Deborah Fisher

This Is Now An Archive

2008-01-10T16:47:00.000-05:00

The new and improved Blog is up! Click Here if you want new content, and be sure to update your links!

If you are looking for an archive of 2006 and 2007's posts, you have come to the right place. Fully searchable and browsable for all you trippers down memory lane.

2008-01-09T17:23:00.000-05:00

Changes on the Horizon

2008-01-07T13:04:00.000-05:00

First, I want you to know that I am going uptown, baby.

I just got me a typepad account, and if what they promise is true, I will be unveiling a fresh look for this blog and some not-blog pages like an online gallery in the upcoming weeks. Tres Chic!

My initial response: typepad's interface is not as easy-stupid as blogger. This might take awhile.

I am also thinking about starting another blog, one that's not all about me. Kind of like a professional advice aggregator for artists, kind of like a brainstorming hub for specific problems artists face--an artist-to-artist network.

I was talking to Lisa Mordhorst at a New Year's party, and we were lamenting the relative powerlessness of the individual artist, and thinking about things artists could do together. Invest money, create a real estate trust, work to keep artists in the city. There are obvious administrative barriers to any of these ideas, but is that any reason to stop thinking about artists helping eachother? I think not.

Let me know if you have ideas or questions, or if there are specific things you would want to read about. What's interesting to me is how much career advice is already out there, and how hard it is to follow or actualize. I am definitely interested in exploring that disconnect, or figuring out whether we are stupid or the advice is stupid.

2008

2008-01-04T20:25:00.000-05:00

Deborah Fisher, Lift, 2007, carpet, cardboard and drywall screws stressing auto-body armature

Happy New Year, Beautiful People!

This blog is almost three years old. If Tyler Green linked to me, I would be a regular internet institution!

And you very well know, it's the time of year to prognosticate. Or write a Best Of. Or a Top Ten. Or summarily decide that art is currently not worthy of such accoladishness.

This blog is most successful, I think, when it's a more personal vehicle than all that. So the best, most appropriately thankful thing to do is write about my own orientation in 2008.

Mini-Epiphany for 2008: Art Is Business

You can hold the back of your hand against your forehead and wistfully wish that it weren't so, but why? If the Times is going to rail against it and Charlie Finch is whining about it, and everyone on Winkleman's blog is waiting patiently for another post that self-helps it, then it must be legitimately so. When I got my MFA, I did not get a book of Food Vouchers or otherwise leave the existing economy. To take care of myself is to take care of the world of people I talk to with my art.

Duh!!!!

This moment of understanding, of course, takes only a second. The yearlong trick, I think, will be understanding what accepting the money end of art means.

I am just like you, just like every other artist I respect. I want everything to be free. I hate money. I suck at paperwork. The only reason I have achieved any success whatsoever is because I have an amazing ability to suspend disbelief, live in a state of denial, eschew new pants and medical care, and still feel that I am so fucking lucky and so fucking prosperous that I cannot believe it.

There is beauty in looking at the world this expansively that I cannot deny and refuse to let go of. And, at the same time, I can admit that this is a good mindset for getting taken for a ride. I intend to explore this paradox all year long, if nowhere else, then in my own mind. I hope to wind up with a more subtle understanding of this crazy art economy that helps me actually take care of myself without forgetting that I am fundamentally a servant to something larger than Me.

I might post about this in more detail later. It seems useful to the larger community. I don't know anyone who doesn't openly struggle with this set of problems... and I know artists who are freaking millionaires.

First Professional Goal in 2008: Organize

2007 was a discombobulating year for me. I bought a house, moved into a construction zone, had a fistful of shows and made a huge sculpture. Everything bad happened. I accidentally deleted the folder I keep every piece of paper in my press packet handy while trying to back it up. My laptop died. I ruined my new computer's keyboard by typing all over it with my grubby fingers. I killed three cellphones, two ipods and a jigsaw. I never know anyone's number anymore.

This disorientation is exactly what prompted me to get so brass-tacks in the first place--all I can do is embrace it. I need to rebuild what I lost (instant press packet) and buttress what was built (bring in more public art commissions).

And, um... I can't do anything of the sort if I am still rummaging through cardboard boxes every time I want to draw something.

The Habit I Will Break In 2008: Apply, Apply, Apply!

I know, this is counterintuitive to the whole business-and-personal-responsibilty angle. But I am prompted to write about this because of the panel discussion at Dieu Donne, which devolved quickly into a discussion about power.

The nonprofits represented (SmackMellon, LES Printshop, Dieu Donne and Socrates) have it.

They gave some to the artists like the ones sitting on the panel.

You, artist sitting in the audience, don't have any.

Nonprofits want lots of applications for two reasons. They want choices, and the number of applications looks great on their grant applications--it justifies increased operating expenses. So every nonprofit will tell you to Apply, apply apply! to their open calls, and this has become standard business-of-art wisdom.

I'm done doing it, though, and that panel discussion clinched it for me. The odds, while not exactly lottery-like, are not in your favor. More important than your odds (seeing as how you might have noticed that the odds of being a "famous artist" are not excellent) is the quality of the relationship. The open call creates Holders Of Power (who are more than willing to stack the deck by choosing artists they already know through friends, as I would in a similar situation) and Supplicants.

Even though I have gotten opportunities through open calls, I don't think it's professionally healthy to be a continuous Supplicant. In 2008 going forward, I am going to start stacking the deck in my favor. I am going to ask three questions and demand at least one "yes" before answering an open call from a nonprofit institution:

1. Is this institution so aligned with my work, goals or values that I can't not apply?

2. Is the deck stacked in my favor in any way? Can I get to know the folks at this institution? Do I know other artists who have worked there in the past?

(I know this question is crass, but fuck it! It's a crass crass crass crass world!)

3. Will the application process take less than an hour?

As long as there are needy artists, nonprofits will have a huge number of applicants every time they have a call-for-entries. But there are better ways to actually get an opportunity, and feeling needy drains artists of power.

New Habit To Replace Compulsively Applying in 2008: Create What I Want

If a nonprofit or gallery has an interest in my vision, then great. That's a solid foundation on which to build a collaboration. But I am done moving from nonprofit to nonprofit and gallery to gallery, slides in hand like a hat, shaping what I do to what they do.

If art is a business, then I am going to be a fucking businessperson. And you know, an investor would not be interested in a business plan that is so entirely dependent upon other people's whims and astronomically bad odds. As the chief investor in my business, I reject that business plan, and am going to create a plan that moves beyond waiting for rejection letters and makes me the primary actor.

Most of that means creating community. People work with people they know for legitimate reasons. But frankly, I have no idea what I mean beyond drinking more at night and blogging more in the light of day. Regular readers of this blog know that this half-ignorant state has never stopped me before, and to keep posted!

The bottom line is this: even if I just go buy a decent fucking file cabinet and drink more cocktails in 2008, I will be happier and more productive. I wish you all an equally joyous and productive year!

New York Times To Chelsea: You've Dropped Dead

2007-12-24T16:33:00.000-05:00

The first step to improvement is admitting you have a problem.

The New York Times has summed up all of 2007's visual arts activity in three scant articles. At the back of the paper. Each one of them more of an indictment than a summation.

Holland Cotter played the straight man and attempted a legitimate trip down memory lane, but could only attack such an exercise after deploying a disclaimer, making the gist of his article go something like this:

Art is merely businessy slick marketing. These were the few things that escaped this glossy existential vacuum. Some of them were kind of dumb. But at least I remembered them.

Roberta Smith opted for more of a two-bird salute. Instead of traipsing through the year that was, she wrote a stiff memo condemning us all for sanitizing and professionalizing a business that is best left to dirty unprofessionals who don't quite know what they are doing. She did this by focusing on three words we all use when we talk about art, and yes. This is an effective strategy for dispatching lots of serious problems in a thousand words. Words like reference or imbricate do point directly at (more than) a year of gobbledygook posturing as actual intellectualism. The word practice is an efficient vehicle for unpacking the problem of the MFA; the professionalism it creates; and how that professionalism devastates the artist's ability to make no sense and solve no problem.

Carol Vogel's little back-page ditty on, basically, stuntsmanship as lame visual art, rounded out this trifecta nicely. Consider the gauntlet thrown! Finally, instead of just not covering arts very much, the paper of record has very clearly explained why visual arts receives so little coverage. From the sound of three of its arts journalists, it sounds like there is little happening that is legitimately "fit to print."

There is nowhere to go but up!

