This week the College Art Association is holding its 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC. In recognition of the event, In Terms Of is republishing four reviews of sessions from CAA’s 1979 conference, which also took place in the nation’s capital, on topics still relevant to the art world today.
Moderators: Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula Panelists: Mel Rosenthal, Suzanne Lacy, and Fred Lonidier
Leslie Satin, “Artists and Community in the Context of Social Change,” Women Artists News 4, no. 9 (March 1979): 8
Because the Caucus [for Marxism and Art] had been granted a very brief time slot, only three artists were scheduled to speak, each to discuss her/his work in the context of social change. Martha Rosler noted in her introduction that each of them dealt with violence—physical or social. Later she addressed the need of political artists to gain control of language, to move away from the media definition of “violence.”
Photographer Mel Rosenthal described his discomfort when audiences skim over the political content of his photographs, responding only to the form of the work. In his photographs of the South Bronx he has insisted, not only on political meanings of the subject, but on the relationship between the art and the subject—the people of the area. His original idea was to make portraits of everyone living on the street where he works at a health center. It became apparent that many of these people, with whom Rosenthal became very involved over the course of a year, had never seen accurate photos of themselves. The photographs show them as real people in real poverty—not just another burned-out South Bronx scene from media.
Suzanne Lacy presented material she’d covered in a previous panel on performance and environmental art from a somewhat different perspective. She and Leslie Labowitz cofounded Ariadne to work against violence against women.1 Discussing several projects on rape, murder, and violence in the record industry, Lacy explained their approach, which involves, not just getting the personal cooperation of local government officials and journalists, but actually setting up performances and exhibits for media. This follows Ariadne’s analysis of the role played by media in preventing or allowing political change.
Fred Lonidier spoke about reaching a labor-union audience. Believing that the structure of the workplace must be changed to affect occupational health problems in a major way, he created an exhibit of photographs showing results of work-related diseases and added a text giving the historical context. The exhibit did attract many union members. At the panel, he spoke of the difficulties of reaching such “nonart” audiences.
When our time in the Lincoln Room ran out, we were in mid-discussion, but discovered another spot available unofficially. Perhaps forty of us sat in a circle there and continued to talk and talk about the role media play for the political artist, the difference between performance art and political activism (is Phyllis Schlafly a performance artist?), political art as a process of self-identification, definitions of “cultural worker,” the exhibit of shopping bag ladies’ art at the Met[ropolitan Museum of Art] organized by Ann Marie Rousseau.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
1 Ariadne, a California woman’s network, produced public art on political issues from 1977 to 1980.
Isabelle Graw speaks on “The Economy of Painting” (photograph by Christopher Howard)
A well-attended lecture by Isabelle Graw, a professor of art theory and a founding editor of the journal Texte zur Kunst, was titled “The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness.” Jetlagged from a flight from Germany, Graw framed her talk as an eight-step analysis of the naturalization of painting in the contemporary moment. In the late 1990s, she said, painters “felt pressured to justify themselves,” but this anxiety fell away by the early 2000s, because of social, economic, and historical reasons. Probably most important is that artists since then have absorbed the critique of painting and consequently renewed the primacy of the medium.
Step One
Graw’s term for the renewal of painting is “vitalist projection.” Her point of departure was Hubert Damisch’s ideas about the indexical signs traditionally associated with painting, such as the brushstroke, which imply subjectivity. Brushstrokes suggest “the traces of an activity to the eyes,” Graw explained, and act as a finger pointing to the absent or ghostlike author. That a painting isn’t actually alive but, because it exists in a material form, offers an illusion that it can think and speak—this is vitalist projection. The labor and lifetime of the artist are seemingly stored in the painting, she told us, but they are not reduced to it. And what a painting actually depicts, Graw argued, is irrelevant to this concept.
One would expect Graw to provide examples from Western painting, from the Renaissance to modern times, to give us an idea of the kind of work that projects vitality. Instead she jumped to the late 1960s, when the German artist Sigmar Polke ironically staged subjectivity as a display of affect. Paintings such as Polke as Astronaut (1968) and The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black! (1969), Graw said, invoke the presence of the author but mock it. And based on its title, the latter work even suggests it painted itself.
