In Terms Of

Tag: Rhizome

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Spectacular Vernacular

    Brian Droitcour: Vernacular Criticism
    Saturday, October 12, 2013
    New Museum of Contemporary Art, New Museum Theater, New York

    Brian Droitcour performs one of his Yelp reviews (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “In fifty to one hundred years,” Brian Droitcour said during his lecture on “Vernacular Criticism” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, “the exhibition review might become a sonnet.”1 The arts of literature and theater were certainly on his mind, as he began his talk by reciting two of his cheeky Yelp reviews on venerated New York art institutions—the Frick Collection and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—from memory for a full auditorium.

    Regarding the former: “This museum is sooo random! I was there today and I heard a docent telling her tour group that ‘there was no acquisitions policy written down’ until 1951 and I was like, no shit lady. The Fricks were just buying whatever struck their fancy and now New York has this weird museum celebrating them and their whims.” And the latter: “The Guggenheim is the best museum in New York to go to on a date. If you go to the Met then your date will want to look at the Egyptian galleries whereas you want to look at Dutch painting, or whatever, and eventually you’ll reach a compromise that you both secretly resent…. The Guggenheim is good for a date because it doesn’t give you a choice. There’s nowhere to go but up the ramp.” It’s funny, as the saying goes, because it’s true.

    A writer on art and culture for various publications and a doctoral student in comparative literature at New York University, Droitcour began contributing museum and gallery reviews to Yelp in early 2012. (He also started evaluating books on Amazon.) As a result, and among other accomplishments, he has cleverly discredited the three primary complaints that art critics have grumbled about for several decades, namely: “No one reads us,” “We have no power,” and “We don’t make any money.”2 For his generosity to the company, Yelp has bestowed Elite Squad status upon Droitcour.

    This afternoon’s wide-ranging talk touched on numerous topics, including the formation of museums. In the Renaissance, Droitcour said, a museum was defined both as a room with all kinds of stuff in it and as a book containing a list of items in those rooms. He also described how early modern museums adopted a linear, progressive version of history popularized by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as its default for presenting achievements in art, passing over Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s notion of the rotunda, in which a centralized subject can view all sides from a single position without considering overly structured narratives.

    Droitcour also summarized findings in Helen Rees Leahy’s book Museum Bodies (2012), which analyzes the behavior of nineteenth-century gallery goers. I wonder if anyone has researched twenty-first-century museum behavior, explaining why people always crowd by the door of video installations, blocking others from entering and leaving, or why latecomers to a talk always stand in an auditorium’s aisles instead of making their way toward empty seats, because doing so might involve crossing the front of the room and interrupting the event—much to a speaker’s horror and the audience’s embarrassment. Droitcour kindly gave those folks standing in the aisle of the New Museum Theater permission to sit down, joking that “I don’t want to torture your museum bodies.”

    François-Joseph Heim, Charles X Distributing Awards to Artists Exhibiting at the Salon of 1824 at the Louvre, 1827, oil on canvas, 68⅛ x 100¾ in. (artwork in the public domain)

    Droitcour positioned the Enlightenment author and philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784) as the father of vernacular criticism, the term given to the type of unprofessional writing found on platforms such as Yelp. For twenty years Diderot described his experiences at the Paris Salons—the art fairs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that showcased the best in contemporary art before the aristocracy snatched it up—in an intelligible voice. With chatty and conversational “writing that echoed the voices of the people there,” Droitcour told us, Diderot promoted the value of engaging in public discourse while upholding aesthetic or critical standards, something that Jürgen Habermas theorized in his landmark book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962, translated into English in 1989).

    Having lived several years in Russia, Droitcour brought up relevant examples of vernacular participation in the arts from the Soviet era. For instance, Furnace was a culture journal that predated the revolution, “so Lenin hated them,” Droitcour added. He then discussed a few examples from Lynn Mally’s book Culture of the Future (1990), which chronicles Furnace and also the contentious, short-lived organization Proletkult, which had local chapters with their own publications. “No one could agree,” Droitcour relayed, “what proletariat culture should be like.” The population of Soviet Russia comprised what could be called “museum burners,” those who wanted to flatten the institutions to create a clean slate, and “heritage studiers,” those who tried to figure out what might be salvaged from the past. The critic, journalist, and government official Anatoly Lunacharsky, for one, desired to erect new structures from the bricks of the old ones. Proletkults initially encouraged amateurism as a way of challenging the status quo but by the 1930s began to affirm the old values. Vernacular culture, Droitcour said, was taken up in an essay by Dubravka Ugresic in her book Karaoke Culture (2011), Droitcour told us, which argues that amateurs ought to know their place. What a party pooper!