Value

2007-12-21T07:43:00.000-05:00

I was dragging my eyes through comments, in which readers alternately praised Stanley Fish for pointing out the naked king and discredited him as a philistine, and this jumped out at me:

I don’t like art that shows me stuff I’ve seen (as in the New Museum). I like art that shows me stuff I’ve never seen (e.g., Jackson Pollock). And best of all I like art that shows me stuff I mistakenly thought I’d seen (Cezanne).
— Posted by Anthony D'Amato

Perfect! This comment wastes no time on what is or is not art, and wastes no time on charges of philistinism or fakery, and I like that. It simply stakes out some ground for deciding what one should value in art.

Of course, the whole point about contemporary art, the thing to "get," is that anything goes. But does it really? And should it? What point, other than fealty to Duchamp, does this en masse expression of gullibility prove?

There is no magic in art if it is already right, if anything really does go. And this absence of common critical ground winds up disrespecting artists, whose work must be engaged either in terms of bobble-headed approval or retarded strawman arguments about what is or is not art.

There's no good reason for art to be this kind of sucker's game.

The State Of The Residency: Tomorrow At Dieu Donne

2007-12-20T16:53:00.000-05:00

I'm participating in this panel discussion tomorrow night at Dieu Donne:

Dieu Donne
315 West 36th Street
New York, NY

Artists & Admin:
New York Workspace Residencies
Friday, December 21, 2007 – 6:30 pm
Moderated by Patricia C. Phillips

We will be discussing "the current state of New York City's workspace residency programs." I don't know what that means...yet! But if you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know that ignorance has never before stopped me from having an opinion.

Seriously, I don't know what the real questions will be, but I go into this discussion noticing that spaces like Socrates, Dieu Donne and the Lower East Side Printshop are keeping traditions alive as much as they are offering artists commodities like space. And that the "post studio" situation (movement? condition?) creates interesting challenges and prompts adaptations from these nonprofits, who are defining themselves against specific kinds of studio practice.

It should be fun. I'll be rockin' the house not just with moderator Patricia C. Phillips, but with these fine artists and arts administrators: Sonya Blesofsky, Noah Loesberg, and Jean Shin Jeanne Gerrity, Felicity Hogan and Dona Warner.

Hope to see you there!

I'm Adding Stanley Fish To My Harem Of Old Men

2007-12-17T08:18:00.001-05:00

Stanley Fish tippy-tapped his thoughts about the New Museum, sounding kind of like Charlie Finch's older, nicer brother. Or Eric Larsen's merely wistful, less histrionic colleague.

(EL, I know you hate Stanley Fish. I am making a point here)

And once again, it is important to respect one's elders! To actually read and love the Old Man Argument, and see the value in it without collapsing into that backward-looking, all younger people are stupider than older people and all the good galleries are closed and this old art is so superior to this new art gobbeldygook.

These are intellectual traps.

Stanley Fish. It's not about the inadequacy of the New Museum's cafe, or the cracks in its unpretentious-pretentious floor, or the fact that the stacked-box effect made you fussy.

It's not even about the superiority of permanence. You wrote, wistfully, that art once aspired to permanence, and that is about the most irrelevant thing art could aspire to right now. Look around you, man! The ice caps are melting and we, ourselves, are drowning in a sea of our own detritus, our own shopping bags and complex financial products and USB cables and wireless radiation. Everything is changing, and it had better! We are ripping apart the Middle East; becoming more economically similar to Mexico than any other developing country; out-Tancredoing Tancredo; refusing to admit that waterboarding is torture; buttfucking habeas corpus.

The last thing we need is to think of is permanence, because we are in trouble!

What you mean, perhaps, is that we can find meaning in all this ephemera, and the need for change, and the deep knowledge of transience without succumbing to mere crapulence. Transience, the fact that everything changes and is changing, is not an inferior idea to permanence. It's just that western culture is treating it that way right now. You are right about that.

Top Ten List of Fears (art-related)

2007-12-16T09:20:00.000-05:00

Deborah Fisher, Break (detail), 2007, carpet, cardboard and drywall screws stressing a wood armature

I am afraid to make something:

1. that isn't relevant in a specific reality-based conceptual (Kaprow, Burden, La Va) way.
2. decorative
3. too "Sculpture Magazine"
4. formal
5. crafty
6. that merely illustrates an idea
7. that doesn't illustrate an idea
8. clever
9. that's "just sculpture"
10. stupid

Trust Fall for 2008:

The ideas are in the making of the thing. Fearing the actual making of the thing and privileging my mind can only dilute the actual ideas. I trust the feedback formalism and craft are giving me--I trust their generative power. Fuck ideas from me, fuck Alan Kaprow, fuck Chris Burden and Barry LaVa too!

I am going to just make the stupidest, prettiest sculptures that I possibly can. I am going to trust that I actually have something to say, and that it will come out if I let it.

Elitism

2007-12-14T08:29:00.000-05:00

I got into a discussion with someone about elitism recently. It all started because he thought skiing was the most elitist sport ever. You have to go far away from where you live, he said. Pay for a hotel room, plane fare, all your meals. And all the expensive gear! You need to buy skis and the appropriate clothes.

He said he was opposed to snow sports on principle. The only reason he concluded anyone would do it is to show off how much money they have.

And I countered that this is a matter of location. You don't live near good skiing. But if you lived in, say, Hailey Idaho, you'd go skiing three times a week even if you were buying your groceries with WIC's help, because in Hailey Idaho, skiing is less expensive than going to the movies or any other form of entertainment around and everyone inherits a pair of hand-me-down skis.

This got me thinking about the nature of elitism in general. I have never liked the word because it is used as such a blunt tool. Everything can be labeled elitist if you can't have it or don't see the value in it. And that self-oriented use of the word totally eclipses the idea that it might actually be valuable to preserve an elite tier of things.

You wind up with serious intellectual problems that are structural in nature. You substitute injokes and cliquishness for hard and interesting work. You toe the line of popular culture instead of actually being avant garde.

It's funny, the way the word elitist cuts two ways. And I wonder how these two spheres of elitism, the actual value of something that is legitimately better and the in-crowd effect, work together.

There are known problems with this idea that anyone can agree that some things are simply better than others. We all went to college. We all know that in order to rank stuff, someone has to be the ranker. And we all know that while the Bush Administration is brimming with folks who are willing to step in and make these choices...

...liberal, thinking people tend to avoid assigning hierarchical value like the plague.

It's potentially a stupid thing to do. You might leave something out, or otherwise expose yourself as a philistine. It was so easy to be an elitist when we believed in objectivity. But in a world without objectivity, it seems smarter to be an assigner of qualities who can see the value in anything. It's best to avoid elitism.

Like a sampler of world cuisine, the art appreciator is supposed to have a broad palate. And I'm no Hilton Kramer. I don't have any bones to pick with this broadness per se. Art should be a place where you can see things that might blow your mind, but may not be entertaining. Art should be a place where you might have to stretch yourself in order to get what you see.

The thing that I am curious about is how this very openness becomes its own elitist dogma.

I see this at the park all the time--people look at the art in the park according to their real-world rules, in which they assign a certain amount of value as a matter of practicality, so that they can navigate and understand the world and their place in it. When confronted with something that makes no sense, like a piece of art, located in a public park, that is made of a material children find irresistable, on the ground, in unstable condition so that children can pick it up and play with it...

...they make a judgement. They say to themselves that it's obviously OK that their children are jumping up and down and pulling at this thing until it breaks. If it wasn't okay, then the sculpture would be out of the way of the children, or made out of a different material. And the fact that it's not withstanding the treatment their children are dishing out is not proof that it should not be touched. It's proof that the sculpture wasn't executed well. They don't have any problem seeing that this sculpture failed in this context for simple reasons.

This drives the administrators of the park (including myself) crazy! Don't these philistines understand, we say amongst ourselves, that it's not a playground, that this is art and should be respected as such?

What I find funny is the way this type of situation inverts the direction of elitism. I am the elitist one in this instance--I am the one shining down some rule that makes no sense, and that provides this sculpture with special privileges that are not even appropriate in this context. And the parent, or the judger, is the one who is just being as broad and sensitive as possible to what is actually around them.

New Review On ArtCal Zine: Liz Craft at Marianne Boesky

2007-12-13T08:09:00.000-05:00

Liz Craft is a hero of mine. The review I wrote of her latest untitled effort can be found here.

And while you're at the Zine, you can also read a great review of 3 Modifications by fellow UCSD alum and appreciator of the City Reliquary Brody Condon.

Trust

2007-12-12T07:43:00.000-05:00

This is not touchy-feely. I am being serious.

