In Terms Of

Author: Christopher Howard

  • The Punch in the Face That a Poster Can Have

    Curating Social Movements
    Tuesday, August 19, 2014
    ICI Curatorial Hub, Independent Curators International, New York

    An Occupy Wall Street poster from 2011 by the artist Lalo Alcaraz

    Weeks after the Occupy Movement started, in September 2011, museums began racing to collect the posters, flyers, and other materials from the protests. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History dispatched archivists from Washington, DC, and the New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York sent representatives downtown, as reported by Artinfo, the Washington Times, and the New York Daily News. As an explanation, the Smithsonian released a statement on October 19 that read: “The Museum collects from contemporary events because many of these materials are ephemeral and if not collected immediately, are lost to the historical record.” In an editorial for CNN published in November, Michele Elam, a professor of English at Stanford University, wrote, “Occupy art might just be the movement’s most politically potent tool in its dramatic reframing of the racial dynamics of a populist uprising frequently characterized as largely white and ‘hippie.’” Academics, museums, and the media clearly recognized the importance of both Occupy and its visual culture in American history.

    Though squatting in Zuccotti Park ended permanently by mid-November 2011, activists and artists kept the movement alive in myriad other ways. So did the institutions. In summer 2012, the Yerba Center for the Arts in San Francisco contextualized contemporary materials with those from the region’s storied past of political dissent in Occupy Bay Area. In spring 2013, the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, organized Artists Take Action: Protest Posters Today, an exhibition of posters and ephemera from Occupy, some of which were borrowed from the Smithsonian. In that same year, the Museum of Modern Art added the Occuprint Portfolio, consisting of thirty-one screen prints (including work by Molly Crabapple, John Emerson, and Katherine Ball) from the Booklyn Artists Alliance, to its permanent collection.

    At the beginning of “Curating Social Movements,” the curator Ryan Wong claimed that the topic of curating social movements is underdiscussed. “Social-movement stuff,” he said, “falls through the cracks.” Wong rightly identified curators as political actors—negotiation among parties of various backgrounds and competing interests is implicit in the job. He also correctly proposed that examining the visual culture of social movements help us to better understand their history. But considering the kinds of activity mentioned above, Wong’s notion that “art institutions are threatened by this kind of work, these objects,” felt off the mark. Which institutions are threatened, and what exactly is the threat?

    A view of “Curating Social Movements” at the ICI Curatorial Hub

    Wong’s fellow panelist, the artist and activist Josh MacPhee, grew up as a punk-rock kid in Massachusetts, where he graduated from making flyers for bands to designing posters for housing struggles, bridging music and politics with cultural production. With Dara Greenwald, he organized Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now at Exit Art in 2008, an exhibition that served as a visual introduction to social movements around the world. (The show traveled to the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University a year later). MacPhee argued that the works of art, which were borrowed from eighty-two institutions, were integral to each movement’s political aspirations. Picking a bone with academia, he said that scholars tend to review what others have written (e.g., in journalistic accounts) and overlook the primary visual documents. I, too, find it odd that authors and historians could be so sloppy and wondered with scholars MacPhee had in mind.

    MacPhee represented Interference Archive, a collectively run group that acquires and houses materials and objects from social movements from the 1960s to the present, stages exhibitions of them, and makes them available for study. Based in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, the archive offers public programming, workshops, and events in a social space—just like many other libraries, museums, and cultural and educational centers. With a hands-on policy, he said, Interference Archive is not a quiet library.

    MacPhee offered seven ideas to distinguish cultural production, which I understood as useful materials for a particular purpose, from political art, a genre that operates in the world of so-called fine art. The first notion was autonomy. If I understand him correctly, the visual culture of social movements does not have autonomy—background information beyond a caption is needed for comprehending the full message of an image. To demonstrate, MacPhee showed a 1963 photograph by Charles Moore, depicting four American civil-rights activists sprayed by water hoses. The underlying significance to the image, not readily apparent, is not that these people are protestors, but that they’re protestors who are organized. I liked this point of view very much, but overall MacPhee’s logic regarding autonomy was unclear, since context is hugely critical for untangling the meaning of much contemporary art.

    charlesmoore
    A Charles Moore photograph of the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3, 1963

    The social forms of cultural production (MacPhee’s second idea) are important. He also emphasized the movement as producer (idea three), for which creative roles are flexible—teachers become television broadcasters. He also pointed out how arpilleras quilts were smuggled from Chile through the Catholic Church to raise funds for resistance efforts against a dictatorship. The stakes of visual material from social movements (idea four) are also vital: what are the intended goals apart from the individual concern? Prints depicting scenes from the Gwangju Uprising (by Hong Sung-dam and others) illustrated what was banned from television because, MacPhee said, journalists couldn’t work the right angle and the American government forced CBS not to broadcast footage. (Since I am not familiar with this history, I’ll take his word for it.) At this point MacPhee noted how Independent Curators International had recently been caught in crossfire with the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, a country that, he noted, pays three to four times the regular fee for visiting speakers.1

    Since upheaval generates cultural production, MacPhee identified cacophony as a fifth quality. In 1968 France, the Atelier Populaire generated thousands of revolutionary posters after protesters took over the equipment in the occupied École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He also mentioned a Nicaraguan artist “known for [his] Marlboro Man cowboy style,” whose images alluding to the wide-brimmed hat of the national hero Augusto César Sandino were adopted by the Sandinistas during the 1980s as a symbol of resistance. (Was Róger Pérez de la Rocha the name of this artist?)

    The White Bike Plan in Amsterdam was organized by a counterculture group called Provo

    Marginal ideas transform the world, which MacPhee called prefiguration (his sixth notion), referring to prefigurative politics, for which people imagine a better society before trying to realize it. The mid-1960s White Bike Plan in Amsterdam would have given free access to bicycles in the Dutch capital, he told us, but the CitiBike idea for New York was seized by sinister venture capitalists, just like portions of the code on which Twitter was built came from the open-sourced TXTMOB in 2004. It would be interesting to read a comparative analysis between the reception of the White Bike Plan and CitiBike—perhaps something has already been written?

    momalibrary
    Cataloger’s note from the Museum of Modern Art Library (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    MacPhee’s seventh and final idea argued that the art of social movements does not fit comfortably in museums and archives. Instead, he claimed, it often stays within the common—which probably means with private individuals who I imagine do not think of themselves as collectors or archivists. He showed a snapshot of a ten-year-old note referencing an unidentified collection of posters deemed “not cool enough” for initial cataloging by the Museum of Modern Art Library, which demonstrated a worker’s delightful sense of humor when prioritizing his or her work. Museums and institutions with different missions, though, happily collect social-movement ephemera, as I indicated in the opening paragraphs of this review. Nevertheless, I wonder if the creators of political posters aspire to have their work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art—or to any institution that desires to preserve and present them—or if such fetishization is antithetical to revolution.

    Wong organized Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at Interference Archive in 2013–14, presenting the work of numerous activists in the 1970s. Early on, Wong noticed that the movement did not have a Wikipedia page, and only a handful of academic books deal with the subject. “Google searches turn up little,” he said. His exhibition focused on the Basement Workshop in Chinatown, which he said was a place to talk, hang out, and make posters. Photographs from the era are banal but offer the energy of the moment, Wong said, which sounded like a contradiction to my ears. But no matter—this was the “first time,” he said, “where Asian Americans are controlling their own image.”

    Ryan Wong talks about his exhibition Serve the People (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Serve the People incorporated diverse media: graphic works from the artist Tomie Arai; music from the folk record A Grain of Sand (1973) and by the jazz baritone saxophonist Fred Ho; copies of a newsletter called Getting Together; and posters for workshops, street fairs, and basic medical services; and more. The curator also included documentary photographs by Corky Lee of a Peter Yew protest against police brutality, during which twenty thousand people marched from Chinatown to City Hall. Wong said that didn’t know this kind of show was possible before [seeing] Signs of Change. When organizing Serve the People, Wong faced skeptics who asked him “Why now? Why you? What do you know about my history?” These are fair questions, but ones that a good curator will know how to answer.

    Conversation during the audience Q&A covered measuring success, intergenerational communication, and exhibitions at Interference Archive, such as reconciling participant’s recollections against material evidence and maintaining community after a show ends. Though the two speakers didn’t offer a satisfactory answer to that last point—Wong even said that exhibitions “do violence” to the memories of the movement—it seems as if a good presentation should sufficiently inspire or agitate people to organize on their own (while including the institution, if they so choose). An exhibition space shouldn’t be relied on to be the only group that can effect social change.

    Installation view of Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at Interference Archive

    Interference Archive is staffed by volunteers, which come to the group out of desire. The organization minimizes hierarchy, MacPhee said, though he suggested that board members should be movement activists. He also said that 95 percent of funding comes from visitors via memberships, passing the jar at events, and selling works, which makes organizational sustainability an issue, especially regarding digital issues in archival work.

    Digitization isn’t a solution to accessibility, MacPhee explained, noting the time, money, and labor that goes into the effort—not to mention the difficulties of conducting additional research, assessing impact, and giving materials proper frames of reference in the face of the internet’s decontextualizing force. It’s better to set up archives in other communities, he recommended, and Wong noted that cultural production for the Asian American Movement is spread across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. Each city can build its own Interference Archive. Someone suggested forcing big museums to do this work, but anyone who has spent time in a nonprofit knows that even the most prominent institutions suffer from an overburdened workforce. There is hope: Interference Archive has a Born Digital Working Group assessing the situation of storing and facilitating the migration of electronic material for future accessibility. But alas, “There’s no funding stream for an archive,” MacPhee resigned.

    An audience member asked about discernment when collecting objects, especially with movements whose political beliefs (such as white power or the Tea Party) may not align with the left-oriented Interference Archive. MacPhee said his group collects material from all kinds of movements and has accumulated right-wing stuff from what he called “counterintelligence” collections, not from the movements themselves. He explained that right-wing activists have typically favored television talk shows over printed matter—remember all those skinheads on Donahue and Geraldo? MacPhee clarified that even people on the left espouse violence, homophobia, and a naïve understanding of revolution.

    “Are kids still doing this?” someone asked regarding cultural production for social movements. “Yes, all over the place,” MacPhee responded positively. That was good to hear.

    In Terms Of count: 6½.

    1 See Mostafa Heddaya, “Creative Time Reneges on Promise to BDS Artists with Israel Exhibition, Artist Withdraws,” Hyperallergic, June 5, 2014; and Anne Pasternak and Nato Thompson, “Creative Time Responds to BDS Arts Coalition Petition” Creative Time, June 13, 2014.

  • Revealing Mystic Truths

    Mainstreaming Psychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain
    Thursday, August 14, 2014
    Swiss Institute, New York

    brucenaumanstudio
    Bruce Nauman in the doorway of his San Francisco studio in 1966 (photograph by Jack Fulton)

    Is Bruce Nauman psychedelic? Though his early work is generally considered formally and conceptually apolitical, one wonders how much the culture in San Francisco in the mid-1960s—from the Free Speech Movement to the Summer of Love—influenced his mindset at the time. After Nauman graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 1966, he established a studio in a storefront in the Mission District, where he spent several years realizing a now-seminal body of work that drew from the city’s tradition of Funk art as well as Minimalism from New York and Finish Fetish from Los Angeles. Though the artist has only admitted to drinking a lot of coffee in the studio, might have he sweetened his beverage with special sugar cubes?

