In Terms Of

Tag: Renaissance

  • Next Question: Is Art Dead?

    Is Painting Dead?
    Friday, May 16, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    This early painting panel was one of the best—real feeling on urgent issues expressed to an audience of peers. Today we may smile complacently at the title question. At the time, art’s higher authorities had declared painting dead and buried. Perhaps it was only some sense of a coming rebirth that gave painters courage to ask the question out loud. But when Nicholas Krushenick says “I LOVE THE ACT OF PUTTING PAINT ON CANVAS!” we hear the voice of the votary since the Renaissance. (Will video artists some day say how they love clicking in that cassette and watching the little light come on?)

    One other note: artists reading this report in 1975 would have known that “The Article” referred to “The Painted Word,” an article by Tom Wolfe which had recently missed the point about painting in Harper’s Magazine. Shortly thereafter it was published as a book, achieving wide notoriety, if not acclaim. Today I had to think a moment to identify it.

    Moderator: Burt Chernow
    Panelists: Nicholas Krushenick, Stuart Shedletsky, Shirlann Smith, and Robert Wiegand

    Judy Seigel, “Is Painting Dead? Artists Talk on Art May 16,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 3

    The subtitle of this panel, “Is Jerking Off Getting Out of Hand?,” could mean anything from, “Once you’ve seen one jerk-off in an art context, you’ve seen them all, so a painting renaissance is inevitable,” to “Painting itself is the equivalent of jerking off, so why paint?” In either case, if you’ve been waiting tensely for the verdict, the panelists agreed that painting is not now, nor is it likely in the foreseeable future to be dead. In fact, one assumes that the four painters convened exactly in order to reach that conclusion. It did, however, take them three-quarters of the evening to start to explain why.

    For openers, the now-infamous query was projected onto the screen: “Artforum wishes to ask you as a painter what you consider to be the prospects of painting in this decade. [T]hose understood to be making the ‘inevitable next step’ now work with any material but paint….” A show of panelists’ slides with commentary by each was followed by talk of The Letter, The Article, The Critics, Other Painters, and The Situation.

    The Letter

    Shirlann Smith: It’s a love letter from Artforum—the kind you’d write at the end of a long marriage. But the language is so literary—intellectual, not words I’ve ever heard artists use.1

    Robert Wiegand: Is Artforum dead? They never had to fish before. They came on Bang! Bang!

    The Article

    Stuart Shedletsky: It’s a tantrum by an essentially literary person who doesn’t “get” art.

    Wiegand: There was a bit of truth on some levels and that made everybody a little uncomfortable, but he stretched it.

    Nicholas Krushenick: I have never been to a party at Ethel Scull’s.

    The Critics

    Krushenick: I’ve enjoyed a certain amount of honesty from Harold Rosenberg. He admitted the critic is finished. Greenberg [apologetic tone] has been a constant champion of die abstract idea in art.

    Shedletsky: The critics can tie up Brice Marden with Fragonard.

    Wiegand: Rosenberg said, “It may be time to abandon, not art, but art criticism, which has become little more than a shopping list.”

    Other Painters

    Burt Chernow: Who are the painters today that keep painting alive?

    Krushenick: Jasper Johns hasn’t given us a new image in years. (My wife will kill me for saying this.) Stella is still about making art, and I respect him tremendously for that, whether it succeeds or fails. A lot of people just give us bricks and bunny rabbits. Noland is still making a fantastic try at making art…. Richard Lindner, Alfred Jensen, Yrisarry, Jo Baer.

    Wiegand: D’Arcangelo, Chuck Hinman.

    Audience: I don’t hear any names of new people keeping painting alive.

    Wiegand: There doesn’t have to be something new every week.

    Shedletsky: Heroes don’t come along as often as Artforum would have us think. They change geniuses every week.

    Krushenick: Work today is all intellect, no passion. Anyway, all artists are not created equal.

    The Situation

    Chernow: Will new technology replace painting, or coexist?

    Wiegand: No one got excited when Rauschenberg got involved with dance. No one’s going to get excited when I get into video.

    Smith: There’s a tendency to want to perform, to go where the action is.

    Shedletsky: I sit in front of all those tapes and get terribly bored. I want to go home and watch television.

    Audience: If painting is dead, it’s dead in the colleges.