The converse of risk is trust. I love the physical sensation of taking a risk, but I hate that sensation of trust that necessarily accompanies each risk. I am not a trusting person.

An example: my husband is an excellent driver who has never been in an accident. And every single time he drives, my knuckles are white and the imaginary brake pedal is going crazy.

And yet the best things that have ever happened to me happened only because I figured out how to stop doing that kind of reacting and trust them.

This is what I mean.

I don't think I am going to look at risk from the yang side anymore. It plays into my weaknesses. I'm going to think about trust for a week and see what happens.

You trust? Is it harder than risk for you, too? What is the one thing you should trust but can't?

Risk and The Idea of Risk

2007-12-08T07:34:00.000-05:00

Deborah Fisher, Twist (detail), 2007, carpet, cardboard and drywall screws deforming an autobody armature

So I wrote a review of Liz Craft's untitled effort at Boesky for the Zine that will be published eventually, and it centered on the idea of risk--what exactly Craft is risking. And it got me wondering what I risk.

I tend to say that I risk failure, but that's like cooking pots and pans for supper, isn't it? Besides, failure is an idea, and I think that sculpture is beautiful because it is flesh. It's not ideas made flesh. It's flesh that you can derive ideas from. So I woke up this morning wondering where the flesh is.

I have no answers to that. I like the idea of risk so much that my practice is clotted with instances where the idea is more important than the flesh. I invest heavily in ideas like structural failure and make a bunch of things that are breaking and eating themselves. This is a fun sthick and I've gotten a lot out of it. And it may be a sauce that smothers the meat.

Not saying that I'm bad. It's more like when it gets dark at 4pm, it's a fine time for introspection.

Anyone else find that what they think they are doing gets in the way of what they are doing? Is it advisable to even try to know what you are doing? I'd love to hear what you all think.

New Orleans Elegy Extended All Winter

2007-12-04T07:40:00.000-05:00

Take advantage of global warming, get yourself on an N or a W train, and visit Socrates Sculpture Park this winter!

New Orleans Elegy--a steel and bronze monument based on a map of New Orleans that is destroying itself a little bit more every day--has been invited to stick around until spring. And if I do say so myself it's a particularly appropriate context, with the big cement ruin it sits on serving as a perfect perch from which to watch boats on the East river, and an unusually strong Emerging Artists Fellowship show rocking the rest of the park.

Sculpture Is About Imbuing Things With Some Sort Of Meaning: Charles Ray v. Martin Puryear

2007-12-03T09:48:00.000-05:00

Charles Ray and Martin Puryear have very little in common. But they are both working consistently with a specific sculptural trope:

How do I take this thing and turn it into another thing that is an idea. That is not a representation of this thing, but is more about why I can't stop looking at it in the first place?

What is the existential significance of looking at something, of holding it in your hand? What does that interaction prove? And how does that meaning transmit to a larger culture of people who, like sculptors, look at and hold things?

Puryear is really lyrical and dreamy about this questioning. He moves from wheelbarrow, or head, or tool, to African sculpture, to the material itself (usually wood) to structural concerns like a volume's inside and outside...

...he's doing two things. He's staying pretty well within the ideas you find while making the thing--he's using sculpture to talk about sculpture. And his thinking is in no way rigid. He's no conceptualist--he's not out there to make sense. He's in it for the music.

Charles Ray is a conceptual sculptor. He endeavors to make a very specific, even narrow, kind of sense, and is harnessing the language of sculpture to the world of seeing that we all share. His work is much easier to pick apart in terms of how it imbues a thing with meaning. Unpainted Sculpture is an almost exact replica of a car that someone died in. Every single piece was taken out of the car, catalogued, re-created in clay, cast, and then the car was rebuilt, in an effort to understand the mystery of the death car. What you get, of course, is a car that is not quite right because every piece has been translated by a carver, and this imbues the car, which once had this mystical allure of death, with a new, literal uncanniness of strange fit. Hinoki began as a real fallen tree that struck Ray with its Platonic power. It felt like The Fallen Tree to him, not just any old tree, but the original from which that idea of "fallen tree" is stamped in your mind. So he took it out of some guy's field and brought it to his studio, made an extremely intricate mold of it, cast it in a material that would travel well (fiberglass?) and sent that new representation of the tree--the one that would not fall apart--to Japan. Where it was reproduced by expert carvers in wood. Specifically, hinoki. The best Japanese wood. The kind of wood that you make a casket or a temple out of in Japan.

A Charles Ray sculpture is, generally, about the story of its making. And it contains questions about how it is that we make a thing or perceptual moment meaningful. Is it in the act of looking, like the moment of driving past this tree and seeing its iconic power? Or is this power to create meaning about effort on our part? Is it that effort to imbue an object with meaning that Ray is striving to reproduce as he creates iterations upon his iterations?

I like Charles Ray's work because I like its fastidiousness, its total commitment to the idea that the logic of sculpture can explain these unexplainables, like how it is that the car itself is rendered creepy once someone dies in it, or where, exactly, the platonic ideal of the fallen tree was located. In its shape? In its woodenness? Inside of Ray as he drove by, or in the tree itself, now thrown away and replaced with a much more perfect replica? Ray seems to define sculpture as the physical evidence of a set of specific spatial questions. It's about relationships: you and the thing. The thing and its meaning. And so on.

Puryear is older and is working with a different paradigm, so he does not need to go to this questioning place. Like a good modernist should, he takes it as a given that he imbues things with meaning, which is why he can play so well, and work so easily with abstraction. Instead of rigorously questioning the mystery of thing into icon, he plays with how exactly that process works on a formal level. The result is a sculpture in the easiest sense of the word. Puryear seems to define sculpture as a thing that takes information from the world of things in a physical way, so that its very thingness is conceptual and actual at the same time.

I like Puryear's work because it has a high fun-to-effort ratio. It's whistle-while-you-work sculpture that glorifies the actual looking and doing instead of getting all meta about the what labor does, or what looking is. Besides, because Puryear is actually shouldering the intellectual burden of creating that meaning

(because he's The Imbuer)

instead of making work that questions this role, he has a lot of freedom.

Ray is making work that is much more relevant to me and my experience of the world. At a time when we are so obviously damaging the world with our ideas of it, it makes more sense to question that capacity for humans to make meaning in the world than it does to take it as a universal truth.

But is it possible to find any of that Puryear-style freedom in this questioning?

Sculpture As Intellectual Burden, and Liz Craft as Deliverer and Victim of Said Burden

2007-11-29T10:16:00.000-05:00

So, I have been thinking a lot about that Liz Craft show at Boesky... trying to figure out what exactly to say about it because it's a real departure for Craft, and it's a departure that makes me feel kind of sad and deflated.

If you've been to art school, you already know this. Sculpture has a lot of baggage as a medium. Even more than printmaking. There's the Guy Thing (also known as the Romancing The Blueness Of My Collar Thing), the Monumentality Thing, the Bronze Thing, the Craft Thing, the Effort Thing, the Plaza Thing...

...and once you've cleared that brush, you still have to wrestle with the actual intellectual meat of this godforsaken enterprise. What is a sculpture anyway? Why is it that nobody can tell you what it is, but you know when you've made a bad sculpture because someone suggests that you put a light in it? Bad sculpture winds up wishing that it was a lamp or an ashtray, and there is such specific logic to this, but the worst, loosest arrangement of words. Keep taking sculpture classes and you will wind up with packets upon xeroxed packets of obtuse gobbeldygook that attempts to explain this problem. Donald Judd will tell you, in too many words, that the only way to make something that isn't a lamp or an ashtray is to make a thing that refuses anything but thingness. Michael Fried will tell you that Judd is full of shit, that a thing that resists its longing to be useful actually manages to refuse its very thingness.

Pretty soon you are sitting in a dark room, listening to Charles Ray talk for hours about this tiny shape beneath the feet of an ancient greek sculpture at the Met that looks like a lima bean and represents space in this incredibly meaningful way. And even though your gut was screaming YES! the whole time you were listening to him talk, you will not be able to make sense of it even a week later, and this will discourage you. And half the time you make anything you are still winding up with either a lamp or an ashtray.

You start dabbling in video and performance art.