Step Two
Graw stated that she spent a year scratching her head over the question “What is painting?”1 For her, painting is not just a picture on canvas but also an art that transgresses boundaries. Painting is revitalized, she said, when it pushes boundaries, like when the French artist Francis Picabia tacked a stuffed monkey to cardboard and painted words around it to create Natures Mortes (1920). Incorporating spheres of labor, consumer goods, and written text into the work, Graw said, breathed new life into painting. Similarly, Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968), a painting inscribed with German curses and insults, combined fashion, art, and design—the artist wore the canvas as a gown before hanging it on the wall. The Large Cloth thus becomes a discursive object that appears to be alive—it can speak to us. But apart from the abusive language, what does it say? Probably not much. As Raphael Rubenstein wrote in his review of the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “It would be hard to find an artist in recent times who was less forthcoming than Sigmar Polke (1941–2010). He almost never gave interviews, and on the rare occasions when he did so, his responses either mocked or otherwise frustrated the interviewer’s quest for information.”2
Installation view of Sigmar Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968) at the Museum of Modern Art (photograph by Jill Krementz)
Graw cited other historical artists who revitalized painting (El Lissitzky, Yves Klein, Niele Toroni) and added a few newer ones (Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rachel Harrison) whose work addresses ideas about painting but usually does not incorporate any kind of paint. “It seems tempting to have a highly elastic definition of painting,” Graw said, “to detect it everywhere,” but she didn’t commit to going that far. Nevertheless, the medium can “push beyond the edge of the frame,” she said, “while still holding onto the specificity of the picture on canvas or to variations of this format.” I nodded my head to all of this—elastic definitions of art are good—but still had one major question: When exactly did painting exhaust itself? Why did the medium need to be renewed in the first place? How did painting become moribund? Graw failed to establish the norms against which her exceptions rebel. If academic approaches or religious iconography were to blame, I wanted to know how vitalist projection worked in them, or not.
Step Three
Graw discussed the narrow bond between person and product, in which the artist and his or her creation overlap. In performance art, she said, this congruity is achieved through the persona, a staged version of the artist. In the work of Andrea Fraser, who was Graw’s example, the character invoked by the artist can be separated from the artist herself. The identity of a painting and its creator diverge: the painting “cannot be reduced to its maker because it’s material,” Graw said, making the relationship metonymic. If I can discern a difference between painting and performance, according to Graw, it’s that a performed character is immaterial, brought to life by a person, whereas a painting is a physical object that has a separate physical presence. But since painting appears to be lifelike but really isn’t, what is she even going after? I began to suspect that Graw was proposing a theory of painting based on the lack of an idea. What a strange thing to do.
Step Four
Graw reviewed painting’s specific indexicality to the ghostlike author (which doesn’t exist, right?), starting with Charles Pierce’s notion that a sign must have a physical connection to an object, corresponding point by point. Pierce cited photography, which has a factual connection to the world and, in Graw’s words, “gives an automatic inscription of the object without presupposing an author.” Do people still take this nostalgic if not ancient view of photography—this it is mechanical, neutral, objective, and descriptive—seriously?
Isabelle Graw at the Jewish Museum (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Step Five
Graw decreed that an artist doesn’t have to touch a painting for it to have subjectlike power—a power that she repeatedly nullified as being an illusion. Like the work of Andy Warhol and Wade Guyton, a painting could be made mechanically or by an assistant. Through this, she said, imperfections can become improvements, which I took to mean a revitalization. At this moment Graw acknowledged the primacy of painting over other forms of art, such as sculpture, to express subjectivity, but her argumentation was neither clear nor convincing. She pointed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s preference of painting over sculpture in his writing on aesthetics, to the power given to painting historically, and to painting’s familiarity to us. Her defense (because other people said so) was on shaky ground.