    Krushenick: On 50 percent of any given faculty you have this meatball who makes a (lousy) watercolor every two years. And he has an enormous amount of power.

    Audience Q&A

    Audience A: Is art dead?

    Audience B: That’s next week!

    Audience C: Art has never been more alive. It’s traveling in all directions. They’re waiting for that one direction, but we don’t have to offer it to them.

    Shedletsky: The impulse to make art is a very primal, basic human impulse, since the caves at Lascaux.

    Audience: Is the idea all important? Are the hands that produce the idea interchangeable, or does art lose in translation?

    Krushenick: They had assistants four hundred years ago. BUT I LOVE THE ACT OF PUTTING PAINT ON CANVAS! I even stretch and prime the canvases myself. There’s a delicious, beautiful factor to running a brush across a surface. I don’t want to relegate that to someone else. If I did, I’d be standing around all day watching the schmuck.

    Shedletsky: Works of a certain type, for example, Judd’s, don’t suffer from fabrication. But you couldn’t imagine getting someone else to do a de Kooning.

    About here a bona fide screaming match between Krushenick and a fellow in the audience who seemed not to care for abstract art attested to the success of the panel and the vigor of feelings about art.

    Krushenick and Fellow: (Incoherent)

    Krushenick: Fuck you.

    Fellow: Your art lacks passion. It’s an intellectual color exercise. It’s like wrapping paper.

    Chernow [calmly]: Do any of you ever sneak off into a room a do a little still life, or something?

    Krushenick: Figurative painting outsells abstract painting six to one. I turned from it and never looked back. I want to die with my finger on the pulse of the twenty-first century. In a strange way it’s the most delectable life style I’ve ever encountered. If you never get any success in your life, you could say on your deathbed, “I’ve had a wonderful life!”

    Conclusion

    Artforum can’t be dead because artists hate it so much and read it so much and painting can’t be dead because it gets reborn about every fifteen minutes.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 The full text of the letter appears below. The responses from artists were published in the September 1975 issue.

    Artforum wishes to ask you, as a painter, what you consider to be the prospects of painting in this decade. It appears that painting has ceased to be the dominant artistic medium at the moment. And we assume that the debates between its two major ideologies, abstract and representational, have outlived their usefulness to the current scene. Our thinking here refers to the fact that neither side has triumphed over the other in a historical verdict to which both had appealed. On the contrary, those understood to be making “the next inevitable step” now work with any material but paint.

    1. How do you think this has affected the need to do painting today and the general morale in the field?

    2. What possibilities, not found elsewhere, does this medium offer you as an artist?

    3. What energies and ideas in painting strike you as worth attention, and why?

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “Next Question: Is Art Dead?” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 3; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 13–15. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Back to the Future

    Ross Parry: The Postdigital Museum
    Wednesday, January 28, 2015
    Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, New York

    Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its “Conference on Computers and Their Potential Applications in Museums”

    In April 1968, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York brought together museum professionals, academics, and computer technologists from IBM for a “Conference on Computers and Their Potential Applications in Museums.”1 A postconference report,” said Ross Parry, senior lecturer and college academic director in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, indicated that participants and attendees imagined their technological future in the year 1980. They envisioned a computerized image-search database that would allow a person to pull up any artwork that depicted, for example, “sailing vessels,” or to get information on objects in storage or from other museums. “This was reverie,” said Parry, of these predictions for a digital institution. In 2015 museums have websites, mobile apps, collections databases, email newsletters, games, and myriad forms of communication that facilitate scholarly and professional exchange. “This moment,” Parry stated the obvious, “has arrived.”

    Parry’s current research investigates the tipping point for digital technology in museums, when it evolved from being considered new, different, and even fearsome, to the present, when “it becomes a natural characteristic of the institution.” Whereas curators once conceived the digital aspects of an exhibition much later in their working process, these features are now created concurrently. “The digital creatives are in the room at the beginning,” Parry said. “They’re part of the ideation moment.” From the advanced skill sets of museum staffers and higher expectations from audiences to profound changes in fundamental approaches to design and education, the museum has entered a postdigital phase.