    “Nauman had a lot of time on his hands,” wrote Constance M. Lewallen in a recent exhibition catalogue, “and very little money.”1 Though the artist taught one class at the San Francisco Art Institute, he didn’t fraternize much with his fellow professors and spent many hours in the studio. In his Mission District space Nauman underwent intense self-examination and self-exploration, as the story goes, and made a monumental shift from making objects to foregrounding process. He contrasted the ephemeral nature of physical senses by casting his body parts—arm, ear, mouth, armpit, knees, hands, back, shoulder, and feet—in solid materials. He also explored language, especially the profound nature of jokes and puns, and documented loosely choreographed, seemingly absurd performances on camera.

    Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, 1967, neon, 59 x 55 x 2 in. (artwork © Bruce Nauman)

    Let’s look at a few of these works. One film depicted Nauman, dressed in a light t-shirt and dark jeans, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967–68); for another, Art Make-Up (1967–68), he filmed himself covering his face and torso with white, pink, green, and black paint. Nauman also hung a neon sign in his studio’s front window—the well-known The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967)—whose words must have both baffled and delighted passersby, which would have included stoned hippies. Another neon sculpture, My Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968), spelled out “bbbbbbrrrrrruuuuuucccccceeeeee” in lowercase cursive script, referencing the lower gravity on the Moon’s surface but also the slower sense of time that a drug user purportedly experiences.

    Traditional scholarship on Nauman’s work at this time focuses on his interest in the playwright Samuel Beckett and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as to contemporaneous avant-garde dance groups (Anna Halprin) and underground film (Kenneth Anger) then flourishing in San Francisco. But what about psychedelia? After all, Nauman’s studio was located only three miles from Haight-Ashbury—the heart of American counterculture—and his work at the time was pretty far out, man.

    The art critic Ken Johnson offers a theory of psychedelic art in his book Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art (New York: Prestel, 2011), which considers work that was previously understood as embracing psychedelic characteristics (Fred Tomaselli, Robert Crumb) to those that didn’t (Sol LeWitt and Adrian Piper, Kay Rosen and Kara Walker). It’s fair to ask how the boxes of Donald Judd might look to a stoned viewer? How might the implausible or impossible works of Conceptual art correspond to the root of the word psychedelic, “mind manifesting”? Johnson makes a compelling argument for seeing twentieth- and twenty-first-century art in a new way.

    Rethinking the influence and potential of psychedelics is happening across culture, into business and science. The artist Emily Segal, the host for tonight’s event and a cofounder of a trend-forecasting company named after a drug experience, asked: “Is K-HOLE art influenced by psychedelia in a different way?” While recently browsing the shelves of a bookstore, Segal came across a Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). The book, written by the handsome and youthful-looking Nicolas Langlitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the New School, attempts to reconcile mysticism with materialism through a historical, anthropological, and philosophical analysis of his subject. Segal invited Langlitz to give a presentation at the Swiss Institute, in conjunction with its summer exhibition, The St. Petersburg Paradox.

    Nicolas Langlitz and Emily Segal (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During his talk Langlitz surveyed the history of psychedelic research in Switzerland and the United States and explored how mainstream society and the counterculture have found common ground, especially over the last twenty-five years, since President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s to be the “Decade of the Brain,” which initiated a federal campaign to raise awareness for neurological research. The history goes back further, though, to the mid-twentieth century. Langlitz reminded us that pharmocological breakthroughs such as antidepressants and antipsychotics were discovered, refined, and produced in the same era as LSD. From Albert Hoffman to Timothy Leary to Richard Nixon, Langlitz traced the decline of scientific research up to the 1970s. (Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA] in 1973.) After that time the occasional rogue scientist operated on the fringes, such as the Californian scientist Alexander Shulgin, who created about two hundred varieties of psychedelic substances and tested them on himself with a government-approved license that was revoked in 1994 after self-publishing what were essentially drug cookbooks. Since then knowledge about psychedelic use has permeated the internet, notably through anecdotes on the website Erowid.

    Today there are two groups advocating psychedelic research. The first is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a group based in Santa Cruz, California, that frames its work to mollify—I mean, appeal to—the establishment by addressing such conditions as posttraumatic stress disorder and end-of-life anxiety for the terminally ill. “Nancy Reagan,” Langlitz joked, “would not say no to a drug that would alleviate anxiety.” The second group is the Heffter Research Institute, an institution based in Zurich, Switzerland, that Langlitz said has a “less activist brouhaha.” Advocates for psychedelic research have come from unusual places, such as the “Silicon Valley gods.” Bob Wallace of Microsoft funded Swiss research in the 1990s, and John Gilmore of Sun Microsystems and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been a longtime activist. Based on his positive recollections of psychedelic experimentation, Steve Jobs was approached for money—directly from Hoffman, it turns out—but the Apple cofounder declined to get involved.

    Nicolas Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (2012)

    Switzerland has a liberal drug policy that dates to the 1910s, Langlitz stated, perhaps not unrelated to a large chemical and pharmaceutical industry in the famously neutral country. The 1990s saw a loosening of state policy: government-run clinics began supplying heroin to addicts, and scientists were permitted to run a mobile drug-testing lab in a popular Zurich techno club. When people come to find out what their still-illegal purchases are made of, they talk to social workers and take surveys, generating data that helps researchers to determine patterns of drug use and dosage, to monitor black-market products, and to educate club goers about current substances. Scientists also recruit, via the mobile unit, human test subjects for laboratory experiments.

    The lively Q&A session with the audience revolved around three issues: differences and contradictions between physical and spiritual experiences; the authenticity of mystical experiences, hallucinogenic or otherwise; and the aesthetics of psychedelic art. Indignant with the term “spiritual,” one audience member asked Langlitz to produce an objective term. The psychedelic “experience is material through and through,” he responded, calling attention to the chemical nature of all brain activity. Like many, though, Langlitz is curious about what does the subjective experience opens, especially regarding the shared qualities of oneness, loss of ego, and being neither subject nor object that drugs offer. Aldous Huxley believed that all religions are built around “unitative technologies,” Langlitz said, which were achieved through practices such as fasting, meditation, chanting, and flagellation (ouch!).

    Theologians may claim that hallucinogenic drugs provide an inauthentic, valueless experience, Langlitz continued, and prefer prayer and meditation. But Huxley had trouble obtaining elevating experiences the old-fashioned way, he continued. We shouldn’t limit the influence of chemicals on behavior to psychedelics. What does an authentic experience mean, Langlitz wanted to know, for a person taking Prozac? Is he or she experiencing real or false happiness? Similarly, he mentioned that anthropological research on psychedelics—especially in the 1970s—has focused too much on the shamanistic (and presumably authentic) use, in contrast to studies of how everyday people might find transcendence.

    Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent, 1999, Chromogenic color print, 81½ x 132 in. (artwork © Andreas Gursky)

    And what about psychedelic aesthetics, which Langlitz characterized as “the ugly and off-putting art of the 1960s.” You know the type—the wavy lines and bright colors found on posters for acid-rock concerts and in the earnest paintings of Alex Grey. Langlitz acknowledged that modernist abstraction was generally objective and cold, with Pop, ornamental Islamic forms, and East Asian traditions offering alternative formal models. He accepted the physiological aspect of psychedelic tropes—the cobwebs and other patterns—but pleaded, “What exactly does it have to do with psychedelics, anyway?”

    Langlitz finds that large-scale photographs by the German artist Andreas Gursky better represent the psychedelic experience, especially with the simultaneous macro- and microscopic perspectives in his busy images of hotels, stock exchanges, sporting events, raves, and commercial retail stores. As an art student, Gursky was influenced not only by his famous teachers—the straight photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher—but also by his LSD experiences. Today Gursky is too famous or too concerned with his professional image, Langlitz conjectured, to talk openly about psychedelics, like he did early in his career.

    Alex Grey, St. Albert and the LSD Revelation Revolution, 2006, oil on wood panel, 24 x 36 in. (artwork © Alex Grey)

    The art world has embraced the drug-inflected work of painters like Fred Tomaselli, as Ken Johnson has noted, but typically shuns the earnest spiritualism in the work of Alex Grey and others. Yet perceived shame of associating artistic output with drugs wasn’t adopted by everyone in the Swiss Institute audience. At one point a man stood up to describe his incredible personal experience on DMT at great length—cool story, bro—and an aging white-bearded hippie type proselytized the transcendent experiences that art environments by James Turrell and Robert Irwin offer, labeling the swirly stuff as kitsch. “So Alex Grey is the Norman Rockwell of psychedelics?” someone else asked, to much laughter. “Anything can be psychedelic if you take enough drugs,” joked Langlitz. “Everything reminds you of drugs.”

    In Terms Of count: 1 (an audience member broke the seal toward the end of the Q&A).

    1 Constance M. Lewallen, “A Rose Has No Teeth,” A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 45.

  • Building a Better Beehive

    Ron Breland
    Sacred Geometry and the Architecture of Well-Being
    Tuesday, July 29, 2014
    Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY

    Ron Breland’s dodecahedron beehive at the entrance to the exhibition (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Pioneer Works in Brooklyn hosted a lecture, titled “Sacred Geometry and the Architecture of Well-Being,” by the upstate New York gardener and apiarist Ron Breland in conjunction with The Six-Sided Force, an exhibition of drawings by Louise Despont that take their inspiration from the hexagon of the honeycomb.

    Sporting a white beard, a gray mullet, and the normcore outfit of a high school teacher, Breland clearly had the eccentric polymath look down, and his wide-ranging talk surveyed scientific knowledge and folk wisdom, pragmatic environmentalism and esoteric spiritualism. For over an hour he talked about sacred caves, Greek mythology, and the vesica piscis (the shape of the overlap of two circles in a Venn diagram). Breland also discussed the physics of Ernst Rutherford and Werner Heisenberg, the woman’s face in Henri Matisse’s famous The Large Bathers (1906) in Philadelphia, stories by the humanitarian author Barry Lopez, and the work of the environmental architect Jérôme Sperling. Above all Breland was there to promote the stewardship of bees—not necessarily the production of honey—with the goal of bringing the art of beekeeping to the artistic community.

    Ron Breland speaks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The shape of a hive is inconsequential to the activity of a bee colony, Breland said. Bees can create homes in dead tree stumps, hang them from tree branches, or build them in the boxy cabinets that humans use for efficient honey harvesting. The nineteenth-century American teacher and pastor Lorenzo L. Langstroth patented a modular hive in 1852, and the form hasn’t changed much since. These hives, in which rows of square frames can be removed, replaced, and manipulated for the ease of commercial honey production, result in a “mechanical relationship to the bees,” he said. “All amazingly logical.”