    Does Yelp love Brian Droitcour back? (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Moving to the present day, Droitcour explored the conflict of personal subjectivity in the age of smartphones. Corporations take subjecthood from people, he said, and people must behave like corporations in matters of sex, love, and social reproduction, developing and marketing their own personal brands.3 (The idea of “selling yourself,” however, certainly dates to the beginning of human civilization.) Yelp models this situation but adds a twist: content on the website and the app depends solely on voluntary writers, but the company eventually usurps the role of the writer, such as when restaurant owners place signs in their windows that boast “People love us on Yelp.” Droitcour feels that Yelp helps to destroy the old forms of public influence and control, such as the consistency of message in advertising, and thus upsets the stability of the bourgeoisie. Yet the same corporations that cannibalize personal affect, he continued, present themselves as neutral, even benign. The Yelp logo, Droitcour said, “doesn’t represent [any emotion] in particular,” and his contributions to the site don’t necessarily demonstrate “how I feel about Yelp values.”

    Exposing the establishment’s cracks and fissures is generally good, but the cannibalization of individual subjectivity quickly seals them up again. What makes the situation even more paradoxical situation is that Yelpers have strong opinions, but often over trivial matters, at least from an economic or political point of view. Droitcour cited a review of a Burger King in Rhode Island—indeed, many fast-food restaurants and chain stores strive to provide a standardized experiences but are always subject to individual responses dependent on idiosyncratic factors that corporations cannot control. By reviewing each establishment individually, diners and shoppers can finally express what it means to “have it your way,” or at least, “this was the way I had it.” Yelp is democratic because everyone gets a voice, and while a consensus isn’t reached, it continually evolves. The art in galleries and museums, the food at Burger King, and the experience of a hair salon are all fair game, Droitcour emphasized. Such a description, though, isn’t entirely fair, since smaller, independent businesses have more to gain or lose through Yelp, unlike places such as Olive Garden and CVS Pharmacy, which safely offer corporate stability that is impervious to complaints.

    Carston Höller, Untitled (Slide), 2011, stainless steel slide segments, polycarbonate upper shell, and steel supports, two floors tall (artwork © Carston Höller; photograph by Benoit Pailley)

    What does the art world have at stake? It’s hard to say. Whether positive or negative, a review on Yelp is not likely to influence museum exhibition practices or commercial gallery sales, nor is it likely to affect foot traffic. Publicity and marketing departments may notice a Yelp review, and maybe a curator or two will read a visitor’s response, but criticism on Yelp will probably not dent decision making and power relations at established art institutions. Droitcour read aloud portions of a Yelp review of Carston Höller’s exhibition Experience (2011–12) at the New Museum from Lisa B., who expressed bewilderment. “I don’t understand it,” she wrote. (Droitcour claimed that the Höller show earned the most one-star reviews of the New Museum.) Interpreting this and other reviews, he argued that these Yelpers are not rejecting contemporary art categorically but rather are protesting its incomprehensibility and homogeneity. Even the art historian David Joselit, Droitcour said, gave Experience a “one-star review” in Artforum. “Lisa B. and David Joselit are basically saying the same things,” Droitcour insisted, which is true only because both writers gave a thumb’s down to the frustrating show. The positions in the two reviews, though, are radically different, as Joselit situates the exhibition within recent art history and current events, while Lisa B. complains about having to wait in long lines for what turned out to be an underwhelming experience. One would hope that a shrewd, perceptive denunciation of an exhibition from a respected art-world figure like Joselit would make a director or trustee pay attention, but would such a text have the same impact if he had yelped his opinions?

    After an aimless Q&A with audience members, Droitcour concluded his talk with thoughts about Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, thinking of Yelpers as serfs toiling the digital soil of social media. The vernacular was the language of slaves, he proposed, and online criticism can emancipate them from their tasks. On a personal level, Yelp helps Droitcour loosen up his own production. “Why not write in the vernacular?” he said. “It works for me.”

    In Terms Of count: 2 (one of which came from Droitcour, who looked me in the eye at the moment the words left his mouth).