The bottom line is that sculpture is deeply nonverbal and deeply intellectual at the same time, and that paradox is its most profound baggage. It's doomed to be as misunderstood and mispracticed as dance. Sculptors, even good ones, are always killing sculpture in an effort to keep it alive, and I include myself and this blog in this assesment. I literally cannot stop myself from blithering about the nature of what I do, even though every time I say something about what I am doing in my studio it winds up being untrue, winds up hindering actual understanding. My mouth is always coming up with systems, and the world is always smacking these systems out of my hand. And all I can say is that when I am good, I remember that my mouth is not very smart and I let the system go. When I am being a bad clingy intellectual, I work very hard to let the words and ideas win.

I don't know how else to put it. Sculpture is about this very basic set of existential problems. It asks where we are--in our minds or in our bodies. And it wants to know how much of this spatial world we live in is of our own making and how much just sits out there apart from us. Is space empty or is it a sensation of interconnectedness? And is it made out there, or in here? Inside me, outside me? Is space the sensation of my perception of the world (my insides) colliding with what is outside me?

This is an intellectual burden that sculptors either avoid or wallow in... sometimes both. Richard Serra, Charles Ray and Jennifer Pastor all wallow, often deliciously. Matthew Barney is a weird hybrid sculptor who avoids the issue of sculpture by making film, but uses film as an opportunity to wallow in sculptural problems ad tedium.

Then there are people like Liz Craft. In 2003, Craft's first show at Boesky easily positioned her as some sort of empathic genius who managed to get all the way down deep into the creases of the existential meaning of space, but without any of the heaviness or tedium. Even though (because, really) it was bronze.

It wasn't just bronze. It was a room full of figurative bronze sculpture. A big, sassy fongoo to the uncoolness of not just bronze, but representation, craft, bluecollar, effort, monumentality and every other thing that you swore off after you left your provincial little state school where you got your BFA. This shit rocked. It didn't just play into every single negative stereotype about "Sculpture Magazine" sculpture, it took on every single artworld cliche from skeletons and unicorns to "the seventies" and biker kitsch. In a show devoid of irony. That havered not to the intellectual morass of how strange and difficult sculpture is, but to a vision that was as silly as it was existentially and spatially complex.

Contemporary sculpture tends to be about devices that pull the viewer into a conversation that is not about objects, but about space. And this was a room full of objects--of traditional statuary--that became a mountain range of obese poopwomen, and a vacant lot, and the graphic on someone's t-shirt hovering out at you. The whole time you weren't unaware of the fact that this is a room full of statues. But you couldn't help but create a space in your mind that brought these pieces together into a unified... not narrative... but a space in which they could co-exist.

I had never seen anything quite as smart, or quite as confident. Every single burden sculpture (and contemporary art in general) had to give, Craft took on and actively used to her own ends. It felt so good to watch an upstart actually play with the same strong, serious ideas that Serra, Ray and Pastor tend to masticate thoroughly, slowly and seriously, for their own sakes.

So, I am not surprised to report that Liz Craft has, in 2007, proved herself mortal and made work that is not catapulting over the myriad burdens of sculpture but instead wallows in the particulars of the contemporary sculpture dialogue as such. It's got inside and outside spaces. It is, therefore, an explicit depiction of spaces that are unified and not discrete because they are all the same white aluminum. It is not about the thingness of the individual cast objects but the spaceness of these boxes. And there is paradox here, because the thing that creates the sensation or understanding of unified space is the fact that each cubey sculpture is one thing, not an arrangement of things or a mini-installation.

In other words, it's academic. And if Liz Craft hadn't already proven herself so utterly beyond an academic discussion of what sculpture is and what it does, well, then the overall effect would not be so disappointing. But honestly, it's as if Queen Elizabeth dropped kicking Spain's ass in order to begin an effort to explain to everyone why she is the Queen of England by describing who was heir to whom.

I've been staring at that last sentence for awhile now, trying to figure out whether or not it's hyperbole, and I am going to let it stand. Sculpture is incredibly important for exactly the same reasons that it is so fucking fraught. It's elemental--it's about you and your relationship to the world in a way that has nothing to do with your insides, your moral, psychological or rational self. We live in a world where our insides--our image of what we want the world to be--has fucked reality up so badly that sculpture might actually become more than an intellectual playground for hamfisted, tonguetied bigbrains with dirty sneakers. It might become intellectually useful if it becomes more outward-looking. Whenever someone like Craft actually applies sculpture to ideas, that basic relationship to reality that troubles us so gets just a little more mutable. Why not admit that Craft is capable of grandness, and that a show that is merely interesting or sculpturally correct is therefore missing the larger mark?

New On ArtCal Zine: Javier Pinon

2007-11-24T09:40:00.000-05:00

Hey Turkey-lurkeys. I wrote up something nice about Javier Pinon's new effort at Ziehersmith for ArtCal Zine. Go read it!

Upcoming this week: A review of Liz Craft at Boesky for the Zine, and a couple of posts about sculpture in general that are probably going to be too nerdy for wider publication.

Bonus Round: I have also been working on a transcript of the Middlebury college talk last month.

So stick around!

Warning!

2007-11-19T10:16:00.000-05:00

Liz Craft and Charles Ray are in Chelsea, Martin Puryear is at the MoMA, and this can only mean one thing:

It is time for extended exegesis on the manifold meanings and glories of sculpture!

If you don't want to hear about the relationship between the inside and the outside; about what the word structure means; the drawbacks of fetishizing materials and the ballsiness of reclaiming a commonly fetishized material; homogeneity versus armaturefulness; the Charles Ray Payoff (or The Need For An Explanation) Problem and Why He Is Still a Small God Anyway; and how one makes a sculpture work in time just by walking around it, then go to a different blog! I mean it! I am fucking stoked! It's sculpture season!

Javier Pinon: Don Quixote and Other Stories

2007-11-15T20:10:00.000-05:00

This image of Javier Pinon's work has been shamelessly lifted from ZieherSmith's website

I really liked this show, in part because all that cowboy stuff is where I am from, and partly because I am a sucker for collage. But I also liked it because it was all about references, but it didn't quite make sense.

Surrealism is like science fiction in that there is a terrible temptation for the author to get caught up in explaining this alternate reality that should really just emerge. It's great that Pinon resisted the urge to actually connect Don Quixote and specific cowboy movies to alligators and St. Sebastian and medusa and the rodeo and the southwestern landscape and all the rest.

Old Man Finch Could Do So Much More Than Scare Kids Off His Lawn

2007-11-10T08:51:00.000-05:00

Don't believe anything I have ever told you before. I make sculpture because I identify with crotchety old men. They're always saying what needs to be said, but usually from the lamest perspective.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have written extensively on a few versions of the Old Man Argument, which is, in a nutshell, that everything used to be so great and now everything is a shitty, hollow simulacra of that former greatness.

There are problems with the Old Man Argument that we can all easily point out. It's really easy to romanticize one's own youth, for instance. And about the only thing that's easier is to assume that what you grew up with or worked to create is "right" and that everything that comes after is therefore "wrong." The Old Man Argument is full of expectations, and when you expect anything you are cruising for a letdown.

Just about the only sane old man response to that inevitable passage from actor to spectator comes from Dave Hickey. At least he admits that he wouldn't know the next hot thing if it came and bit him on the nose.

But even with those disclaimers out for everyone to see...I kind of liked Charlie Finch's latest effort. It is classic Old Man, and therefore has this basic backward-looking dismissiveness that is not particularly helpful. And it is classic Finch, so look out for lazy rhetoric that depends on whores and namecalling to get any intellectual work done.

But his point is worth a little time. He is talking about the difference between real openness and the illusion of openness that is actually a playground for exclusivity. It is rhetorically lame that the only way he can talk about that is by talking about the past. Instead of calling the taste of Rirkrit's curries "foul," he could talk about exactly how boring and calculating the dinner-party-as-art phenomenon is, and exactly how the curry show divides up viewers into the haves who eat dinner and the have-nots, who are treated to the janitor's-eye-view.

This clubhousey art, which hopefully jumped the shark at Deitch this summer, is weak and cynical. It is merely about power. Finch misses an opportunity when he shrouds criticism of this current highschool scene in a wistful rememberance of galleries past. Not only is it possible to talk about that cynicism in the present tense, it's important to do so.

Last Chance: New Orleans Elegy at Socrates Sculpture Park

2007-11-06T08:04:00.000-05:00

If you have not already hauled your butt over to Socrates to see this self-destructing map of New Orleans*, beautifully installed alongside Takashi Horisaki's Social Dress New Orleans, then you should stop procrastinating. This is the last weekend before Takashi and I fold up our wares!

*The streets of NOLA have been represented with steel. Bronze was then laid over this steel map armature. The bronze and steel chemically react to one another, causing the steel to corrode. Every day, there is more corrosion and less steel. Eentually, the steel will vanish completely, leaving only a depression, or memory, of its former existence.