    Managed bee colonies in the United States, Breland told us, have decreased more than 50 percent since the late 1940s. He blames what scientists call colony collapse disorder on an unchecked military-industrial complex that has manufactured pesticides and fertilizer as well as bombs. He also faults a lack of communication between left- and right-brain worldviews. Breland said that fixing watches, building railroads, and waging war are all right-brain activities, and to illustrate this point he showed a clip from the Martin Scorsese film Hugo (2011), which highlights the importance of both heart and mind. Breland then showed a snippet from a video on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, which in the context of the talk exemplified a refined combination of creativity and engineering—minus, of course, the cultural, economic, and political impact of the building. For Breland, this combination of art and science creates a quintessential relationship that a beekeeper needs “to get us out of this mess.”

    Running with the bees (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Many years ago Breland set out to invent a new hive that would reduce environmental stress on bees (when colonies are transported geographically) and to offer a structure for which harvesting honey was not its primary purpose. He had designed six-sided structures to resemble the honeycomb shape, but this direct correspondence didn’t feel right. What about five, since that’s the number of man? Some say the dodecahedron, a complex polyhedron that features twelve flat pentagonal faces, has mystical qualities. The ancient Greeks understood the notion, as this particular geometric figure has been associated with the five Platonic solids.

    So, in the late 1990s, Breland built a hive, which is about six or seven feet tall, that used the dodecahedron form. His creation intentionally resemble the modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. Based on photographs of his self-described ecofriendly, sustainable, specialty nursery in West Nyack, New York, Breland has built about a dozen of them. “This hive is not for honey,” he stated. Anne Raver described the results in a 2001 New York Times profile, “In industrial beehives, the bees are regimented: they are given wax cells larger than they would build, and the queen is tricked into laying more eggs. In Mr. Breland’s hive, the bees build their own cells, and the queen moves freely among them.”

    Balancing consciousness with the vesica piscis (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Breland articulated humanity purpose as a desire to express love, to understand beautiful, miraculous phenomenon, and to do meaningful work—not simply to chase the bottom line. “In commerce there’s no hope for a remedy,” he warned. While I generally agree, I’d like to see investors help Breland to mass-produce his hive—with quality, sustainable materials, of course—and help to spread them across the country. Perhaps doing so would help alleviate the need for professional apiarists to haul five hundred boxed hives on a flatbed truck around the Southern states, traveling up to 20,000 miles, in order to aid pollination in places where bees are lacking. And besides, these hives look really, really cool.

    Toward the end of his talk Breland brought up the biological concept of the superorganism, which occurs when species such as bees, ants, and termites instinctively delegate responsibilities in order to accomplish a task—the collective transcends the efforts of the individuals. “Some say that is an image for mankind,” he observed.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

  • Fun Fun Fun on the Infobahn

    The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions
    Sunday, May 11, 2014
    Frieze Talks 2014
    Frieze Projects, Frieze New York, Randall’s Island, New York

    Dana Schutz, Google, 2006, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in. (artwork © Dana Schutz)

    In her opening remarks for “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” at the art fair Frieze New York, the panel’s moderator Orit Gat remarked that conversation about net neutrality has changed in recent years. Indeed, public awareness regarding the controlling forces behind the delivery infrastructure of the web has risen sharply after two pieces of federal legislation introduced in 2011—the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Senate’s PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—failed to develop, along with the “internet blackout” protest on January 28, 2012, and the onslaught of related op-ed pieces over the last couple years.

    Reducing the information superhighway to fast and slow lanes would no doubt pave the way to chaos on the roads on which millions of ordinary Americans travel daily. We would witness terrible bottlenecks and breakdowns, insufferable congestion and gridlock, and relentless construction work and impossible detours. If the internet behemoths have their way, Gat warned, “you will stream Netflix faster than you read the New York Times, if Netflix chooses to pay for it.” And the start-ups, the nonprofits, and all those individually maintained websites would presumably stall into obscurity. I wonder, though, how significant net neutrality is for contemporary artists, especially those who work closely with digital media. Based on this panel discussion, the issue doesn’t seem that important, but related topics—such as how the corporatization of the internet affects artists and the definition of postinternet art—are of particular interest.

    Oblique view of “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Gat, a writer and editor for Rhizome and WdW Review, quickly gave a chronological history of the web as it intersected with digital art. While working at CERN in Switzerland, the British engineer Tim Berners-Lee invented hypertext transfer protocol (http) in 1989. Internet art grew in the early 1990s, she continued, helped along when US Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which greatly expanded online access for many citizens and businesses. Artists have influenced the web’s look and feel as we know it today much more than we realize, Gat said, and that internet and postinternet art developed simultaneously. This makes sense—thinking about Web 2.0, you can’t theorize the massive influence of Facebook and OkCupid, which launched in 2004 and run at full steam today, without considering LiveJournal and the Makeout Club, both founded in 1999 (but now puttering along). Despite the term “post,” Gat insisted, there is no art after the internet. Rather, postinternet art is a product of, and a response to, the changing digital landscape.

    The first speaker was Gene McHugh, a writer and curator known for the blog Post Internet, who spoke biographically. The mainstream migration of people to the web, he said, took place in the late 1990s, when he was in high school. “I was an internet addict,” he said. “My identity was as much online as it was a body sitting there typing.” I was relieved McHugh advocated a synthetic view of a person’s relationship to digital culture, instead of trotting out the clichéd internet/IRL divide.

    The cover of the print book edition of Gene McHugh’s Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art (2011)

    McHugh intended Post Internet to explore and connect modes of digital production to modernism and the Pictures Generation—a pretentious approach, he admitted. Modernist terms, he came to realize as the project evolved, are not useful when describing the banal behavior of checking Gmail and social networks and watching cat videos. “The writing was rough, in retrospect,” he said, and also full of young fervor. For Post Internet McHugh deliberately chose the default blog settings, a kind of readymade design that he said created an awareness of the self-publication format. That sounds suspiciously like self-reflexive modernism, like Jean-Luc Godard foregrounding the act of making and watching films. The blog’s domain name contained a short string of numbers (122909a.com), and the posts contained only writing—no embedded links or photos.1 “It’s a certain way to approach the internet” that he said was characteristic of the late 2000s. “If you push it far into this banal realm, it works in an interesting way.”

    McHugh explained Guthrie Lonergan’s term “internet aware art” as meaning offline art made with the internet in mind, or art made with an eye toward how it will look online. Considering time as an element, McHugh theorized that multiauthor projects such as the Jogging and Dump.fm, as well as surfing clubs, can be understood as performance, since you can follow this activity online but in real time. He also identified Marisa Olson, Cory Arcangel, and Michael Bell-Smith as artists exploring this kind of art in different ways.

    The second speaker, the artist and writer Tyler Coburn, wanted to define postinternet, and especially that nagging prefix “post.” Instead, he read a formal, polemical, and somewhat difficult-to-follow artist’s statement that addressed the art market and art history. “The current market for postinternet art,” Coburn claimed, “is nothing if not robust.” He was less optimistic about periodization, which constricts some artists and renders others illegible. I don’t, however, find it unreasonable to group together similar artists and their work for the sake of convenience, acknowledging, of course, that such categorization doesn’t always make sense at a granular level. As problematic as they might be, terms like Cubism, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism simply work. As much the term postinternet makes its supporters anxious, it still allows them to slide their work into a relevant discourse.

    Regarding his own critical practice, Coburn firmly stated: “My work attempts to disenchant the dominant metaphors and mindsets at work in contemporary technology.” The reflexivity and opacity of digital infrastructure concern him greatly, as do finding a digital space outside Facebook and exploring emerging methods and practices, whatever those may be. He named Benjamin H. Bratton and Ann Hirsch as people doing critical work and cited his own project, I’m That Angel (2012–13), which took the form of a physical book and several readings inside data farms around the world, as another example.

    Readings of Tyler Coburn’s I’m That Angel at EvoSwitch in Haarlem, the Netherlands, took place June 6–7, 2013

    Christiane Paul, a professor and program director at the New School for Social Research and an adjunct curator of new media arts for the Whitney Museum of American Art, ran through highlights of a previous talk called “The Network Space,” which chronicles the transition from web 1.0 and web 2.0—in particular the move from publishing (e.g., personal websites) to participation and broadcasting (blogging)—through works of art. She mentioned Mark Napier’s browser mash-up Riot (1999/2000); Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s Lovely Faces (2011), a fictitious dating website created from scraped Facebook profiles; projects such as Jennifer Ringley’s JenniCam (1996–2003) and its commercially oriented spawn, lonelygirl15 (2006–8); and Aaron Koblin’s crowd-sourced drawings for The Sheep Market (2006).

    Shane Hope, Backdoor.Deathsys.exe Running Soon on a Death Cube Near You: Posted Two Thousand Sixty Whatever and Ever, 2007, oil on canvas, 96 x 96 in. (artwork © Shane Hope)

    According to Paul, “There’s nothing post in postinternet” art, which she described as work that is “deeply informed by networked technology” and is digitally aware but takes the form of material objects. Paul’s canon of postinternet artists includes Rafaël Rozendaal, Clement Valla, Petra Cortright, John Raffman, Evan Roth, and Katie Torn—artists who have emerged in the past few years. For me, some of the best work about the internet (using Paul’s formulation) came even earlier and often took offline forms. Seth Price’s ongoing explorations of digital distribution (since 2000), Adam McEwen’s drawings of text messages from a Nokia phone (ca. 2006–8?), Shane Hope’s rickety laptops built from painted wood scraps (2006) and his paintings of imaginary digital-device screens (2007), Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s bizarre videos (2006–present), and even Dana Schutz’s Google (2006), where she sits in her studio entranced by the offerings of the almighty company’s Image Search—these artworks, made by fairly traditional and post-Conceptual artists (and not necessarily creators of digitally sophisticated forms), explore the condition of interacting with digital networks and technologies.2 On a side note, one of the most brilliant artworks of the George W. Bush era was Ramsay Stirling’s animated GIF, Enduring Freedom (2008).

    Anyway, postinternet art takes on a physical form, Paul reminded us, but whether or not a viewer understands the concept of the form (or its subject matter) is another issue. Like Gat before her, Paul noticed the increasing corporatization of the internet during the 1990s but, in slight contrast to Coburn’s celebration of sales of postinternet art, stated that the market for internet art hasn’t changed since the 1990s. How do these observations square with Rachel Greene, who ten years ago wrote that “as yet, there exists no viable or stable market for net art.”3 Furthermore, Paul vaguely described an antimarket attitude among postinternet artists, who are “savvier” in some undisclosed way. It’s not clear to me how artists working in the digital realm are making money—or not—based on these three assessments.

    Christiane Paul (photograph by Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America)

    The conversation among the panelists after their individual presentations progressed productively. McHugh argued that first-generation net artists, who had trained academically, were happy working in the margins, and that younger artists would have used paintbrushes, too, if they hadn’t grown up digital. Nevertheless, he said, those younger artists still want the white-cube experience.

    Gat complained that much digital art ends up looking the same, aggravated by the ubiquitous use of Facebook and products from Google (and Google Earth in particular). She wondered if artists are problematizing the operations of these corporations or are complicit with them. I sympathize with her wariness of the dependence on proprietary corporate platforms. If Tumblr, which allows people to use their own domain names for their microblog but doesn’t offer back-end programming access, pulled the plug tomorrow, the content for every site would likely disappear with it. Conversely, platforms are occasionally abandoned en masse by their users. Remember all those indie bands that created MySpace pages instead designing their own stand-alone websites? Well, they’re on Soundcloud and Bandcamp now, because that’s where the audience is. The question is, how much self-sufficiency should an artist relinquish to reach that audience? McHugh said that postinternet art aims for a larger audience beyond the art world. Paul doesn’t see Google taking over art with a nonexclusive right, and there are ways to combat marketing, such as, for example, by “liking” everything.