    1 The talk coincided with a curatorial project for the web, Fifteen Stars: An Alternative View of the Museum, for which Droitcour asked seven artists—“all of whom [were chosen] based on their pre-existing participation in social media communities (like Tumblr and Dump.fm)”—to illustrate five Yelp reviews of New Museum exhibitions. Here are Droitcour’s thoughts on the project.

    2 An explanation: Droitcour’s Yelp reviews are regularly voted “useful,” “funny,” and “cool” by fellow contributors, which indicates that people read them. Furthermore, because of his novel approach to art criticism he has gained recognition and notoriety that has led to a paid speaking engagement at the New Museum, among other opportunities.

    3 In a Facebook message, Droitcour clarified his position: “I don’t say that they must [behave like corporations…], I say that the currently dominant ideology says that they must, and I’m interested in people who don’t do that.”

    Read

    Brian Droitcour, “Vernacular Criticism,” New Inquiry, July 25, 2014.

    Orit Gat, “Art Criticism in the Age of Yelp,” Rhizome, November 12, 2013.

    Matthew Shen Goodman, “Denis Diderot, Yelper? Droitcour’s Vernacular Criticism,” Art in America, October 11, 2013.

  • Certificates of Authenticity

    This essay is the third of three that reviews a recent symposium at the Jewish Museum. Read the first and second texts.

    Panel Two
    Who Is Jack Goldstein?
    Sunday, September 22, 2013
    Jewish Museum, New York

    Kathryn Andrews, The Eighties, 2008 rented neon sign and fabricated neon sign, 64 x 60 x 6 in. (artwork © Kathryn Andrews)

    The second and final panel on the symposium for the Jewish Museum’s exhibition Jack Goldstein x 10,000 featured presentations by two artists—Kathryn Andrews and Paul Pfeiffer—who emerged a couple generations after Jack Goldstein (1945–2003). Neither artist was directly influenced by Goldstein, as they arrived at their aesthetic approach prior to gaining knowledge of the elder artist’s work. One of two moderators, Claire Bishop, professor of contemporary art at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, described the situation as “reverse engineering.” While hers was certainly a clever use of the phrase, the concept is standard operating procedure for scholars making connections between the art of different decades. That doesn’t mean artists don’t have a say, and here is what they said about Goldstein and influence.

    Andrews, an artist based in Los Angeles who earned her MFA at Art Center College of Design, presented several examples of recent work. Though she did not frame her practice as being influenced by Goldstein, one can detect similar interests: Hollywood film, found objects, and the aura of authorship expressed through mixed media. Using the gestures of others as her own, Andrews made her wall sculpture The Eighties (2008) by renting a neon sign from a prop shop, having it reproduced, and hanging that piece upside down and underneath the rented one, which she returned to the prop shop after the exhibition it was shown had concluded. The shop’s secretary, Andrews revealed, had designed the original neon sign. For another work, she asked another person to make a piece for her; she ended up with a wooden sawhorse covered with butterfly stickers that spelled out her first name. To her, a temporary work like The Eighties or Ashton (2010), a stainless-steel coat rack and hanger accompanied by a ring worn by Ashton Kutcher in the movie The Killers, is a “performance.”

    Kathryn Andrews, detail of Ashton, 2010, cast stainless steel and certified film prop, 70 x 32 x 24 in. (artwork © Kathryn Andrews)

    Andrews has a ninety-nine-year lease on a prop in her work. These rentals, she said, come with certificates of authenticity that “guarantee” the original use or owner of the object. This fact reminded me of an essay I read a few years ago, “Dust to Dust” by Matthew Bown, that compared the obscene prices of contemporary art sold at auction to the adoration of medieval Christian relics. There was probably enough wood from Jesus’s cross floating around Europe to build a hundred crucifixes. I also found it interesting that the Pictures Generation did not traffic in certificates, as the previous generation of Conceptual artists had done.

    Paul Pfeiffer, The Long Count (I Shook Up the World), 2000, video loop (artwork © Paul Pfeiffer)

    Pfeiffer said he had first heard about Jack Goldstein from a collector, in response to his award-winning contribution to the 2000 Whitney Biennial, a disturbing video loop of Tom Cruise gyrating face down on a couch, taken from Risky Business (the 1998 work is called The Pure Products Go Crazy). He learned more about Goldstein through the Scott Rothkopf article in the October 2001 issue of Artforum, whose cover image was the barking dog from Shane (1975), and also through a performance of Two Boxers (1979) that he saw in 2002. Discovering Goldstein’s work was “like finding long-lost relatives,” Pfeiffer said, but he strangely didn’t mention his own videos involving boxing, including The Long Count (I Shook Up the World) from 2000, shown at the Project in Harlem, in which he digitally erased the figures of Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston from the ring, leaving ghostly traces of their moving bodies. For Pfeiffer, Goldstein’s work defies and transgresses binaries such as inside/outside, self/other, performance/film, black/white, and public/private. This, he said, might be the central mission or content of the work.