Step Six
The American artist Frank Stella once said that painting is handwriting, Graw went on, and some have understood Stella’s work as undermining the signature style—despite him creating his own. The more artists erase themselves from their work, Graw said, the more their subjectivity appears in it. “So there’s no way to get rid of it, right?” she joked. Here Graw recognized that an artist uses a mechanical process—like when the German artist Gerhard Richter drags paint across a canvas with a squeegee—doesn’t signify detachment. Why can’t she apply the same logic to photographers?
A painting’s value is not its price, Graw said, but rather is “a symbolic and economic worth that is attested to it once it circulates as a commodity.” (She explored this idea in her enlightening 2010 book High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture.) Valuable art, she continued, must be attributed to an author—this in spite of millions of art objects in museums worldwide (including paintings) whose makers have not yet been identified, or never will be. As in steps one and two of her talk, Graw cited only a contemporary example: Martin Kippenberger’s series of Hand-Painted Pictures (1992), which satirized the desire to see the artist’s personal touch in painting. (Kippenberger often had assistants or hired guns make his work—sometimes too well, to the artist’s displeasure.) Graw explained that this desire becomes a fantasy in collecting: when buying an artwork, a collector also buys into a fantasy that he or she has now become part of the artist’s life. This idea was the most compelling in her talk, and I would like to see Graw develop it.
After Steps
The Q&A session was scattered, with conversation between Graw and several audience members revolving, in an uninteresting way, around the production of digital images, and around Karl Marx’s definition of value and labor. Graw summarized her argument again: liveliness is apparent in painting from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century—though she never established when, how, and by whom—and twentieth-century avant-gardes redefined that vitality as they integrated art and life, something we usually understand as emancipatory. Yet the new spirit of twenty-first-century capitalism, she began to conclude, has a similar strategy: control subjectivity by transforming life into a currency, if not a product to be bought and sold. Taking an autonomous, conversative view of the function of art, Graw said that painting today fulfills the connection between art and life. In fact, she said, it’s one of the last places for people to find fulfillment. I am reminded of that quote attributed to Henri Matisse: painting should be “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”
In Terms Of count: 0.
1 Her exact queries were: What do I mean when I say painting” and “What is my notion of painting?”
2 Raphael Rubinstein, “Polke’s Plenitude,” Art in America (June/July 2014), 110.
Hank Willis Thomas Thursday, April 16, 2015
Art + Design Agency Series
Krannert Art Museum, Krannert Auditorium, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Poster for a lecture by Hank Willis Thomas at the Krannert Art Museum
“Would you say your biggest source of inspiration is other people?” an audience member asked Hank Willis Thomas, who had just finished giving a presentation on his work in the basement auditorium of the Krannert Art Museum. The artist replied with a smile: “I’d say.” Indeed, early on Thomas stated that art is about people and connections, and he even began his talk by quizzing the audience, asking who was a student, a faculty member, a first-time visitor. He also asked who in the room had tattoos—there were several students with visibly more than a few—and playfully harassed a few latecomers. Thomas also joshed a reticent audience member halfway through the lecture: “This talk can’t go if you don’t talk.”
If people were the primary inspiration for Thomas’s work, personal biography and American cultural history came a close second and third. He spoke of his mother, Deborah Willis, an accomplished professor, photographer, curator, author, and a specialist in African American photography. “I used to be Deb’s son,” he joked. “Now she’s Hank’s mom.” Thomas said that Willis’s investigation into black photographers, who had been making pictures professionally by the mid-nineteenth century, rewrote his notion of American history, along with the recognition of blacks working in chemistry, physics, and other respected fields. Thomas ran through several images from the twentieth century, from a distinguished photograph of Bert Williams, a Bahamian-born vaudeville star who was “paid to perform blackness” in blackface, to ones of Mike Tyson, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama.