    I agree with Gat in that postinternet artists often produce consumer-friendly work which anyone can make, and that using a popular, deskilled digital process does make things homogenous. But Coburn reminded us that, whether it’s art that conforms to the New Aesthetic, a term used by the writer James Bridle to describe a certain kind of visuality, or automatic, personless photography taken by drones and satellites and affiliated with corporations and governments, this is how we view the world now. Besides, Paul added, it’s easy to argue that any style or moment can appear homogenous. For her it’s Abstract Expressionism, but for me the black-and-white photographs, typewritten texts, and maps of Conceptual art and Earthworks readily come to mind. While artists in the late 1960s were emulating science and industry—what Benjamin H. D. Buchloh called the aesthetic of administration—postinternet artists are making user-end art, based not on programming and hand coding, skills the first generation of net artist learned, but rather on out-of-the-box applications. Postinternet artists—who Coburn proposed are targeting nonart audiences but needing art-world legitimation—want to have their cake and eat it too. Paul said that criticality comes from within the medium, an awkward position of which artists are aware. A curator (like herself) looks at both critical work and the stuff “riding the wave of flashiness.”

    The idea of audience intrigued me. I wondered how much contemporary digital art—especially the stuff using Google Maps or Twitter—would be interesting to your typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur? What would highly skilled programmers and designers make of work by all the artists mentioned during this panel? Probably with the same kind of amusement that a 1970s Hollywood filmmaker would have when viewing early video art by William Wegman and Vito Acconci. Similarly, what kind of distinctions would contemporary programmers and designers make between an art-gallery video and an amateur YouTube clip? We’re now fully immersed in the world in which the gap between art and life has ceased to exist. Would avant-garde artists who championed that notion one hundred years ago be horrified or pleased with early-twenty-first-century practices?

    Tyler Coburn (photograph by Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America)

    An audience member had the same idea and queried the panelists about differences between avant-garde or critical artists and the general public when both use the same digital tools. The gap has collapsed, McHugh said, but artists are examining issues other than these products, such as the physical and environmental impact of cloud computing. But that is also an important topic for mainstream media, especially in states such as North Carolina, where Apple has built several solar-powered data farms. Paul said that while some artists produce interesting work from behind the curve, most of them are “by nature and statistically” ahead of the curve, waiting for the technologies to be invented for their use. Char Davies, she recalled, was a frustrated painter who in the 1980s helped create Softimage, a software application for three-dimensional image creation that was later acquired by Microsoft in the 1990s. That happened twenty years ago—which artists have done something like this recently?

    Another audience member linked the web’s founding in 1989 to the fall of communism and then asked about digital natives of technology and of “markets as the only way of organizing the world.” Is postinternet a condition, he wanted to know, and not a subgenre? “I would say absolutely, yes,” said Paul. “It’s not an art movement. It’s not an art genre.” She acknowledged that (art-historical) acceptance comes from the market, and that museums look to the market for validation. For her, artists and critical practitioners must therefore denaturalize the present condition and create suspicion, whatever that might be. McHugh wondered about the critical role of writers and curators, of articles and exhibitions. I’d say all of that is highly important to the development of both internet and postinternet art, which is still very much up in the cloud, I mean, in the air.

    In Terms Of count: 12.

    1 Funded in part by a grant from the Arts Writers Grant Program, Post Internet published regularly for most of 2010 but was then taken offline. McHugh’s collected posts can be read online or downloaded as a PDF for free, or purchased as a print-on-demand book from Lulu.

    2 For a superb essay on Schutz’s painting Google, see Steven Stern, “Image Search,” Frieze 106 (April 2007): 136–41.

    3 Rachel Greene, Internet Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 31.

    Listen

    Frieze Projects New York has posted an audio recording of this panel.

  • A Special Kind of Ordinary

    Blonde Art Books: Artist Conversation and Launch
    Tuesday, July 22, 2014
    ICI Curatorial Hub, Independent Curators International, New York

    Sara Cwynar shows the original version of Kitsch Encyclopedia while Sonel Breslav looks on (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    There’s a special kind of ordinary that folks in the art world love. Artists, curators, and critics often fall over themselves to praise the everyday, elevate the banal, and highlight the overlooked, momentarily relegating what normally would be banal to a distinct realm of interest and reflection. But sometimes the ordinary is, well, simply unremarkable. The discussion that took place during “Blonde Art Books: Artist Conversation and Launch” was ordinary in that unexceptional sense. For this evening’s event, the three people involved in the publication of an artist’s book, Sara Cwynar’s Kitsch Encyclopedia, met to present and discuss their work and to celebrate the launch of a special collector’s edition of the book.

    In 2012 the New York–based curator Sonel Breslav founded Blonde Art Books, a project—one hesitates to call it a business—that sells artist’s books at exhibitions and fairs, as well as through an online store. Originating as a blog, Blonde Art Books was physically housed for most of 2013 at Schema Projects in Brooklyn. Kitsch Encyclopedia is the first book she published under the imprint.

    Breslav stated numerous times that she intended her digital slide presentation to loop (which it eventually did, kinda rapidly), her words themselves becoming looped, which was unintended metacommentary on the direction of tonight’s conversation.1 She repeated fuzzy notions about accessible spaces, broader audiences, sharing information, and collaboration. For example, Breslav expressed interest in “materials as objects and the information they embody,” a phrase that exemplifies the kind of language that has developed around the everyday—at least in the contemporary art world—that sounds agreeable but, if not explained in relation to tangible situations, is trite, if not hollow or incomprehensible.

    Breslav said she was given opportunities to do pop-up events, which evolved into full exhibitions—“my comfort zone,” she said. I wish she had better explained her curatorial projects, describing specific installation shots in her digital slide show or talking about other recent exhibitions, such as She Was a Film Star before She Was My Mother, held a few months ago at Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City. Breslav glossed over what she called a “summer tour,” which I later discovered was a Blonde Art Books traveling show for which she gave talks and conducted workshops on artist’s books across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest last June and July.

    Born in Canada and based in New York, Sara Cwynar identified herself as a studio photographer and a graphic designer. She explained that Kitsch Encyclopedia was, in its original form, a one-of-a-kind hand-assembled artist’s book that she had started four years ago as a student. For this and other works, Cwynar adopts a strategy of appropriation, using other people’s images garnered from “the New York Public Library, flea markets, my parents’ basement, old encyclopedias.” Stuff from the 1950s through the 1970s interests her in particular, which she finds, removes from circulation, reworks, and redistributes, usually as digital prints for gallery display. While her art is largely visual, the book incorporates texts from three authors—a few sentences from Milan Kundera here, a few from Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes there—interspersed with her own writing. “All the texts are mashed together,” she said. The book’s alphabetical, encyclopedic format is a “quaint form of knowledge-containing,” and its organizing principle was Kundera’s definition of kitsch.

    Cwynar claimed that the images in Kitsch Encyclopedia—photographs of flower arrangements, ancient sculpture, obsolete electronic equipment, and outer space—are the “stuff we see everyday,” which is certainly true if you’re the kind of person who sifts through old issues of National Geographic, sets of Time Life books, and vintage photography how-to manuals. (The artists Matthew Craven, Abigail Reynolds, and Björn Meyer-Ebrecht also mine these sources, but walk the aisles of any art fair and you’ll see dozens more.) Cwynar didn’t elaborate on the specific nature of the images in her book, apart from an awkward explanation of Kundera’s notion of kitsch, which made me wonder how purposeful or random her choices were. I also wondered why the handmade Kitsch Encyclopedia was republished in print—one thousand copies were made—instead of posted online using platforms such as Tumblr and Pinterest that are the legacy of André Malraux’s imaginary museum. Cwynar pronounced that we live through images instead of real experiences, and that we’re desensitized to horrifying images, reacting the same to pictures of bombings and flowers. Pundits have voiced identical opinions for decades. What’s significant about these positions now?

    The third speaker was Corina Reynolds, an artist, bookbinder, and founding partner of Small Editions, a studio and consultancy that helps produce artist’s books. She helped to make the portfolio of six zines included in the deluxe version of Kitsch Encyclopedia, which were hand-stitched into the original book. Summarizing her background, Reynolds learned the technical processes for bookbinding as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego. Seemingly without a business plan, the fledgling Small Editions started in a living room, became a website, and expanded through networking. Suddenly money was there, Reynolds said, after working on projects with Dash Snow and Dan Colen. (The chronology and circumstances were unclear.) She then described a book that Small Editions produced in 2013, Sheryl Oppenheim’s Black Hours, which comprises screenprints of drawings that were inspired by an illuminated manuscript in the Morgan Library and Museum.

    Corina Reynolds (right) talks about Small Editions (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The conversation among the three panelists lagged after their individual presentations, perhaps indicative of a lack of planning, resulting in rote observations. Breslav argued that Kitsch Encyclopedia “is very specific to Cwynar’s practice but also has this universality,” something that could described any number of artworks. Breslav also stressed—several times—how she plays multifaceted roles in the contemporary art world (as curator, publisher, collaborator, et cetera). She also delighted in discussing trivial details of the book’s production. For instance, the Chinese printer Breslav contracted required that she and Cwynar remove images of Disney characters and nudes from Kitsch Encyclopedia. (Publishers have certainly policed morality and been overly protective against copyright infringement for decades.) The photographer did sneak in a picture of a naked body: “There are nudes in the zines,” Cwynar said. I got the impression that Breslav was tickled at the collaborative process behind publishing a book, discovering for the first time the types of decisions people have made along the way when producing a book—for centuries. Oh, process.

    Cwynar wondered aloud what it means to make an image that will be seen by a million people but neglected to offer an answer, even though she had worked as a designer for The New York Times Magazine until last year. How the context of images change over time greatly interests her, she disclosed, which sounded profound until I remembered that this is the inevitable fate of nearly every picture ever made.

    During the audience Q&A, a man visiting from Australia fawned over Cwynar’s work, and a woman in the front row asked the photographer about her font choice. “I used the ugly version on purpose,” Cwynar explained for the “1970s” typefaces in the book and on her website. “They’re really all nostalgic fonts.” This response made me think about how the term “futuristic” now specifically characterizes things that are forty and fifty years old.

    A display of Kitsch Encyclopedia (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Cwynar spoke more about the life of an image over time, how it loses and gains value, and also about what she referred to several times as an image’s patina. When looking at decades-old photographs in the New York Times, she explained, you can discern a quality, if not a style, of the era. You can tell “what looks contemporary,” she commented, “what looks classy.” That’s periodizing in a nutshell. Cwynar added that nostalgia is strong in graphic design of the present moment, and Breslav identified what she called “outdated colors” in Cwynar’s work. What exactly is an outdated color?