Amen, Brother Hickey!

2007-11-02T07:32:00.001-04:00

Dave Hickey is offering the simplest gospel. All he is saying is that judgement is power.

To have a reasoned and insightful judgement that another person can actually hang their hat on is to create real value. In fact, right now, it is to create more than value. It is to create a unique opportunity for another person to watch you and not someone else. To quote:

“If you want to be an icon of virtue, this is the moment because you’ll stand out”

This is not "Deathwatch Cheerleading." This is straightforward positivism. He is talking about the power of individual action and individual virtue when the zeitgeist screams You, individual human, are powerless! You can do nothing! This is about vast sums of money and power that you don't possess!

I know that the last line of this article is about thousands of Icari plummeting or plunging into the surf or whatever, but I think Edward is taking it too literally. Hickey is talking about gathering power in the face of a market that has the potential to render dealers (as well as critics, curators and artists) powerless. Gathering that power is fundamentally about cultivating judgement. It's not about believing in your artists, as Winkleman argues already happens. It's about "not being wrong" in Leo Castelli terms, or to cultivate and offer one's judgement. To offer that kind of rigor or structure, Hickey is offering, is to promote change.

Let me put it this way. You can take a crap on a gallery floor and plant an American Flag on it and call it art. You can go buy a bag of Doritos and put them on a pedestal or tack them to the wall and if you have called them art, art they will be.

Gallerists, therefore, do not legitimize art. But when they cultivate and offer sound judgement about artists that others can use, they cut through the bullshit that is inherent to art, and to do that is to cultivate power. Gallerists, as well as curators, critics and other artists, generally sidestep this power for two reasons. First, they learned in college that it is better to deconstruct other people's power than it is to have your own. And besides, they don't want to be seen as bumpkins who don't understand the basic premise above--that everything is art. And what Hickey is saying is that this act of stepping aside, of simply saying that art is good, or that my artists are good, represents a missed opportunity.

This is why the Top Ten List delights Tyler Green, and more and more I agree, even though it's a suspiciously easy idea. This is why I write criticism, and it's why I keep a blog. I don't have time to spend answering all the Plagens questions via Grammer.Police, but if I did, every answer to every question would invoke this idea, that judgement is power.

Raymond Pettibon Review Hits Your Inbox

2007-11-01T08:17:00.000-04:00

This just in from the Shameless Self-Promotion desk:

Fuck You, Ray, Here's YOUR Irony Back made the "headlines" on this week's Artkrush.

As Promised: Images of A Specific Piece of Public Art and More Questions About Public Art In General

2007-10-29T07:29:00.000-04:00

Solid State Change, 2007, discarded tires and electrical insulation over cement, 9'x24'x11', commissioned by Middlebury College's Committee for Art in Public Places

Look forward to more musing on the nature of public art later in the week. In order to do its job (that is, actually be art), public art must produce conflict--if everyone liked it and it made no one uncomfortable, it would be bad art. Generally, this creates a lot of lame art in public, and a lot of artists afraid to leave the safety of the gallery. But need this be so?

I was talking to Rachel Owens about going to Middlebury, and she provided an interesting insight. She compared what happened--a spirited debate about interesting ideas and problems--to the unanimous lovefest that generally characterizes the Artist's Lecture, and wondered why artists can't give and get feedback like this from one another.

Interesting question, and relevant to the content on this blog. There will be as much palavering as time permits in the upcoming days. You all know what I think. Debate is good, the art world has too little of it, and public art could perhaps help overcome this artworld aversion to critical opinion.

ON A RELATED NOTE: Tyler Green's Dave Hickey Top Ten Challenge is asking for similar walls (of constant bobble-headed approval) to be torn down... and new walls (of discernment) to be erected instead. I have, as a good blogger should, linked to this article instantly and reflexively--without actually thinking about whether a top-ten list makes sense. All I am saying at this point is that I am going to the dentist. And while they scrub and scrape my pearly whites, I'll be staring at acoustic tile and trying to come up with a reason why I shouldn't agree that Dave Hickey "kicks serious ass."

Environmentalism and A Possible Aesthetic of Understanding Vastness

2007-10-27T14:43:00.000-04:00

New images of SSC, installed, with grass, are forthcoming... as soon as I figure out how to get Photoshop to see a raw camera file. In the meantime, here's an ancient detail from April 2007, and the "fresh install" shot, circa mid-August!

I spoke about Solid State Change at Middlebury College on Thursday, and it turned into a spirited discussion about, of all things, the appropriateness of tires as a material in a setting like rural Vermont.

The fact that Vermont dairy farmers love to use tires to hold down tarps aside, this points to a larger question about defining and using the aesthetics of environmentalism. Elsewhere on the Middlebury campus, environmentalism has dictated an attachment to "local materials," meaning local stone from local quarries, local wood from local forests, harvested in smallish amounts, and so on. This focus on local material has yielded a campus full of uniquely beautiful buildings that solve problems of scale or overuse in creative ways. And this looking to local materials and food is sheer common sense, as transportation equals carbon.

But is the intellectual work done when a building's carefully-crafted paneling has been gently taken from the surrounding forests, or has it merely begun?

When does local become shorthand for a larger statement of what one values in one's environment?

And what effect does this valuation of some materials or things over others have on one's ability to see what is actually there?

I certainly cling to the fact that finding stuff in the immediate environment is better on a practical level than shipping stuff all over the world without thinking about where it comes from or how it grows. But I wonder when exactly that practical decision transforms into an aesthetic, or worldview, that has the potential to exact its own harm--its own acts of not-seeing.

Like not seeing the tires for the forest.

Whether or not my art is liked by others is irrelevant to me. What is important is that it provokes thought--that it spurs the intellectual work of thoroughly understanding the relationship between the self and the world, between what we build and what we build it upon. So I am thoroughly pleased to have touched an aesthetic nerve at Middlebury College, and hope that Solid State Change continues to spark debate.

Environmentalists are facing such vast and terrifying problems, and this sense of threat creates the potential for mind-expanding revolutionary thinking on a heretofore unimaginable scale. To face the vastness of the whole changing world with your little frail body, and understand both the great potential and the inevitable limits of your own actions is to truly fucking see something!

But that same sensation of threat will spur just as much reactionary easy answermaking as actual revolutionary hard work. I hope more than anything that Solid State Change keeps refusing to yield an easy answer, and keeps the eyes of Middlebury from resting on any soothing notion that anyone there may have of that which looks "environmental," "local" or "beautiful."

Best of DF: Artists Should Write Criticism

2007-10-20T07:52:00.000-04:00

I got into a discussion with someone last night about artists writing criticism. It would be rude of me to get into it, but the basic idea was that I was being given some friendly advice. I could either stand outside art and write about it, or I could stand inside and make it, and that it was "dangerous" to think I could do both.

To my career? To my health? Dangerous? Really?

It seems like a good time to revisit last year's Kuspit lecture.

New Content On ArtCal Zine: Or, Blogger Says No To Images So Here's Some Picturesque Language

2007-10-19T11:20:00.000-04:00

Raymond Pettibon at Zwirner. Thoroughly digested and thrown back up for all the little baby birdies. Come 'n get it!

THIS JUST IN: Appriciation of this article, from the always-thoughtful editorial desk at Art Fag City

I Will Never Make Fun Of Tyler Green Again

2007-10-15T12:35:00.000-04:00

I will never make fun of Tyler Green again.

He has not just delivered Saltz the dope slap he so deserves.
He has not just put his finger on exactly why less art criticism and more pictures of rich people doing arty things.

He has proved that one can be earnest and righteous and interesting at the same time! A MAN first! Go Tyler go! More righteous earnestness! We eat that shit up around here! We cannot get enough! Pump your fist without worrying about tactlessly showing whose side you're on! Be on the side of art and not the art people! Stand for something, and keep standing for something, damnit!

More On Gore

2007-10-15T08:08:00.000-04:00

Apologies about the picturelessness of this post. Looking for images of Al Gore was taking me down a rabbit-hole of flat-earth blogdom and, well, I do have things I want to accomplish today.

Everyone is still talking about Al Gore running for president, and I don't blame them.

Gore talks openly about the serious structural problems with the current "democracy." That the senate isn't acting like the senate, a separate legislative body of government, but instead acting as a wing of the executive branch.

That the judicial branch is stacked with people who want to create more unilateral power for the executive branch.

That this is unbalance of power is a serious constitutional threat.