Thomas showed a range of his own projects, series, and singular images, comprising mostly photography and sculpture. He played the first couple minutes of a video called A person is more important than anything else… (2014), commissioned by New York Live Arts for a citywide program on James Baldwin. The work features an audio recording of the black author speaking on the artist’s struggle with integrity; Thomas supplied the visuals. After listening intently to Baldwin’s first few sentences, I began focusing on the moving images, unconsciously tuning out the words. When quizzed by Thomas to recall the content of the piece, Eli Craven, an MFA student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said he “got lost in the visual.” I wasn’t alone.
As an artist, Thomas emerged in the mid-2000s with a provocative series of work, called Branded, which showed Nike’s swoosh logo emblazoned not on clothing but seared directly onto athletic black male bodies. The artist understands corporate logos as hieroglyphs: “You don’t have to use the language to understand the ad.” He also connects them to both slave ownership and consumerism. “Bodies are treated differently at different times,” Thomas said.
Thomas’s photographs read quickly, like advertisements. One work in particular, Priceless #1 (2004), parodies the phrasing of MasterCard’s “priceless” campaign but with deadly serious intentions. The photograph depicts the artist’s own family at the funeral of his cousin, who was shot to death outside a Philadelphia nightclub. (Thomas was a witness.) The text read: “3-piece suit: $250; new socks: $2; gold chain: $400; 9mm pistol: $79 (changed here to $80); bullet: $.60.” The punch line of “Picking the perfect casket for your son: priceless” highlights the “affordability guilt” of burials. Do higher price points for caskets, Thomas wanted to know, reflect how much you love a loved one? In 2005 he said, “My aunt is not a rich woman…. I don’t know how much she paid for the casket she picked, but I guarantee you it went on a credit card.’”1
The interest of Priceless #1 goes beyond that. The question always asked of Thomas is “How did you family feel about the image, in mourning?” The artist asked himself that, too, as well as questions such as: Why show it? Do I take the logo off? Is this an exploitative situation? “That’s where the question of integrity comes back,” said Thomas, referring back to the Baldwin speech.
Some viewers find the work offensive to blacks, as one white woman did during the local Fox news story when, in 2007, the photograph was enlarged to billboard size and hung on the exterior wall of the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. The museum faces the jail, so the local crowd read this fact into the image. Though museum curators spoke for him on television, Thomas had to defend the work in the Birmingham newspaper—and then realized how things get dumbed down in public discourse. Was it insensitive to use his grieving family as the subject of his art? “I think I made the right decision,” Thomas said, referencing the same white woman interviewed on television, who understood the artist’s decision to either get revenge or make art.
Thomas then discussed a Reebok advertising campaign from 2005, called “I Am What I Am. Lacking any reference to sports gear, the image for one ad portrays 50 Cent as survivor, rapper, entrepreneur, actor, and criminal—a white man’s idea of black values that in turn reflect black values. You know the image is an ad, Thomas said, because of the logo. The campaign also featured the tennis player Andy Roddick as a white guy who is a champion but feels guilty, the Chinese basketball player Yao Ming with a slew of Asian visual references (rising sun, the year of the monkey), and the actor Lucy Liu as a docile female. “They’re playing off of some crazy stereotypes,” Thomas remarked, adding that the ads have nothing to do with the products Reebok are trying to sell. “We’re doing the work to make the ads work,” he said as he involved the audience once again in a discussion of the images.
In a work from a series called Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968–2008 (ca. 2006–10), an advertisement with the boxer Joe Frazier isn’t promoting Aunt Jemima syrup but rather margarine—that’s why he is wearing a Blue Bonnet. The Manwich ad, he said, couldn’t have existed ten years earlier, because working-class white and black men wouldn’t be sitting at the same lunch counter—and certainly the white fellow wouldn’t be craving the “dark meat” of the other. A Chevrolet ad depicts the long history of blacks but curiously erases their status as slaves. (Thomas discusses these same examples in his other artist’s lectures, as a quick perusal of YouTube tells us.) The Unbranded series displaces meaning, the artist said, by showing an “undressed image.” His removal and erasure of text and commercial logos reveals the not-so-hidden meaning of the images. It’s a classic John Berger analysis. Thomas strives to present universal ideas through abstraction of historical photographs.