    Breslav feels the DIY culture that produces free “takeaway” publications is going strong, but she nevertheless chooses to publish more expensive art books. Reynolds is a believer in the precious object you can hold in your hands, whether that’s a limited or larger edition. The group talked some about scarcity versus mass production, but that’s a conversation which usually ends in stalemate.

    Revealed only at the end of the night was the fact that Cwynar’s book was largely financed by a successful Kickstarter campaign to the tune of $17,386 from 310 backers. (Wow!) I realized that the three speakers did an excellent job of avoiding conversation on financial issues, one glaring issue in the art world that needs more sustained and vocal attention. Since Breslav and Reynolds work in a multifaceted space that combines elements of for-profit, nonprofit, DIY, and entrepreneurial approaches, it would be beneficial for them to approach their models frankly, offering to the audience the solutions that they’ve found and challenges that they’ve faced.2 It would be interesting to know more about how art workers in their late 20s can sustain a practice and make a living, in New York and around the world.

    In Terms Of count: 7.

    1 Neither the panelists nor the Independent Curators International staff attempted to subdue the highly irritating bouncing iTunes icon on the Apple laptop’s dock, which was visible every few seconds on the projected screen for the full hour-and-a-half duration of this event.

    2 Cwynar works with traditional art galleries and presumably makes a living from her art, since she left her New York Times Magazine job in 2013 and didn’t mention another one.

  • The Paradoxical Absolute

    Frances Stark on Robert Ryman
    Monday, June 16, 2014
    Artists on Artists Lecture Series
    Dia:Chelsea, Dia Foundation for the Arts, New York

    Frances Stark performs a lecture, maybe (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    If I understand her convoluted comment-question correctly, an elderly woman in the audience wanted to know, during the Q&A session, if the speaker, Frances Stark, had just done a performance. Based on Stark’s zigzag lecture on her relationship to the artist Robert Ryman, I had wondered the same thing. For about an hour the Los Angeles–based artist covered a range of topics, which seems typical of her multidisciplinary practice that embraces expository and confessional writing as well as visual art in diverse media (drawing, collage, photography, video, and performance). By the end it became clear that Stark’s talk was among the most bewildering and cryptic that I’ve ever attended, and I can’t decide if my frustration is justified—that Stark meandered without having anything substantial to say—or if I just didn’t get it. For the record, the artist did not disclose to the audience that a performance had taken place.

    Such confusion shouldn’t be surprising, since the work of both artists often perplexes and befuddles, from Stark’s rambling online conversations turned into video to the oblique materialism of Ryman’s career-long exploration of the color white. Tonight she emphasized tenuous connections between her and Ryman, comparing, for instance, the square shape of his paintings to her Instagram feed. Throughout the event Stark read from her “Scared to Death” essay, published in an exhibition catalogue in 2001, which includes a brief, humorous comment on Ryman. Perhaps for this reason Dia invited her to speak on him for its Artists on Artists Lecture Series.

    Robert Ryman guarding his own art (source of photograph not known)

    In the passage Stark recounts the plot of a novel that takes place in a museum, in which a guard was a central character, and retells the story of when Ryman decided to become a painter while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid-1950s. “[H]is first ambition was not to be a cop but a musician,” Stark read aloud, “and now, of course, he is known for his paintings not for his style of guarding them.…”1 Three of her artist friends in California—Jason Meadows, Richard Hawkins, and Morgan Fisher—all “were enamored of Ryman’s paintings, and I, too, am enamored of Ryman’s paintings. I struggled to speak of this fascination with Ryman’s work, and, embarrassingly enough, found myself asking, Is this some kind of mysticism?”2

    Stark’s stated aim tonight was to share, not to theorize, as well as to demonstrate overlaps and rhymes between her and Ryman. “That’s a concept I learned from Emily Dickinson at age fifteen,” she said. As a humanities student at San Francisco State University, where she studied art history, “I came to art as a reader,” Stark told us, “with aspirations to be a writer.” In the early 1990s she identified as a visual artist and attended graduate school at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, though she felt that people favored her writing to her art as the decade commenced. As an MFA student Stark was exposed to Ryman after others had recommended him to her. At the time “the work didn’t turn the lights on,” but she eventually warmed up to it. After being asked to participate in an exhibition of favorite books, she recalled offering Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and a book about Ryman.

    Frances Stark, Push After Pull After Push, 2010, mixed media on canvas on panel, 69 x 89 in. (artwork © Frances Stark)

    Stark’s narrative slipped in and out of consciousness, with seemingly unscripted observations based on her prepared digital slide show. One pair of images juxtaposed Henri Matisse’s Red Room (1908) with Studio View (1959), a black-and-white photograph that Ryman had painted red. Stark then dwelt on a 1964 Ryman painting next to a photograph of his studio and uttered something about their mutual project of “creating vehicles for methodical making,” but the synthesis of these pairings didn’t produce a clear meaning for me. The head-scratching continued when Stark announced that “people love people to stand in front of things and explain” before playing a recent video interview of herself, filmed at the Museum of Modern Art, on the screen behind her—but without any sound.

    Perhaps Stark was suffering from a fatigue of speaking engagements. She admitted that she talked herself out in early May through participation on a panel on Sigmar Polke, who has a retrospective at MoMA, and at Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference, where she was paired with the technologist David Kravitz from Snapchat to create a new project. Her assessment of Polke’s work was that it looks like splooge and therefore resembles the universe. “Where is the artist in the universe, literally?” she asked before declaring, “Art is where you commune with the dead.”

    The language of Frances Stark (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Stark talked about the role of artists as educators in a university, telling her students who say “I want to make a style and get famous” that, in stark contrast, “being an artist is to fall in love with another artist.” Paraphrasing Alighiero e Boetti, she identified the artist as both a shaman and showman, fake yet sincere. “The fake being in the service of the real,” she explained, “not as a sham but as an inescapable condition.” Stark concluded her lecture by adducing “fake texts” and “ghost texts”—if “Greeky Lorem Ipsum” isn’t the title of a work by Stark, then it should be—and remarked that “the mutter reveals something else that you can’t see.” If poetry is language free from utility, then Stark’s use of language is often free from meaning. I’m not sure if the non-sense of her Dia lecture was liberating or hindering, but the ride was bewildering.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Frances Stark, “Scared to Death,” in Painting at the Edge of the World, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001), 209.

    2 Ibid.

    Read

    Megan N. Liberty, “Frances Stark on Reading Robert Ryman,” Hyperallergic, June 23, 2014.

    Listen

    This audio of Frances Stark on Robert Ryman was recorded as part of Dia’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series.

    Watch

  • Help the Aged

    Amalia Ulman in Conversation with Dr. Fredric Brandt
    Thursday, June 5, 2014
    Swiss Institute, New York

    Simon Castets, director of the Swiss Institute, introduces the speakers (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

    The twenty-five-year-old artist Amalia Ulman announced that she just had plastic surgery while spending time in California for her recent solo exhibition, Used & New, at LTD Los Angeles. The before-and-after pictures of her profile, projected onscreen above her, showed nearly imperceptibly minor work on her nose, straightening a slight bend. Ulman also revealed that she had Botox fillers injected under her eyes. According to comments in an Art in America interview published a day before this event, Ulman considers the eye fillers and the nose job to be art.

    “We thought it was too good to be true,” said Simon Castets, director of the Swiss Institute, for his organization to pair a young artist who thrives on beauty and appearance with the world-renowned cosmetic dermatologist Fredric Brandt, famous for his contributions to the New New Face, a term used to describe his and others’ medical practice in a 2008 article in New York magazine. It was, in Castet’s words, “a match made in heaven.”

    Castet introduced Ulman’s work—in photography, sculpture, and installation—as concerning value creation, wealth, game theory, and 89plus, a project on artists born in 1989 or later, on which he and the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist work. She understands her art as analyzing class and addressing social and power relations, especially in representations of the second world—she has singled out Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece—through dollar/euro/pound stores as well as on lifestyle blogs such as Apartment Therapy, where it’s hard to tell if an object is well or poorly made based on a digital photograph. Ulman’s work, which deals with beauty, consumerism, and social media and takes both digital and physical forms, has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Criticism on her is hard to find via a Google search, as writers are inclined to publish Q&A interviews with the artist rather than analyses of her work.

    Amalia Ulman, before and after her recent body modifications

    Born in Argentina, raised in Spain, and educated at Central Saint Martins in London, Ulman regularly posts photographs to Instagram that seem to have a gauzy soft focus like television shows from the 1960s. The whites and pale pinks in her aesthetic palette are, coincidentally or not, the same hues generally ascribed to the Caucasian race and the color of its skin. Her postinternet worldview is typical of a newer generation in which the older Marxist critiques of society do not apply, or at least not as much. Ulman has admitted to reading theory, but her work is quite different from that of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger in the 1980s, and that of Nikki S. Lee and Laurel Nakadate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ulman’s criticality is questionable, since she’s seemingly complicit with existing power structures in supporting the elegantly bland (or blandly elegant) qualities of life. But don’t hate her because she’s beautiful.

    Ulman began the evening’s conversation by reading a prepared artist’s statement from printed pages, while the audience of largely twentysomethings followed along, craning their necks to take in a projected PowerPoint presentation. Ulman recalled being introduced to art at a young age—8 to be exact—by a television program on Orlan, the artist whose career-long project is to transform herself via plastic surgery. The Australian performance artist Stelarc and the photographer David LaChapelle were also formative influences, she said. While speaking, the carefree Ulman casually tossed her just-read pages onto the floor between her and Brandt, as if she were lackadaisically scrolling a website, and asked the doctor about his work.

    Fredric Brandt preaches his aesthetic gospel (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

    With whitish-blond hair, Brandt bore an uncanny resemblance to Andy Warhol. The sixty-four-year-old cosmetic dermatologist also possessed a face that had obviously undergone extensive work. (An article in the New York Times noted that he experiments on himself.) The old medical tools and processes such as peeling and collagen injections, Brandt said, were developed a long time ago. Collagen injections, for example, are no longer available. People in their forties and fifties made appointments with him in the old days; now he gets younger first-time clients. With the language of a benevolent, confident self-help guru, Brandt used phrases such as “subtly refreshed” and “continuity of youth” and revealed that few patients have expectations to fix an aged face. “We can improve on Mother Nature,” he professed. “I’m not going to make you look like a porn star—unless you want to.” Not many people do.

    “We understand the age and face better,” Brandt said, saying how doctors can separate and empty fat pockets to affect the reflection of light. His clients “don’t want to look young” but instead “don’t want to look tired.” Besides feeling better, they also express a desire to “extend their life in the workforce,” an honorable motive that may not do enough to combat institutional or structural biases against older employees. Making a distinction between a person’s chronological age and his or her biological age, Brandt encourages his patients improve their looks for themselves, not for their husbands—the implication here that women, not men, receive treatment from him. Brandt made two points I agree with: that people shouldn’t impose their beliefs on others, and that you should criticize yourself before criticizing others.

    “Botox is the most amazing drug that came along in the mid-nineties,” Brandt continued what essentially had become a monologue, “and it really changed the course of cosmetic dermatology.” Botox replaced collagen injections and works by shrinking lines, lifting the eyebrows, and changing the shape of the face, he said. Is it all necessary? “People come in and they’ll point out these flaws in themselves that nobody can see. And I say, ‘I can fix that little scar or line but that’s not going to affect your appearance to anybody else but yourself.’” Brandt points out other areas for work—he called it educating his patients—that could improve their face, making them beautiful.