That, unsurprisingly, the executive branch is taking advantage, claiming that they have the power to do things that are totally unAmerican, like hold anyone they want, for as long as they want. Forever if they want. Without telling anyone.

Like collect information about the citizenry without a warrant.

Like torture.

And he is the only one talking about these issues as such. He's the only one saying that senators spend too much time making money and not enough time legislating. The only person out there who is saying that George W. Bush is breaking the law.

Is it true that he is saying these things precisely because he is not running for president? That his position outside politics is exactly what gives him the power to tell the truth?

Mayhap. But it is just as likely that he is showing all those other mealymouthed carefulkinses exactly how to use the media. How not to compromise. How to go and have some fucking vision.

Here. Listen to or read these speeches that Gore has given over the past few years. They are chock full of content and ideas, and they are also full of hope.

The Limits of Executive Power
This One's About The Judicial Branch
Iraq

Chelsea In Brief

2007-10-13T19:33:00.001-04:00

From Keith Tyson's Large Field Array

Chelsea’s rhythm is generally brisk—the same as one’s own footfall. There are so many things to see, and so much that is not particularly meaningful, that it’s easy to think of it as a literal hike. In four and a half hours I planned to get from 18th street to 25th street.

But after shuffling tediously through Raymond Pettibon at Zwirner as I read each drawing individually...

...and then plopping myself down on a sofa at Elizabeth Dee for an hour and forty minutes, so that I am not the only person who hasn’t seen the latest Ryan Trecartin effort...

...and then waiting twenty minutes to spend (sorry people waiting) fortyfive minutes wandering through Keith Tyson’s Large Field Array...

...it was getting kinda late. I was tired. And all the other art looked kinda stupid in comparison. I tried to finish 22nd street, but wound up at the Half King, gulping down a decidedly ungenerous bloody mary.

I still feel kind of beaten and disoriented. And generally, I want art to make me feel big feelings like this, but I have questions. I mean, DR9 made me feel similarly punch drunk, and it wasn’t because it was good. In part, I think I am exhausted simply because I confronted two of my least favorite gallery tactics: text and linear narrative. Sofa or no sofa, these time-sucking devices fail to understand what walking around in a gallery feels like for a viewer—they misunderstand the transaction. I definitely want to get sucked in, but generally not doing something I can do better in the comfort and privacy of my own home. Reading is intimate, and all video looks and feels better when I am on my own sofa.

I’m open to surprises, but generally I’m looking for something that benefits from me going all the way to a large, white room.

I also think I am exhausted because Ryan Trecartin is exhausting. And because the difference between Reagan-era Raymond Pettibon and W-era Raymond Pettibon is elusive. And because Keith Tyson managed to make the cube relevant in a way that has nothing to do with backward-looking modernist mannerism.

Over and over again.

These three shows do belong together somehow, and will be written about at more length, perhaps for ArtCal Zine. But I don't know how yet.

Draft Gore '08?

2007-10-13T10:19:00.000-04:00

Well, he has already won the popular vote once, and failed doing it. And I am a firm believer in the transformative power of failure.

We cannot forget that Gore achieved greatness not in spite of, but because of that lame election and the horrendously bad Supreme Court decision that ended it. Gore was an equivocal, people-pleasing weakling in '00. His most distinguishing feature was his caution. He compared most often to wood, and did not even have the balls to stand up for himself and demand a full recount in Florida. He was a better choice than Bush, but he was not a good leader.

I voted for Nader, myself.

Since his public non-trouncing, Gore has grown up, figured out why he is publicly engaged, and I think most importantly, has figured out that it's not about him or his personal goals. This is the kind of person who should be president right now--the person who has written a long, boring book about how the democracy broke, and what could be done to fix it. We need someone who will stick his neck out. Someone who is all about fixing problems instead of pleasing people. Someone who thinks that the American people are smart enough to make good choices.

And he shouldn't even run. He should just be overwhelmingly written in. We should all stage a nonviolent coup. Say fuck you to the horse race and just demand someone who will do a good job.

Outrageous

2007-10-12T07:40:00.000-04:00

The letters after Friedman's article are funny, they are full of college students earnestly proclaiming that they would rather do something than "be outraged."

On one hand, there is obviously no point to being outraged, because we are being ruled by a classic bully, and everybody knows that you ignore a bully. And I would love to belive that these kids are quietly going about their changemaking business, all suit and tie instead of flowing hippie hair.

Their argument makes sense, because progressive social projects are inherently conservative--it's all about restoring and protecting The New Deal, the air we breathe, the ozone layer, the delicate fall leaves. It's what I do with my nasty old house. I work to make it incrementally less nasty, and I don't do that by razing it and starting over. Instead I slavishly attend to how old and new go together, so that it's still the same house when I am done...

...except that now the floors will once again take the weight of furniture and people.

This kind of restoration or conservation is simply not radical activity. It's boring, thinky labor. It is totally unromantic. Outrage has no place in restoration. It only distracts, creates bad decisions. To express outrage about the rotten wood is to wind up leaving it in place, or taking away too much too soon.

But is this what kids today are actually doing? Is this a nation of little worker ants, calmly, silently and dilligently marching along, protecting and preserving all that humanity from below, even as we lose it at the top? Is Generation Q so quiet because they are simply good taoists?

Or are Americans such great mythmakers with such an intact sense of self esteem that we simply cannot make ourselves look bad?

I don't know. But I have taught college recently. And I have called out enough plagarized papers and sat through The Grade Challenge Discussion enough times to have an opinion.

Generation Q

2007-10-10T09:46:00.001-04:00

Tom Friedman is, as usual, almost hitting the nail on the head today, talking about this generation of college students and young adults.

He calls them idealistic and optimistic, but quiet--that's the Q. And always the optimist himeslf, he is willing to buy into the idealism as such and not call these kids "deluded" or "hopelessly out of touch." And then he says that if they are not outraged they are not paying attention. And says that they need to stand up for all these things, like the polar ice cap melting, that they just talk about amongst themselves.

Friedman, wake up! This is how smart, powerless people in a closed government behave! Kids these days are not quiet, they are living in a world where asking questions goes nowhere. You want outrage? Be outraged at that.

I want to live in a democracy more than anyone. But I am not going to blame kids-these-days for understanding that we don't.

EDITED TO ADD:

Okay, so the minute I hit the publish button, I thought about what I said. Maybe Friedman is right. After all, technically people still do walk into voting booths and push buttons or whatever. And just because in certain states you don't have a record of your vote, and just because there is ample evidence of voting "irregularities", that doesn't necessarily mean that democracy is in fact dead. What makes it dead is the fact that nobody gives a shit about the irregularities. What makes it dead is the fact that bringing it up in an appropriately outraged fashion will get you tazed by the campus police, while the student body sits and watches and does nothing. I stand corrected. Tom Friedman, you are awake.

ArtCal Zine

2007-10-09T09:51:00.001-04:00

I am pleased to be contributing regularly to ArtCal Zine--starting today!

Big thanks to all the ArtCal folks, especially Bosko Blagojevic's editorial hand.

Fuck It: Call This A Manifesto

2007-10-08T10:03:00.000-04:00

The world is very difficult to look at right now, much less envision changing. Your baby boomer parents may have had it all figured out--how to say No to war and stuff daisies in the barrels of guns and have sex and do drugs and rock the long hair--but we can all admit that this is not a reliable strategy going forward.

Dissent works when you have the power to do so, and the first thing I have to admit is my powerlessness. If Diebold delivers elections, then I am powerless. If GW Bush calls war protesters "focus groups," then I am powerless. If it's all about huge sums of money, then I am powerless. If we are talking about the polar ice cap melting or breaking the entire Middle East, then I am powerless.

I am tiny and insignificant, but I can continue to look and imagine. I can continue to ask questions. I can continue to find meaning in the destruction that surrounds me, and I can continue to see that I am not the only one in this existential predicament.

I have nothing to lose because I am not important.

I face out, not in.

I look for what we share and not what divides us.

I believe that destruction is the beginning of the story and not the end.

The scarier it gets, the more hopeful I get.

RWB

2007-09-30T08:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I was whining about the injustices of the world, but now I am pissed! The briefest of summaries:

37-year old black male reporter for the NY Times goes to the south to report on the way police officers treat suspected gang members.

37-year old black male reporter gets his face shoved into the dirt and handcuffed within ten minutes of his arrival, without so much as a "put your hands on your head and lay down on the ground."

Police officers find out that he's a reporter and lives in New York and release his cuffs with no apology, no explanation beyond, "You're in the south. We have different rules here."