    During the open discussion with Bishop and Julia Robinson, assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art at New York University, Pfeiffer commented on the mythology of Douglas Crimp’s Pictures exhibition and essay. “Influences retell history,” he said. Andrews found it hard to track Goldstein’s influence in her work. An artist such as Robert Longo has more shows in spaces to which she has access. She also wondered about the contexts in which Goldstein might be placed, such as Light and Space, instead of the Pictures Generation, in which he is always understood. I liked that she questioned the received wisdom of art history. After all, Goldstein did spend most of his career in California, not in New York.

    Robinson asserted that Goldstein’s work defines the Pictures Generation but transcends it. She also called Pictures “the last generation” of artists, meaning a coherent group that can be categorized largely without opposition. I’m not sure that’s a fair argument, as one can identify numerous artistic cliques from the last thirty years that could be generational, such as the one revolving around Kelley Walker, Wade Guyton, and Seth Price, or the scene at Deitch Projects as chronicled in the book Live through This (2005), or the Relational Aesthetics crowd, as grouped by Nicolas Bourriaud and canonized in the Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition theanyspacewhatever. The contemporary art world is indeed too plural, too diverse for any one scene to lead the pack—but there are movements, even if no one uses that term. Relatedly, the 2000s and early 2010s will probably be remembered as the decades of the mega gallery, with dealers like Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner having the most influence.

    Bishop noticed that today’s artist is interested in the celebrity aura and the proper name. Robinson said that Goldstein had evacuated proper names, but Andrews countered, arguing that Longo had brought them back (with his use of stills from Fassbinder films). The roaring Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, she said, is a proper name. “That’s not a star—that’s a brand,” Pfeiffer retorted. To him, Kutcher’s ring has the aura of a coat rack—it’s not special at all to him. But what is valuable to one person may not be important to another: does anyone remember the Carl Andre bricks scandal in the 1970s? The panelists agreed that the aura of celebrities, now on Twitter and appearing in reality television shows that are about themselves, has now become mundane.

    The panelists, from left: Kathryn Andrews, Julia Robinson, Claire Bishop, and Paul Pfeiffer (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    One panelist called Goldstein a cross between Peter Fonda and Keith Richards—maybe it was Pfeiffer. Andrews talked about the “symbolic presence of the artist’s body,” and Bishop mentioned the “curatorial paradigm” that was Goldstein’s class at CalArts in which students reconfigured stuff instead of making new art objects. Andrews related this to collecting art as a leisure activity, and Robinson compared the film director to the curator and asked “Does that mean the stakes of dematerialized object are evacuated?” Pfeiffer said that we move between material and immaterial now. To me this was an instance in which the form of one generation (Pictures) becomes the content of another, as Longo stated in the first panel.

    During his Rhizome Seven on Seven collaboration in 2013, Pfeiffer worked with Alex Chung, the inventor of Giphy, a microblog website for animated GIFs. Eyes like this kind of vibration, he said. “The loop is vision.” He had the idea to create a company that could hypnotize people with animated GIFs. But that’s the TV news, he laughed. Bishop noted how audiences’ attention spans have shortened since the 1970s. Goldstein’s film Shane is three minutes long, but animated GIFs last three seconds.

    A man in the audience wanted to clarify the difference between influence and copying. He recalled how his exposure to the singer and musician Jonathan Richman inspired him to play music, not to copy him but because he thought, “I can do that.” (Richman was a Velvet Underground groupie whose own band, the Modern Lovers, took the delivery of his idol Lou Reed into new directions, such as comedy.) The audience member was also impressed by Goldstein’s work in writing and graphic design from the 1990s—as was I—and never thought the artist would do something like that. He also considered the paintings from the 1980s to be sellout stuff, and that the films from the 1970s came out of nowhere. Matt Mullican, also speaking from the audience, said that Goldstein didn’t come out of nowhere but from a group of twenty people in New York’s downtown scene. The influence of those twenty people continues to reverberate today.

    In Terms Of count: 4.