    Putting science aside, Brandt talked about other matters, such as routine. He does yoga. “I do have a spiritual side,” he said. What about diet, Ulman asked the doctor. He minimizes sugar intake and doesn’t east red meat, which has inflammatory qualities that can accelerate aging. And because he is gluten free, he avoids filling up on bread when dining at restaurants.

    Although Brandt stopped short of calling himself an artist, he strongly emphasized the aesthetic nature of his work and touted his great eye for facial improvements, citing the golden ratio and the rule of thirds as tools in his kit. His instincts are so refined, he bragged, that he can look at someone and know exactly how make them look better. The face, Brandt said later in the talk, is a painting that he creates.

    Amalia Ulman and Fredric Brandt at the Swiss Institute (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

    Ulman and Brandt briefly discussed insurance issues, with the doctor favoring private-pay systems and urging healthcare companies to stay out of plastic surgery and cosmetic dermatology, which would introduce chaos and make costs skyrocket. In an interview in Kaleidoscope, Ulman expressed interest in getting Korean plastic surgery, which I understood to mean that she wanted to look more Asian. She prodded Brandt to talk about “corrective” surgery for Asians to look more Western, but the doctor didn’t bite, though he did acknowledge that Asians may desire a Western-looking eye. What about patients who don’t really need work, Ulman asked. “Your perception of yourself is the hardest thing to change,” he responded. Brandt also emphasized that his work is reversible: “If you don’t like it, it goes away.”

    During the audience Q&A, someone brought up Michael Jackson, who Brandt said was “a very extreme transformation.” “You can’t have ten rhinoplasties,” snipped the doctor, “and expect your nose to look good.” Where does the desire for change come from, someone else asked. “Within us there’s an innate sense to want to look good,” he answered, which for him explains why things like mirrors and hair salons exist in our world. The role of the media, he continued, is to educate, to provide tools and information on procedures that weren’t available twenty years ago. “Obviously the media, all the images out there affect you, but they’re educating you, and probably … it’s not like they’re forcing you [to do] anything you didn’t want to do. They’re reinforcing your own thoughts of what can be done.”

    A young man in the audience described how the technology for antilock brakes, originally developed for Formula One racing cars, has become a standard feature for even the cheapest car. Has social good, he asked, come from Brandt’s work? Obviously prepared, the doctor said that scars, accidents, and birth defects all benefit from reparative surgery. Botox, he said, helps with migraines, bladder dysfunctions, prostate problems, and eye spasms. (Remember that Viagra was developed to alleviate symptoms of pulmonary arterial hypertension.) Someone else asked about new and old standards of beauty. Brandt wants to democratize beauty: “We’re taking typical standards of beauty and applying them to more people … like photocopies.” But at the same time, he said, “I would hate for every one of my patients to look the same.”

    A noted collector of contemporary art, Brandt first acquired a Monochromatic Joke painting by Richard Prince—the one about the psychiatrist stealing his patient’s act—in the 1980s. He also owns one of Yayoi Kusama’s white Infinity Net paintings, which he described as “ethereal.” Brandt enjoys how John Baldessari masks the identity of people in his artworks with colored dots, changing our perception of their faces. In sum, he said that he like feel-good art.

    It was odd that Brandt showed no interest in Ulman’s work, not even asking her once about her own practice. At one point she even asked him “What do you think of my nose?” and he responded with “I think you’re a pretty woman,” eventually conceding with “Good, it looks good.” I was amused with how one narcissist out-narcissized the other. What was even more surprising, though, was the dull affect of the audience throughout the event. I expected the crowd to be, by default, deeply skeptical of Brandt’s line of work, with its impossible standards of beauty and synthetic body transformation by a wealthy elite. (What, with all the concern over genetically modified foods and an obsession with all things organic and artisanal.) Then I realized that’s the old way of thinking. Lifestyle drugs and unnecessary medical surgery are more popular than ever and much less controversial than in the past. Plastic surgery and cosmetic dermatology, as common and unobtrusive as wearing contact lenses, are no longer garish procedures, if handled by the right doctors; they also allow people to happily and blissfully maintain their personal brand. Who could possibly object to that?

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    Read

    Anna Soldner, “Face to Face with Amalia Ulman and Dr. Fredric Brandt,” Dis Magazine, June 6, 2014.

    Watch

  • Conversation with the Sound of Its Own Unraveling

    Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 | Robert Morris, Julia Robinson, Jeffrey Weiss
    Wednesday, April 16, 2014
    Artist Dialogue Series Event
    New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, New York

    Jeffrey Weiss with Clare Davies, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (2014)

    The legendary artist Robert Morris doesn’t often participate in live interviews, whether in public, in person, or on the phone, so a recent appearance by him at the New York Public Library was a rare treat. Indeed, as the scholar and curator Jeffrey Weiss noted at the outset, “Agreeing to speak is not something he does too freely.” But when Morris, Weiss, and the art historian Julia Robinson gathered in celebration of Weiss and Clare Davies’s new book, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), the ensuing conversation was a frustrating affair.

    How could such an experienced crew bungle this rare opportunity? It certainly wasn’t the fault of the articulate, soft-spoken Morris. Rather it was the disorganized and unprepared Weiss and Robinson, whose cluttered thoughts belied the sharp focus of the book. Weiss, a senior curator for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, fumbled with his faulty microphone for several minutes as the conversation began and demonstrated a serious “um” and “uh” problem throughout the event.1

    What’s worse, though, is that he and Robinson, an assistant professor in the Department of Art at New York University, had great difficulty asking a simple, straightforward question, as both were plagued with the malaise of offering a garbled comment in place of a question. When a question finally did come out they immediately tried to answer it themselves, offering several possibilities before Morris could even respond. Furthermore, the pair constantly stumbled when describing and interpreting the images of the artist’s work projected on the screen behind them. This was all a pitiful shame considering Weiss’s excellent, insightful articles recently published in Artforum on the refabrication of Morris’s classic 1960s work and on the value of damaged and destroyed art objects through the lens of two recent exhibitions of them.2

    Despite the obfuscating efforts of Weiss and Robinson, Morris told entertaining and informative stories about his early career, the period covered by Weiss’s book. The artist confirmed with Simone Forti, a dancer, choreographer, and his wife at the time (who was sitting in the front row of the audience), that they had arrived in New York in late 1960. Even though he had been painting through the late 1950s, Morris didn’t consider himself to be an artist during his initial time in New York, when he was studying art history at Hunter College. “I spent a lot of time reading,” he said. It was inexpensive to exist in Manhattan back then. Living in large lofts with no heat and hot water, Morris said he was poor but comfortable.

    Julia Robinson gestures wildly at Robert Morris (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    At Weiss’s prompting, Morris talked about the first two works he made in New York—Box with the Sound of Its Own Making and Column—both created in January 1961. The former is a nearly 10-inch-cubed wooden container that encloses an audio recording of Morris building the work with carpentry tools. The latter was an eight-foot-tall rectangular box built with plywood salvaged from the street and stored uncomfortably in his room, whose ceiling reached only seven feet high. “This might have given me the idea of permuting this work,” he joked of the decision to re-create the piece several times from the lost or discarded original. A garbled comment-question from Weiss attempted to address the size of, and process involved in making, the two works, and the curator seemed astounded that Morris could simultaneously produce large and small works (and unrelated ones at that). “Just literally making them,” the curator gushed, “in and of itself, reflects a certain level of…” before trailing off.3 Did the two bodies of work intersect, the curator asked? “I never felt obliged to think much about the connection,” Morris responded, who went on to say something about the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s concepts regarding the self that was not picked up by Weiss. In fact, Morris’s deep knowledge of Western philosophy was an area that Weiss and Robinson should have fervently pursued but, sadly, did not.

    Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961 (artwork © Robert Morris)

    Robinson mumbled something about how the Box with the Sound of Its Own Making performed or demonstrated temporality and also literalized time. Painting was static then, she claimed, but process brought time back. This may have been a cue for Morris to describe his processed-based works from the 1950s, for which he spread a canvas on the floor and moved across it while sprawled on a short scaffold. “I was just using oil paint,” he said, “putting it on with my hands.” (Does this work still exist?) Robinson stated her interest in Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of the action painter as well as Allan Kaprow’s 1958 essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” She knows her book art history. “Activating work with time was a way out,” Morris said to appease Robinson. Because he didn’t resolve the issue of time, he quit making this work. Among other reasons, Pollock had succeeded where he had not. While Morris failed to recognize these paintings as performance, he did acknowledge a “temporal involvement.”

    Weiss asked Morris if he had a series in mind when making Box and Column. Not yet, the artist replied. “The large works had a kind of apparent continuity … in form,” he continued, “whereas the small objects didn’t.” (Weiss and Davies’s book presumably gives the smaller pieces, which Weiss calls “object sculpture” but Morris identified as “process type objects,” that missing continuity.) Box for Standing—or was it Column?—was a leftover from a Forti performance. “I had this box,” Morris slyly recalled. “It kept getting in the way. I kept moving it around the studio. Finally I decided I would expropriate it and make a sculpture. It was really very easy because it was already there.” The works from the early 1960s “were much more contingent than they appear today,” he mused.4

    Morris, Robinson, and Weiss talked about the avant-garde milieu in San Francisco and New York, which featured characters such as Forti, Anna Halprin, Henry Flynt, and LaMonte Young. Robinson simultaneously asked and told Morris about his own history—while offering her own interpretations of it—a strategy that resulted in a confused, fragmented chronology. Moving on, Morris told the story of when the radical composer John Cage visited his Upper West Side apartment, where he asked to listen to the entire three-and-a-half-hour recording of Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. Robinson commented to Morris: “Did you ever ask him later, ‘What the heck was that?’” Did she truly find it incredulous that Cage would want to listen to the complete tape?

    Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer in Simone Forti’s See-Saw, December 1960, Ruben Gallery, New York (photograph © Robert McElroy)

    Morris recollected several experimental dance performances in which he took part. For one Forti piece he pretended to be a rock. For another he was directed to remain on the floor (“Whatever happens,” Forti had told him, “you gotta lay flat on the floor”), while another performer, Robert Huot—a man twice Morris’s size—was instructed to tie him to the wall. “A battle occurred,” Morris declared, “and that was the movement…. A fight with a rope, two guys—I mean, there wasn’t any expression there at all, just defense and scratches and bumps.”

    The conversation dragged when Robinson pressed Morris about the mysterious, nefarious controllers of a bifurcated Fluxus scene of artists, dancers, and musicians surrounding Young in New York. Morris admitted that he had written texts for the group that are not widely read because he pulled out of the scene. “I find it really hard to give a reason for that,” Morris mused. “I must have been feeling especially hostile.” Regarding the writing, he explained, “I was using language to make drawings.” The nature of this discussion wasn’t clear, but the three speakers seemed to be in the know. Maybe it was all just gossip.