    At the outset of his talk Parry sought to legitimize the term “postdigital,” which he intends to be an economical and precise description of our current moment—just after the digital revolution—and not just a toe-curling neologism. I can accept his designation without resistance, but his explanation about the differences between digital and postdigital being as clear cut as the distinctions between structuralism and poststructuralism, or between modernity and postmodernity, was perplexing, since folks are still debating these divisions. And apparently he’s unfamiliar with the postinternet art debates.

    Technology in museums has become normative, a concept Parry borrowed from political theory and from business and management studies.2 In this context, he explained, normativity refers to shared work ethics and company values—it is considered a positive trait. With frameworks borrowed from disciplines outside museum studies, he can explicate the structures of domination (mission and values, policy and protocols, organizational shape), structures of legitimization (validated behavior and language, allocation of resources, valued skill sets), and structures of signification (strategy, brand) as the prism for analyzing an institution.

    Leaders of digital departments in UK museums consider their future and their possible obsolescence (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While this theoretical background was formally dry, the implications are consequential, especially regarding organizational structuring and people’s jobs. For example, Parry traced digital development in museums: the IT departments that once maintained infrastructure evolved into new-media departments, which grew into teams to build websites and gallery-based features, working alongside the marketing and education departments, among others. Postdigital museums, Parry predicted, will eventually phase out new-media departments because digital activities will be embedded across the museum, in every department. The need for a standalone branch of an institution, a silo to defend, will eventually fade.

    Parry has evidenced the postdigital notion not only through conversations with senior staffers in UK museums but also by scanning job titles in job classifieds. A museum at the digital level might seek to fill a web-designer position, but postdigital museums are searching for digital participation officers, online shop managers, digital marketing officers, and digital learning managers. Moreover, Parry suggested that a postdigital museum won’t need a director to lead a digital strategy; it will instead plan for its traditional roles of engagement, collecting, and exhibiting, which may or may not use digital technology. He also floated the notion that museum staff will work “permanently in beta,” meaning a project is launched, monitored, and constantly tweaked to the extent that, six or twelve months down the line, it will have mutated significantly from the initial public iteration. Goals are regularly redefined and may never actually be reached—something museum workers might find exciting, frightful, or both.

    The distinction between online and offline experiences for audiences has collapsed, Parry argued. A geographically based mobile app for New York architecture isn’t a singularly digital experience, he said, because the user is on the streets, with the sights, sounds, and smells of the city surrounding the person. A museum visitor might use his or her smartphone in tandem with looking at an object, and people walking through a park might receive historical sound clips on their phones relayed from iBeacons. Such hypothetical examples provide “an incredibly visceral, sensual, embodied experience” for the postdigital viewer. Because of resources, cultural context, and professional skill sets, Parry said, not every museum needs to be postdigital. Indeed, I wondered how institutions that are still resistant to digital, that have a poorly developed digital presence, or that—worst of all—lack a sufficient understanding of the importance of digital technology can survive in a postdigital world. Because technology advances rapidly, negligent, clueless, or impoverished organizations may fall too far behind and flirt with irrelevance.

    Ross Parry noted the shift in PhD research toward postdigital topics (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    A man in the audience asked if digital technology augments human experience, or if it’s incorporated into a person’s full sense of being. “Which impulse is stronger?” he wanted to know. Digital, Parry responded, “has a profound ontological effect” on the way we perceive the world, shaping our community and our expression. He is fond of Lev Manovich’s observation, from 1999, that the database is the symbolic form for our time, just like linear perspective was a way of conceiving knowledge in the Renaissance, as the art historian Erwin Panofsky argued in 1927.3

    One audience member asked about remediation for media, and another questioned the politics of access and disenfranchisement. Parry flipped the question, wanting to consider the consequences of people using digital devices more and more but noticing this behavior less and less. One attendee raised the old “challenge to curatorial authority” chestnut, seemingly incapable of accepting that a populist interpretative experience can coexist with the sovereignty of the anointed expert. Then I realized how few people understand that artists are often the ones who challenge curators and institutions—and even challenge the idea of what art is—with the greatest amount of success.

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    1For a review of the published conference proceedings, see Edward F. Fry, “The Computer in the Museum,” Computers and the Humanities 4, no. 5 (May 1970): 358–61.

    2One example he gave was James Barham, “Normativity, Agency, and Life,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C 43, no. 1 (March 2012): 92–103.

    3See Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 5, no. 2 (June 1999): 80–99; and Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

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