Thomas talked about some sculptural and mixed-media work, noting that the phrases “I am a man” indicates a collective, and “I am the man” is self-centered. His bronze sculpture Raise Up (2014), based on a historical photograph from apartheid South Africa, depicts a row of male heads turned against the wall, arms raised in the air. The art historian and critic Kerr Houston explained the source: “In Raise Up, Thomas gives us the heads and arms of ten of the thirteen black miners pictured by [Ernest] Cole as they undergo a humiliating medical examination, in the nude.”2 The work was shown at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in June 2014. The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which spawned the protest phrase “Hands up, don’t shoot,” took place two months later. The piece took on an unanticipated meaning.
Thomas talked about his collaboration with Ryan Alexiev and Jim Ricks on a public-art project called In Search of the Truth (also known as Truth Booth), in which participants enter a structure shaped like a caption balloon and record a two-minute video during which they riff on the phrase “The truth is….” Truth Booth was first presented in Ireland in 2011 and has since traveled to South Africa, the United States, and Afghanistan. This work represents the artist’s interest in what other people think—sometimes being an artist involves listening more than anything else.
Since many artists are typically excited about their most recent projects, I found it odd that Thomas didn’t present the work in Unbranded: A Century of White Women 1915–2015, his most recent exhibition at Jack Shainmain Gallery in New York. For this new series Thomas removed the copy and logos from one hundred magazine advertisements depicting women, taking the suffrage era as a starting point.
This text is the second of two that reviews a panel on photography and painting, held in 1983. Read the firstreport.
Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference
Friday, April 29, 1983
Artists Talk on Art, New York
The event evoked another, allegorical commentary.
Moderator: Craig Owens
Panelists: Joseph Kosuth, Jack Goldstein, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Mark Tansey, Robert Mapplethorpe
Once upon a time in a constantly collapsing and re-rising city, the inhabitants made buildings with large spaces where people sweated to make things for others to sell. But one day they painted the spaces white and displayed mysterious and precious objects there. At last, on a night in spring, 1983, many people gathered in such a space to hear messages from shamans who made the precious objects. They worried about a tool producing these objects quickly and easily, and wondered if the new objects would be precious in the old way. So they gathered to DEFINE THE DIFFERENCE. On the walls were canvases with scenes of the Far West painted by a person with a new kind of organ transplant—50mm lenses permanently in both eyes.
The shamans sat down on chairs on one side of a long skinny table with glasses of water on it and were lit by spotlights. The rest of the people sat on the floor on the other side of the table in the dark. A scribe who wrote important words about shamanism sat with the shamans and said the people on the floor were probably there to enjoy dissension between shamans who used brushes and those who used the new tool, but he was there to make peace and had personally picked these shamans to address the issues.
However, the first shaman, an acclaimed user of the brush, hadn’t brought his magic objects with him, saying that, anyway, holy objects made with a brush were now meaningless, and even worse, decorative, but unscrupulous folks attributed false values to them so people who had lots of money but inadequate wardrobes would buy them and feel like emperors.
The other shamans showed their precious objects and told of their powers, but no one could define the difference, because they had forgotten or never knew the old way of making something unique yet universal. Mostly they talked shaman shop talk and complained that there was too much of an abundance of their product and that they were saturated, alienated, repressed, politically “other,” and lost in multiplicity, while yearning for singularity or maybe irregularity and had a headache that night.
Because of these feelings, they used images they just found lying around. They ripped off some and copied some onto canvas in a larger size. The one who did that was so demoralized he said he didn’t trust his intuition any more, which may have been why he didn’t make the copies himself, but hired others to do so. Learning that this fellow had helped himself to images, like fruit in the Garden of Eden (denying existence of originality and authorship), one hopeful questioner from the other side of the table asked if these were political acts. This might be a very brave and principled shaman who denied, not only authorship, but also ownership and the putting of price tags on holy objects. But that one was very silent about the authorship of his bank account.