Turns out he found his story.

My hat is off to Solomon Moore for his elegant response to such an outrageous assault. What a master of the high road! This piece is graceful and dignified, with its eye trained exclusively on what is important and away from Moore's own ego. If I am ever in a similarly difficult situation, I can only hope to be strong enough to be things like funny and true and light. It is much easier to whine, cry and be wounded.

Negative Capacity At Capacity

2007-09-29T08:09:00.000-04:00

I like to think of this as a fundamentally optimistic little publication... so there is little to report. I am still buried in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. And it is getting more and more depressing. Globalism is just a new name for colonialism, and colonialism is a grand and ugly force.

Speaking of colonialism... The Yes Men were not even questioned for proposing enslaving much of Africa at the Wharton Business School, and to top it all off, I've been sick for what feels like forever. I'll be coming out of my hole when something good happens. Like if my nose stops running. Or if they take back Milton Friedman's Nobel Prize.

For Once It All Makes Sense

2007-09-27T08:35:00.000-04:00

The UN General Assembly means better-than-usual boatwatching at Socrates Sculpture Park, as all boats must go around to the Queens side of Roosevelt Island.

It also means talking about climate change, and leave it to my favorite poet revolutionary to cut right to the meat! In today's Times, Vaclav Havel is calling on all humans to, basically, look at the world with humility and acceptance instead of desire or entitlement.

Really, doesn't anything else one says about climate change just distract us from this perfect description of the problem? We don't really need to invent any new technologies as much as we all need to become less focused on our individual selves and more aware of us, the collective force we exert as a species. It's the ultimate solidarity, the ultimate collectivism.

Interesting times, interesting times! Just when it looks like our world is falling apart, the earth rises and asserts itself as a reason to overcome the greed and desire that's causing nothing but war and death and suffering anyway.

Michael Cline v. Jules de Balincourt

2007-09-23T08:52:00.000-04:00

Michael Cline, I Will Tell You Off, 2007

Jules de Balincourt, Think Globally, Act Locally, 2007

Strategically very similar. But the Cline show seems very full and the de Balincourt show seems very empty, and safe in its emptiness. The Cline images are quite wrong, and I like them that way. They're unabashedly romantic instead of ironically kitschy, closeup and human instead of landscapey and far away. De Balincourt is showing us an empty apocalypse, which does make sense if you are reading the news, but Cline refuses to take such an easy point of view. Cline's meaty brown police state scenes are anti-apocalyptic. They seem to be about the day after the so-called apocalypse, when we all have to get up and figure out what to do next, still full of our filth, history and humanity. Because they don't stop at horror, they are full of empathy and strangeness, and best of all, they make no fucking sense whatsoever.

Except they do. They make their own sense. More art should refuse to resolve itself like this, and more art should be this difficult to pull off. Any one of these paintings could collapse under the weight of its own romanticism, become sweet, get too many or too few chronological references and start reading as a particular time or place, or get all Walker Evans-ey and full of pity for them.

Instead, I left feeling actual, loamy sorrow for us and our time. We should not be afraid to embrace this richness.

Purity

2007-09-23T08:15:00.000-04:00

If you have not yet picked up your copy of The Shock Doctrine, stop reading this and run to the bookstore!

This book is particularly interesting to artists because the logic is associative and the crux of her argument is aesthetic. The briefest of summaries:

A Canadian psychologist decided that he could rebuild broken human minds by erasing everything that was there before and finding a pure, blank slate, on which he could rebuild a healthy personality. One small problem: the only way to erase a personality that he could think of was massive quantities of electric shock therapy, solitary confinement for more than sixty days at a time, scrambling mealtimes, constant light and/or constant dark, up to a month of forced sleep, the use of drugs such as LSD and PCP and sensory deprivation.

He would up creating the blueprint for how to "scientifically" torture people.

This blueprint for torture methods wound up being useful in another quest for purity: The Completely Unregulated Market. Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil... turns out nobody really wanted to choose Milton Friedman's beautiful, pure free market in a democratic way, but that brutal dictators and Chicago School Economists = TLA.

I have never read a more beautiful, more sobering exploration into the problematic, illusory nature of purity.

And I know that this is going to seem perverse or minimizing, but reading about hundreds of thousands of people getting yanked out of their houses and shoved into Ford Falcons and disappeared...

...it makes me think of Minimalism so differently.

Opening Tonight: Up as if Down

2007-09-22T11:00:00.000-04:00

Mari Spirito is harnessing the efforts of Shara Hughes, Peter Kreider and Moises Saman to get at what we accept as "real" at Cuchifritos.

Any press release that mentions Oliver Sacks, the Iraq war and "the new normal" has got my attention. I will definitely be there.

Up as if Down
Cuchifritos
East Village / Lower East Side
120 Essex Street, Delancey / Rivington (inside the Essex St. Food Market at the South end of the building), 212-420-9202
September 22 - October 20, 2007
Opening: Saturday, September 22, 4 - 6PM

Is It Just Me

2007-09-22T08:01:00.000-04:00

...or is anyone else totally fucking spooked?

Blackwater is the new Brownshirts. And they actively patrol not just Baghdad's streets, but our own.

Andrew Meyer is tased for what, exactly? For getting seriously involved in actually questioning a politician? For getting emotional about the fact that there were serious problems with voting in Ohio? That it appears as if Kerry actually won the election?

Even if Meyer was a total ass, isn't it appropriate to be an ass in this situation? And since when do we arrest people for being rude? Since when does it look good to arrest people for demanding answers to questions at a political venue?

Instead of just answering the questions, John Kerry's blog is chockablock with excuses. Meyer asked good questions, and I want answers too! Why did Kerry concede so quickly? Why isn't anyone taking the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters seriously?

And all the Naomis are cryin'. Naomi Wolf has what she is calling a Blueprint for Fascism, and she's saying that we're following it. Perhaps more interesting is Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. It will be thoroughly digested and regurgitated on this blog in the next few weeks, because it finally answers the most important question: Why Fear?

To top it all off, in case anyone needs any help placing themselves in all this madness, the Times published an interesting story about a photo album that documents how the Other Half at Auschwitz lived.

It turns out you don't stop loving your dog or making friends or playing the accordion when you start putting thousands of people in ovens.

Banality of evil, indeed.

Naomi Klein: Blank Is Beautiful Demands Artistic Response

2007-09-21T10:58:00.000-04:00

Image: Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph des Willens

I am on page ninteen of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. Klein is wrapping up the introduction of her thesis, which is basically that Milton Friedman's idealism has been unleashed over thirty years, in times of crisis, resulting in Global Corporate Feudalism. I like how she's putting a caveat and the meat in the same paragraph here:

Any attempt to hold ideologies accountable for the crimes committed by their followers must be approached with a great deal of caution. It is too easy to assert that those with whom we disagree are not just wrong but tyrannical, fascist, genocidal. But it is also true that certain ideologies are a danger to the public and need to be identified as such. These are the closed, fundamentalist doctrines that cannot coexist with other belief systems; their followers deplore diversity and demand an absolute free hand to implement their perfect system. The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably toward violence. The ideologies that long for that impossible clean slate, which can be reached only through some kind of cataclysm, are the dangerous ones.

Yes! And as an artist I have to say that purity and a lack of ambiguity are deep existential motivators, and are legitimately beautiful, legitimately soothing!

Image: Donald Judd

I have written on many occasions that political art is generally a waste of time--because it takes a side, it becomes mere propaganda that preaches to the choir. I would rather argue that all art informs our political lives, because all art takes an existential stance.

Klein argues, and I agree, that we are currently under an existential threat. We are being frightened and bullied into giving up not just our civil liberties, but our government protections and services. And in the face of this specific existential threat, "apolitical" art can do more than political dissent. To imagine a world in which ambiguity is not just tolerable but delicious;

Image: Adam Frelin

to find beauty in imperfection;

Image: Jean Lowe

to dream of a bright future that does not depend on an apocalyptic clean slate and a present in which humanity has the fortitude to bear inevitable cataclysm without collapsing from fear--this is the most important political work an artist can do right now.

Solitarity

2007-09-21T07:43:00.000-04:00

This is a moment of qualified genius. And it will result in a diatribe about the Power Of The Individual Actor And The Death Of Dissent As A Rhetorical Strategy...

...but maybe not today. It's a bit of a triple helix. After all, Colbert is savvy enough not to use dissent, but he's using it to to say No to a whole generation of people who are incapable of saying No.

There must be more you can do with this.