    “You became a pretty serious critic pretty fast,” Robinson noted. She also noticed a difference between Morris’s private writing in notebooks and his published words in the 1960s. “The need to go on record became important,” the artist said. And he liked doing it, even though he considered himself to be a lazy writer who didn’t produce articles often enough. In fact, his advisor at Hunter College, William Rubin, kept bugging him to finish his thesis on the Romanian modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, even after the professor had left the school for a curatorial position at the Museum of Modern Art. “I usually wrote about things after finishing a body of work,” Morris said.

    Three views of Venus of Willendorf, ca. 28,000–25,000 BCE, limestone, 4¼ in. tall (artwork in the public domain)

    Halfway through the conversation Morris loosened up, while Weiss and Robinson continued to grope erratically. The artist recalled the artist Ad Reinhardt’s famous class on Japanese art at Hunter, which he said didn’t follow typical chronological or geographic lines. Instead, Reinhardt showed slides from different eras, periods, and locations, saying “That’s classic. That’s baroque. That’s early classic.” Reinhardt would show “five hundred slides a night,” Morris remembered. When showing an image of the Venus of Willendorf, Reinhardt deadpanned “That’s really primitive.” A student exclaimed, “That’s not primitive—that’s pregnant!” The professor, Morris punchlined, did not reply. Morris also recalled that Reinhardt’s slides of monuments and artworks from foreign lands—once a year he traveled to another country, by himself—were frontal and bilateral. Many students, Morris said, declared these photographs so well taken that they depicted the actual sites better than seeing them in person.

    In the early 1960s Morris worked in the Art Office of the New York Public Library, in room 313, where he answered mail, filed things, and used the card catalogue. It was during this time when he conceived of Card File (1962), while drinking coffee one day in the library. Weiss felt Card File is neglected, misrepresented, and singularly understood as a form of categorization—perhaps because we never can actually read the cards filed into it. (Weiss read a few of them aloud; his book publishes transcriptions of each one.) “It’s unending, theoretically,” Morris said of the work, but “it has a narrative.” It’s also, Robinson added, “indeterminate.”

    Robert Morris speaks, as Simone Forti listens attentively (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The influence of narrative, Morris revealed, came from Marcel Duchamp, in particular the focus on text and language found in Robert Lebel’s 1959 book on the French-born artist.5 For Morris, Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23) represents process—materials and their transformation—through a puerile story about the proverbial bride and nine bachelors, a metaphor, Morris said, of the Artist screwing Art to become Famous. Morris also admitted the influence of Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14) when creating works like Three Rulers (1962), for which he estimated imperial measurements by eye. The hand-drawn inch was intentionally a “mistake,” Morris said, claiming that Duchamp had become the “new standard of measurement” for artists.

    The classic gray-painted plywood boxes from 1964, Morris said, “were competently made but not expertly made.” It was easier for him to construct them for exhibitions and toss out afterward than to build permanent works. “I said at some point there are no originals of these,” he noted. “There are only reproductions. Nobody [back then] wanted to hear that.” One time he sent assembly instructions for the pieces to a museum, whose workers “built them too well—and that offended me. If you make these things too well, they look like God made them.” These sculptures presented preexisting forms in the world, Morris explained, such as columns, benches, and gates; he also used materials other than wood. Although fiberglass works well for the curves of a boat, the artist said he was disappointed with the material’s response to edges, which became frayed. “It was a mistake” to use the material, he said, “but it has a certain quality that’s different from plywood.”

    Robert Morris, Box for Standing, 2011, walnut, 77 x 12 x 26 in. (artwork © Robert Morris)

    For a private exhibition at SurroundArt in Brooklyn in 2012 and a public exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in Manhattan in 2014, Morris instructed fabricators to use quality woods such as walnut, cherry, oak, poplar, European beach, and maple when making replicas of older work—or in his words, “recent work that recollects earlier objects.” For example, Box for Standing went from pine in 1961 to walnut in 2011, and Wheels (2012), first made in 1963 with street lumber, was reconstructed in cherry wood at a slightly larger scale. These fabrications are obviously salable pieces for private collectors and museums, but Weiss and Robinson didn’t engage Morris about these cash cows. Instead, the artist offered an alternative view: “I have a compulsion to revisit some of these things.”

    New York Art Strike, 1970

    During the audience Q&A, a woman sitting behind me pestered Morris with several questions about Duchamp, which the artist answered with good nature. “Did Duchamp really smoke a cigar?” was the last one she got in before the library’s representative, Arezoo Moseni, judiciously cut her off. When an artist stood to lament (in a kind of calm hysteria) the state of the New York art world today—the dispersion of artistic centers, the lack of easy living, and finding a voice in an art world in which everything has seemingly been done—Morris recanted a story about the New York Art Strike, which took place outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 22, 1970, when approximately five hundred people sat on the steps to protest war, racism, and repression. After the ten-hour event ended, a few stragglers remained to clean up the steps. While sweeping up cigarette butts, the artist Carl Andre remarked to Morris, “You never know how good an artist you are, but you always know how good a sweeper you are.” Morris said that life was hard back then but leisurely so: you could see your friends and think about things. Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, the artist declared, “Creativity is the residue of wasted time.” It’s certainly unfortunate we don’t have that kind of time today. And although this story sidestepped the audience member’s concerns, Morris seemed to suggest that she work at her own pace and within her own competencies.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Similarly, speakers at any level of experience must simply get over their fear of amplification. Likewise, academics should be required to learn about microphones, projectors, and PowerPoint as an integral part of their jobs.

    2 See Jeffrey Weiss, “Eternal Return,” Artforum 52, no. 6 (February 2014): 174–81; and “Things Not Necessarily to Be Viewed as Art,” Artforum 51, no. 7 (March 2013): 220–29.

    3 During this time Morris also made what he called performance switches. A fourth body of work was the set of boxy plywood structures first exhibited at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery in 1964.

    4 From the audience, Forti recalled that Morris had made two boxes; he only remembered making one.

    5 Lebel’s book was translated into English by George Heard Hamilton in that same year. Duchamp’s notes from The Green Box were published in 1960.

    Listen

  • Writing for Socially Engaged Art

    Christopher Howard, founder and chief critic for In Terms Of, delivered the following untitled talk on a panel at the 2014 Open Engagement conference. The discussion, which was moderated by Chelsea Haines and included presentations by Sandra de la Loza and Juliana Driever, looked at new directions in writing about social practice from diverse perspectives.

    Writing for Socially Engaged Art
    Friday, May 16, 2014
    Open A.I.R. Workshops
    2014 Open Engagement
    Queens Museum, New York City Building, Queens Museum Theater, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, New York

    After being asked to participate on this panel, I wanted to know what kind of writing on socially engaged art is already out there. My conclusion is that there’s a lot of writing on socially engaged art out there. We have books devoted to the subject by Grant Kester, Claire Bishop, Pablo Helguera, Tom Finkelpearl, Nato Thompson, and Gregory Sholette, among others. We have essays by the above authors, as well as by Ben Davis, Steve Lambert, and Yates McKee. (Why so many men, I wonder?) They write on Project Row Houses, Theaster Gates, Suzanne Lacy, Tania Bruguera, Superflex, and the Yes Men, as well as projects sponsored by Creative Time, Art in Odd Places, and local and state arts councils across the country.

    Artists, writers, and curators discuss socially engaged art in Creative Time Reports and on several blogs hosted by the nonprofit organization A Blade of Grass. Over the past two months, the blog for Open Engagement has published daily responses to questions about social practice, and I’m sure we will read more about what happens at this three-day conference in the coming weeks, adding to the growing body of literature on socially engaged art.

    One could argue that participatory art probably generates more passionate debate than other form of art—although flipping through any art magazine or browsing any art blog would indicate otherwise. Traditional genres such as painting, sculpture, photography, and video still grab the lion’s share of attention, and reviews of socially engaged art rarely appear in the reviews section proper.

    Still, socially engaged art is totally mainstream. Last fall, for example, Artforum magazine, generally accepted as the pinnacle of art writing, published several major essays, including “Limits of Control,” Felicity Scott’s text on Rain Room at the Museum of Modern Art (2012) and other immersive environments, followed by several pieces on Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) and a reassessment of Andrea Fraser’s untitled sex video from 2003, which isn’t quite social practice as we generally understand it but which embodies many of the same issues confronting the field.1

    A view of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) at Forest Houses in Bronx, New York (photograph by the New York Observer)

    Last month ARTnews published major exposés on social practice, Carolina A. Miranda’s “How the Art of Social Practice Is Changing the World, One Row House at a Time,” and this month’s Art in America has a pair of essays on the genre: on the artist Pedro Reyes and three architectural firms that involve communities in their process. The academic journal October has published several of Bishop’s key essays and devoted its Fall 2012 issue to Occupy Wall Street. In the popular press, articles have been published in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and many other news websites that aren’t art-oriented.

    Considering all this activity, important questions arise: Are we content with the writing? Are we satisfied with the level of discourse? It depends on whom you ask. Many articles fret about documentation, about aesthetics, about experience, fussing over whether or not social practice is capital A art. Personally, I find such conversations to be uninteresting and unhelpful. My definition of art is elastic, expansive, and inclusive. Maybe I’m easy to please. But I fully recognize the need to keep having these conversations.

    In his 2013 essay, “The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism,” published in e-flux Journal, Grant Kester addressed the anxiety over writing on participatory art:

    The result has been a series of largely unproductive debates over the epistemological status of this work, most of which entails variations of the same simplistic opposition between a naïve social art practice, associated with the evils of humanism or pastoral sentimentality, and a theoretically rigorous, politically sophisticated avant-garde artistic practice.

    Often the conversation revolves around the ethical and political position of the artist, and how much the artist seizes or relinquishes power. I’ve found too much finger pointing and hair splitting in this strain of writing, which can be intensely puritanical.

    So how do writers sort out the good from the bad, or the worthwhile from the inconsequential? Where does a critic—or a viewer or a participant—draw the line and evaluate a project? “Does it work?” offers one person. “Is it useful?” states another. These are two possible directions, but there are many more. A writer can discuss socially engaged art—or any form of art—through many lenses: the history of art, contemporaneous art practices, literature, music, politics, the social sciences, economics, religion—through anything, really, and that’s what great about art, and what’s fun writing about art. The only prescriptions I would suggest for a writer is: research your subject thoroughly, try to say something new, and always question received wisdom.

    In the same e-flux Journal article, Kester encouraged writers to take a long view of social practice. He described a “field-based approach, in which the critic inhabits the site of practice for an extended period of time, paying special attention to the discursive, haptic, and social conditions of space, and the temporal rhythms of the processes that unfold there…. When does the work begin and when does it end?”

    This is a good approach that is typical of historians and certain kinds of journalists writing long-form articles, but not really the methods of critics, reporters, and bloggers, whose publications require fresh content daily. When writing about a work of socially engaged art, it’s important to talk to the artist, the participants, the passers-by, the institutional organizers, the funders—whoever might have been involved in or witnessed a project. Consult the published record. Consult as many sources as you can. Don’t just rely on your reactions.