It turned out that all the shamans had, in one way or another, been using the new tool or its products. One modest shaman in rumpled Ivy League jacket and tie (although the evening was hot), who told in a low voice of changing photos into paintings and putting old shamans into new paintings of old paintings, had evidently seen Woody Allen frightening Susan Sontag. Another shaman harked back to the Russian Revolution. She advised that the propaganda of the culture should be turned against it and warned that in times of political repression people lose sight of the pleasures of multiplicity. She herself seemed to have suffered this loss because, although she uses the camera-tool and the printing-press-tool, her magical objects are nevertheless, one of a kind. She also stressed the importance of increasing the number of spectators with her kind of reproductive organs. The last shaman made no bones about it. He said he used the camera instead of a brush or a chisel. He thought he was good at helping his subjects show their fantasy or reality. And then he showed his work, which reflected his life: outrageous rock stars, men with magical erections, famous androgynous women, flower studies, and male members of the races embracing. Even a few children, although he admitted to not liking them. It wasn’t Rembrandt’s Saskia as Susanah, but there was an echo of the same process. “For whom do you do your work?” someone asked. Robert Mapplethorpe replied, “For the people I love.” And put his dark glasses back on.
Then everyone went out onto the sidewalk where a loud argument had earlier made it hard to hear the proceedings, much of which had been mumbled, as if the shamans found it very hard to communicate.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Gladys Osterman, “Night of the Shamans” was originally published in Women Artists News 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1983); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 222–23. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
As I recall the moment, Photo-Realist painting had become so well accepted it was passé; painting on photographs was still tacky, or anyway naughty, at least in New York—in the West or Southwest it was a regular style. But “discourse between painting and photography” was not yet so obvious and popular a topic as it soon became. (I was amazed, amazed, the other day to see Art and Photography, Aaron Scharf’s excellent book on the subject, in B. Dalton!)
Having myself recently switched from painting to photography, and being then on the Program Committee of Artists Talk on Art, I thought a “Difference between Painting and Photography” panel would be timely, and began casting about for a brainy moderator. Someone suggested Craig Owens, who not only agreed cheerfully, but turned out to be a committee person’s dream, conjuring up an all-star cast on time, not just for the announcement, but for the event itself, without so much as a reminder.
The panel Owens conjured up became one of those special SoHo events, measurably enhanced by the overflow gang on the sidewalk outside pounding on the plate-glass window. These were reportedly motorcyclist friends of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work, by the way, looked smashing in the evening’s format of slides projected onto a portable screen. I suppose it hardly needs to be added that nobody defined anything, let alone the difference, though since then I have heard others make a stab at it. (Ben Lifson presented a two-part theory at a photo conference in 1990. The part I remember was that the photograph has an absolutely even surface.) Another difference occurred to me that night: photographs probably mutate less in slides than do paintings.
Carol Steinberg’s report, which came in “over the transom,” precisely and eloquently defined the ways discussants begged—or fogged—the issues.
—Judy Seigel
Moderator: Craig Owens
Panelists: Joseph Kosuth, Jack Goldstein, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Mark Tansey, Robert Mapplethorpe
Craig Owens, senior editor of Art in America, sat with the six panel members and spread his hands, butterflylike, cigarette dangling from the long fingers. We, seated on the floor of the crowded gallery, were, mercifully, not permitted to smoke, having squeezed in while others less fortunate clamored at the entrance and pressed against the window to see—an Artists Talk On Art panel!
True, it was, at $1, a cheap Friday night and an interesting topic: “Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference.” Owens’s hands seemed to point to two points of view even while he hoped those who had come for the latest installment of the historical battle would be disappointed. They were there, he said, to “define difference,” not define or create false oppositions.