    Participants in Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Street (2013) in Brooklyn, New York (photograph by Nicola Goode)

    The history of art is far from static—it changes when new discoveries and connections are made. Moreover, a single review is a discrete piece of writing, never the final word, and one response at a given point in time. Would you get a sense of the 2014 Whitney Biennial if you just read one New York Times review and nothing else? Of course not. But read five, ten, twenty pieces—published over many months—and you’d get a good really sense of the reaction to the exhibition. The same goes for Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Stoop (2013) and Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, which generated many written responses in print and online. It would be fantastic if writers would return to Forest Houses in the South Bronx, where the monument was sited, and talk to people who had been there last summer. Or talk to the attendees who live elsewhere, or to Dia Art Foundation employees. I’m hopeful this will be done, and we’ll eventually get a better understanding of long-term implications of the work.

    I’ve been a practicing art critic in New York for ten years, reviewing exhibitions for print and online publications and also writing the occasional essay, but I haven’t written much on socially engaged art. Perhaps a parallel project is something that I’ve been engaged with for a few years.

    A self-published blog called In Terms Of publishes criticism of live speaking engagements such as lectures, panels, conversations, symposia, and the like, concentrating on events in New York City (but not exclusively). Public programs have existed for decades, yet the rapid increase of such events over the past ten years, as well as their standing in the art world, is astounding. An art exhibition today is inconceivable without an attendant calendar of events. Furthermore, live speaking engagements constitute a core part of the mission of libraries, bookstores, universities, and cultural centers. Since much contemporary art—not just social practice—depends on dialogue and conversation, the need for informed commentary on lectures and panels is tremendous but underdeveloped.

    In Terms Of has examined talks with a wide range of players: artists, art historians, curators, critics, and students, as well as scholars in the related disciplines of literature, philosophy, architecture, and design. One recent post examined the intersection of aesthetics and politics generated from a panel of artists and activists that was moderated by the author of a book called 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. Another five-part series covered a one-day conference on curatorial authorship in art exhibitions, which featured historians, curators, and artists from around the United States. A third post explored the notion of critique in contemporary art through an analysis of a lecture by the installation artist Mika Tajima. Events outside the art world are also important: I’ve written about the contributors to an anthology of feminist comics, the author of a book that historicizes the Riot Grrrl movement, a former New York Times columnist on ethics, and the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe, as well as the occasional forays into economics, politics, and law.

    I consider texts in In Terms Of to be experimental, not in the avant-garde sense but rather because I’m drawing from multiple genres: basic reporting, investigative journalism, art criticism, newspaper editorials, polemical prose, book reviews, art-historical research, and so on. Most of the time I follow the chronological presentation of the speaker or panelists, but not always, and that’s one thing with which I constantly struggle. After attending an event and taking scrupulous notes, I conduct research and interject my own responses into the written narrative. If the event was recorded and the video posted online, I’ll watch parts or all of it.

    I don’t approach live speaking engagements as art and would have a good laugh if you tried to convince me that a panel is a “performance of language.” I have no problem, though, stating that the overall goal for In Terms Of is to publish “socially engaged writing.”

    What kind of writing do social-practice artists want, if they want it at all? Do they need a fatter CV and bigger portfolio to establish professional credentials for job applications? Do they need publicity that will help them get a grant to fund the next project? How about clips to show mom and dad to justify the frivolous and expensive master’s degree? It still feels good to see your name in print, right? In a larger sense, are social-practice artists looking for a silver-bullet treatise, a text that defines and validates their work, something like Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” or Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”? You tell me.

    I would assume that any artist would want feedback on his or her work, something that acknowledges their effort and legitimizes their work. Not as approval—after all, an artist doesn’t work for his or her critics. But the work cannot exist by itself. It must be supported by an audience and by participants, through spoken and written words, through memories and feelings, with some level of intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic fulfillment. Will there be good writing about socially engaged art? Most emphatically yes. Will there be bad writing? Without a doubt. Will some writers miss the point? Sure, but others will get certainly get it.

    In Terms Of count: 0 (naturally).

    1 See the table of contents of the November 2013 issue of Artforum for links to the articles on Hirschhorn and Fraser.

  • The Well-Hung Show

    This essay is the fourth of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, third, and fourth texts.

    Discussion and Response
    Monday, April 7, 2014
    Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
    Center for the Humanities
    Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York

    Dieter Roelstraete on the left and David Joselit on his left (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    To conclude the conference “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” two speakers—a curator and an art historian—offered their thoughts on the day’s events. Dieter Roelstraete, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, spoke polemically about the conference theme, wanting his remarks to be “a case and a plea” for a curatorial attitude that “shouldn’t be ashamed of its aesthetic ambitions and its aesthetic aspirations.” Roelstraete first declared that conversations regarding antagonistic tensions between artists and curators, and regarding questions of power, fatigue him. “For me,” he boldly stated, “the practice of exhibition making is really an artistic endeavor.” As a curator coming to the profession through writing (after being trained as a philosopher), Roelstraete thinks of exhibitions as essays, and he considers group exhibitions as “spatial writing—not with ink, not with computers—but with objects.” It is easy for artists to be curators, he said, but it’s still taboo for curators to be artists. He wants to challenge this taboo.

    Thankfully he stopped short of calling himself an artist. While I agree that curatorial work is highly creative labor and that the essay format for it is a productive conceit, organizing exhibitions is not art. Curatorial work and artistic labor share many aesthetic elements, such as rhythm and symmetry, as Roelstraete pointed out. Further, he said, curatorial work involves building “an aesthetically compelling argument,” which curators “attempt to master by trial and error.” His observation that “curating is the art of hanging pictures,” however, earned a hiss from an audience member. In fact, this same person—I think it was a he—kept hissing at comments throughout the conference’s final session. Maybe this hiss was intended to be a laugh.

    In contrast to Roelstraete’s passionate approach, his session colleague, David Joselit, professor of art history at the Graduate Center, commented briefly on several points raised during the conference. Like many in the art world, he has noticed that curating is everywhere, from the interiors of co-op buildings to products in upscale grocery stores. He defined curatorial work as “adding value through the assembly of a group of things” and “the convergence of production and display.” Joselit offered a notion of “curating in the expanded field,” which consisted of “aggregating, assembling, curating.” Selection, he continued, has become an aesthetic skill, which creates what he called a condition—not a turn. Joselit also observed that embedded curatorial activities with artists—such as Lynne Cooke’s rapport with Rosemarie Trockel and how Josh Kline includes his friends in his shows—may combat the scale of an overwhelmingly expansive art world. The practice, he noted, is not without ethical dilemmas and intellectual contradictions.

    Dieter Roelstraete with a two-finger muse; David Joselit with palms-down authority

    Though Joselit felt that “the idea of an artist’s career as an object is very interesting,” he approved of Carol Bove’s objection to the attitude that everything an artist does is the work. Suggesting that the impresario curator is a European cultural model, Joselit posited that American curators are caught between the goals of museum public relations (to draw audiences) and the needs of an institution’s funders, trustees, and, to a lesser extent, corporations and public funding. Like several other conference speakers, Joselit rubber-stamped the idea that artists are delegated to do what regular curators cannot or will not do.

    Roelstraete felt it is routine for the “curatoriate” (his term for the professional class) to renovate, reinterpret, reinvigorate, and rejuvenate their institutions’ permanent collection. He agreed with the conference’s keynote speaker, Boris Groys, that everyone—artists, dealers, collectors, museum directors, and even installers—instrumentalizes art in some fashion.

    Throughout the duration of the 7th Berlin Biennale, representatives from Occupy and M15 practiced their forms of protest and strategies of involvement on the ground floor of KW

    As an example Roelstraete discussed the seventh Berlin Biennial (2012). Even though it was the first one organized by an artist (Artur Żmijewski), the show was reviled and panned, especially by Berlin-based artists. A chief complaint, Roelstraete recalled, was that Żmijewski instrumentalized the art. Reflecting on his own practice, Roelstraete said that he doesn’t conceal his intentions when approaching artists, directly asking them if he can instrumentalize their work. “Maybe they like the idea,” he wondered aloud, “or the museum.” Or maybe artists are desperate for a high-profile exhibition to help boost their careers.

    Noting that of the thirty exhibitions listed in the September previews in Artforum, only two were group shows, Roelstraete wondered if the group show is an endangered species.1 Even though he specializes in the thematic exhibition with multiple artists, such as the recently closed The Way of the Shovel (2013–14) at his home institution, the curator acknowledged that his preferred genre presents fundraising and communications troubles; group shows, he added, are also hard to travel. Such anecdotal claims cannot be easily proven, of course, but decisions in the curatorial world are often based on personal experiences. That said, Roelstraete relayed that his first attempt at organizing a solo exhibition (for Chantel Ackerman) was tough and his most difficult project. Later on he offered a tantalizing idea of having six curators organize a solo exhibition.

    Toward the end of the session the conversation bounced from topic to topic, with each speaker making brief declarations on this and that. After proclaiming that “writing is the bedrock of curatorial thinking,” Roelstraete asked Joselit for an opinion. “Some arguments can only be made with objects,” the historian replied, which he misses from his academic life. (He was a curator in the 1980s.) Joselit was thankful that academia has provided him with time to write but then tried to explain something called the “counterexhibition,” using Philip Parreno, Rirkirt Tiravanija, and Maurizio Cattelan as examples His concept was not clear.

    “I don’t think you can curate a menu,” exclaimed Roelstraete twice, urging that the term only applies to exhibition making. Joselit felt that curators should not withdraw into a defensive “I’m an expert” model. Action and dialogue in contemporary art, he noted, has moved from three-dimensional space but also virtual—and that you cannot have one without the other. You cannot assume that bloggers are amateurs, Joselit let slip.

    From the audience Chelsea Haines, a PhD student in art history at the Graduate Center and a conference organizer, reminded the panelists how curators need only posses a generalized knowledge of art, which lessens the dependence on a doctorate or a curatorial-studies degree. People in the art world are nimble, she said, and can learn stuff in bits and pieces. If a curator, Haines continued, wants to bring an outside interest into the museum—here thinking of Roelstraete’s The Way of the Shovel—he or she does not need a PhD in archaeology. Joselit agreed and disagreed with this suggestion: the curatorial rhetoric of constructing an argument in space and with objects, he said, can be learned and developed—it’s not always intuitive.

    In his opening remarks Roelstraete observed that no conference speaker had discussed curatorial roles at art fairs, a gap that I also noticed and wished was addressed. In the previous session Kline talked about organizing do-it-yourself exhibitions in unconventional spaces, but the conference largely addressed curatorial roles in traditional art institutions. Haines’s comments about education struck me as particularly interesting: while I agree with her that formal training isn’t always needed, my unscientific observations of employment classifieds for open curatorial positions tell another story—museums and university galleries “prefer” an applicant with a PhD, which is to say that those without one may be unduly overlooked. Even a master’s degree in curatorial studies at Bard College will only get you so far. If a doctorate becomes the baseline standard, the curatorial profession may become out of reach for “outsiders” (such as Robert Nickas or Joshua Decter, to name two from an older generation) seeking institutional positions. To break from convention, a museum can always call on artists to provide an unconventional approach to exhibition making. To have only these two options—academic and artist—precludes a wide realm of curatorial viewpoints.

    In Terms Of count: 1½.

    1 Discounting the introductory section that lists seven biennials, the seasonal preview in the September 2013 issue of Artforum listed nine group shows among the forty-four selected for the section.

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