Joseph Kosuth, in his perennial black outfit (is he making an unconscious statement about being in mourning, does black flatter his figure, or is it some kind of ’60s minimalist, conceptualist, artist’s statement?), read a tract about how the institutions of gallery, critic, market, etc., create what we think “art” means. He showed no slides, not to be arrogant, he said, but because those familiar with his work didn’t need to see them and those not might fall into that tendency people have of thinking they understand something after they’ve seen slides. No one told the audience he is a conceptualist. I guess he wasn’t on the side of painting or photography. Next, Jack Goldstein showed us a slide of his painting of a [Margaret] Bourke-White photograph of a Kremlin air raid. He jocularly read an interview and some comments on the dilemmas of quotation and authorship. He also said he was “not interested in Painting.”
Sarah Charlesworth said she was “freaked out” that day about having to do the panel and that she would read to us from a letter she had written to a friend. She even began, “Dear Rudy,” but I was not convinced her friend really wanted to hear about the gap between the subjective/presence of oneself of painting and the objective/absence of self-presence of the other in photography, which I found difficult to hear and understand. She showed a slide of a photo of a photo of a photo which had been ripped up and some other manipulated photographs.
Barbara Kruger spoke about the potential for creating feelings of richness or poverty in the spectator face-to-face with the artist’s image and the importance of understanding the politics of images, as well as her attempt to provide for a female art spectator. Her work consisted of photos with words collaged together, making political statements. I think one said, “You destroy what you perceive as different.”
Mark Tansey showed his joke paintings. Each got a laugh from the audience, as with the National Geographic photoboat crew on the edge of a waterfall, entitled, Take One, or a woman lying in bed pointing a gun at a man pointing a camera at her, entitled Homage to Susan Sontag.
Robert Mapplethorpe took off his dark glasses to tell us he really hadn’t prepared anything to say, just brought slides of his photographs, which he related more to sculpture than painting. The photos included Lisa Lyon (the bodybuilder) in the nude with graphite powder covering her body to emphasize its statuesqueness, portraits, a black guy who we were told could achieve erection at a moment’s notice, men embracing, children (whom he doesn’t particularly like, he said), flowers.
The most wonderful commentary on the difference between painting and photography came unexpectedly from the audience, when Cynthia Mailman, whose works adorned the walls of the Soho20 Gallery, was moved to shout, “Don’t Touch My Painting!” as another member of the audience on her self/unconscious way out was about to put her hand through one of the paintings to support herself. As the audience laughed at the serendipity of the moment, Mailman became a bit defensive and added, “Mine are only one of a kind, you know.”
I couldn’t decide whether this was more fun than realizing that the woman across the room I’d been admiring all evening was probably Lisa Lyon, as she left in her sleeveless white mini-dress with her beautiful arm and leg muscles bulging out just a bit more than one is used to seeing on the average woman.
Someone in the audience asked about the power of painters to paint what isn’t there. Mapplethorpe answered that, as a photographer, he feels his best work is that in which he sees what he hasn’t seen before.
Another member of the audience began to explain his understanding that, in light of the panel, “aren’t painting and photography the same thing except for content?” Sarah Charlesworth assured him that form was content and Craig Owens cautioned not to go from one extreme to the other, that is, from saying they’re opposites to saying there’s no difference.
Too late, I tremblingly raised my hand, shocked by this question, and burning with something to ask, if only I could figure out what it was, something, something about the process of painting—by its nature longer, with more potential for discovering relationships, meanings, ideas, feelings, images, subconscious meanderings, the way we perceive. Don’t most of us feel we must study a painting for longer than a photograph? How long do we study photographs, and for what purpose? Isn’t there some major difference between the act of painting and the act of photographing? And then, can we escape evaluating that difference, at least for ourselves?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I almost didn’t dare to write this and I didn’t dare to ask so I had to write. These ideas need deep questions and deep answers. Where were the painters, process painters, painters who discover ideas through their painting, not start with a pre-fixed idea or image and paint it? Where were the paintings, real paintings, not slides of photos of paintings, of paintings of photos, photos of photos. Slides are photos. Form is content. The panel was weighted, the sides were uneven, and the difference was never defined.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Carol Steinberg, “Repainting the Battle Lines” was originally published in Women Artists News 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1983); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 221–22. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
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.