Thomas Lendvai at Winkleman, Or Why Jewelry

2007-09-18T08:43:00.001-04:00

Thomas Lendvai started a discussion on this blog about what I said about his current effort at Winkleman. I said that it was about jewelry. He wanted an explanation, and I figured you all might as well. Enjoy!

Thomas Lendvai's Between Boredom and Pain is a specific relationship between some lumber and a room. The room "looks" pierced, but it very obviously isn't. But it isn't lazily accomplished, so that it looks like I am supposed to finish the idea for the artist in my mind. It is painstakingly, lovingly done, and that changes the gesture for me.

To me it feels almost "clasped", but from the inside. My date that evening agrees that the overwhelming gesture is one of "fit."

All this care made the relationship between the room and the wood surprisingly delicate, but organized to look violent. This feels like a jeweler's gesture to both of us. Refined, polite, playing at drama.

The jewelry metaphor seems like the most appropriate way to find meaning in this work for us. The wood is obviously the gold, and the room is obviously the stone, and it's obviously a huge pendant or ring setting. But the ordinary jewlery relationship is inverted in a nice way.

It's not groundbreaking, but it's really nice work. It is not uninteresting to make a huge piece of inside-out jewelry out of rough-hewn lumber. There is something about the piece that speaks directly about how precious and mundane much art is.

Alex

2007-09-17T07:39:00.000-04:00

Alex The Gray Parrot's passing is causing much more media stir than I thought it would, including this sappy piece about his soul in the Week In Review. I have two things to say about this.

A friend of mine who, granted, is a known exaggerator (that's a disclaimer), says he used to work with Alex in his lab. And that they were trying hard to teach him the "Ch" sound, which he found difficult, and to do so they were feeding him Cheerios. The routine, he says, went something like this:

"Alex, what's this?"
"Cheery"
"Good!" And then he got a Cheerio.

Dr. Pepperberg found out what Cheerios are made of and, disgusted, went to the food co-op and bought a box of all-natural cheerios. The result:

"Alex, what's this?"
"Cheery"
"Good!"
Alex took the all-natural cereal in his mouth, chewed on it, and said, "Wood!"

Much of the coverage in the Times of Alex's passing was basically about his existential problem--did he understand death and have a mind. But he has the most to teach us about our existential problem. To stubbornly assert that Alex is that soul-fully different from us in the face of so much You Tube evidence to the contrary does set us apart from the world we live in. How this does anything but heighten our own mortal anxiety is kind of beyond me.

With A Nod To Tyler Green...

2007-09-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

Who doesn't just need to declare five things from time to time? I don't just "think I think" these things, though. I am pretty sure I know them. What I don't understand is their context or usefulness. So here you go:

Five Things I Don't Know What To Do With

1. Sculpture transcends because of what it is. It's not an illusion.

2. Failure is way more interesting than success. Without failure, any good sculptural inquiry collapses into earnestness.

3. There seem to be good ways to fail and bad ways to fail. (Or, No Pressure, But One Can Fail At Failing!)

4. I really, really, really, really, really, really hate to fail.

5. Everything is a negotiation.

I Know I'm A Day Late, But...

2007-09-12T18:36:00.000-04:00

World Trade Center aluminum façade fragment, "Here Is New York: Remembering 9/11" New York Historical Society

How could I let such an inappropriate example of fetishization pass by unnoticed?

One Great View Of Boundless Internal Space, or Further Evidence That Sculpture Is Hard

2007-09-10T23:08:00.000-04:00

Jedediah Caesar's Three Views From Space still pleases me more than any of these shows because one piece does that thing that sculpture does best. It rests, thinkingly and lovingly, on the stupidest, most elemental stuff and gets that stuff to actually change on you. Whatever else the show contains, Caesar manages to make disparate things, like magazines or lemon rinds, into a singular material. And then he manages to insist that the material remains material, even after it necessarily becomes a form.

This is good, nourishing stuff. And for that matter, so is the sweetness and humility of the original gesture of all this work. It is right to look at all the things around us, the trash we produce and the stuff we sweep up, and know that it doesn't go away, that it goes to a place and becomes something else.

I like, for selfish reasons, that this work takes a geological look at our own detritus.

And for all my own prejudices about arriving at form, it is easy to admit that the grid makes this untitled wall piece the satisfying spatial adventure that it is:

It makes the grand idea more than process art. It becomes more like to make and understand peoplerock. Not people rocks, but a monolithic substance that has been sampled from, not made and sliced. Caesar made a series of literal core sample shapes that were, well, literal. The enterprise turned into a too-specific fiction about core samples. The grid works better. It's empirical-looking without being specific. And it's ongoing. You'd want to count a number of circles and interpret what that means in terms of any core samples you've made as a young science student. Those geodey shapes remained objects--geological artifacts. A grid, on the other hand, is known for a fact to be endless. You get a sensation of genuine vastness never before possible with only, oh, I'd guess a few hundred pounds of material. Economical!

That's what I mean when I say that this piece asserts itself as material and not form, even though, duh, it obviously inhabits a form. The thing, though, is that the magic is formal, not the form. Grids and cubes are not simply magical disappearing shapes! The grid solved a particularly evil little problem in an elegant way. Once. On that back wall. Cubes and squares do not fare as well in the rest of the room.

One of the most compelling things about Caesar's work is that it's got this fatal flaw that he keeps chewing on and never spitting out. It's so interested in materiality and internality, and so uninvested in form, that it could become a boring sausagemaking project like that! A dead end lurks around every corner, and Caesar surely knows this. And in the rest of the room, he's casting about for quick answers to hard problems, which is too bad. The prop piece. The potted plant. The crappy chair. Instead of doggedly, carefully insisting on material and material alone, he starts trying to do something with the materials he makes. And when he does this, he closes the door to vastness and geology. The rest of the pieces in the room are more about their form (and their relationship to art history and objectness) than anything else. Their materiality doesn't matter very much.

This is kind of a shame, but it's also par for the course. Sculpture is best when it is impossibly stupid, and it's always a better idea to keep hammering at the unsolvable problem no matter where or when the show is than it is to try to wind up with a decent product.

(I know, I know. Easy to say...)

You can't make something that is inherently bounded read as boundlessly as geology. You can't communicate something as paradoxical as the infinity of internal space using ordinary, physical means... in a small room, even! And that Caesar even does this once with such an improbable process is meaningful.

I Never Promised Objectivity...

2007-09-07T08:22:00.000-04:00

Okay, there will be writing about Jedediah Caesar's show at D'Amelio Terras. But I want to start by expanding my own bias. I don't know an artist that doesn't occasionally get a crush on something another artist says or does. And this crush is never about a better understanding of the crush's work.

It's a crush because it leads you to understanding your work.

I came across these paragraphs, spoken by Jedediah Caesar, in the AiA interviews with 19 LA Sculptors when I was trying to make this specific leap from representing little versions of broken systems to actually breaking shit:

I got to the point where I was completely tired of the process: I was going to Home Depot, buying more material, getting another tool, and then eventually I'd end up with this object. Was it a good object or a bad object?
The rationale for making a better, or worse, object was that there was going to be this new form. It was going to justify all this work that I'd put into it. I wasn't quite sure where to go with that, and I found that I was more interested in histories and the resources that formed the materials.

I read this a few times, and internalized it. And it led me to some specific realizations about form and how one arrives at it, and I want to thank Caesar in writing for that. What stuck with me was this idea of winding up with an object, and then having to figure out whether or not it's good based on what you did. That's a top-down approach in which you tell the sculpture about form. And what I wanted was a bottom-up relationship, in which form is a necessary result, but in which I have little say over what the form is.

That relationship, in which form is not dictated but allowed to happen, seems more like the way life works. It seems more interesting, more about managing the crazy shit that happens to you in the course of a day and less about being the master of anything.

So, reading this was interview was a serious tool for understanding how to not get in the way of making this body of work, that is more about subjecting stuff to traumas of puncturing, torque and weight and allowing the results of that stress to emerge, than it is about anything else. You all remember this stuff:

Twist, 2007, carpet, cardboard and drywall screws over a found auto-body armature

What Caesar is doing has nothing to do with this. He's not interested in form as much as he's interested in volume and internality. And so he needs to start with some sort of form--you have to pour the resin in something--and so he relies heavily on known forms: circles, blobs, and at D'Amelio Terras, the grid.

And, of course, because I invested some energy in using these words for my own purposes, they are full of my own meanings now and so I look at all this grid stuff and feel disappointed, and that's not exactly the Good Foot. It is kind of selfish to hold someone accountable for how you used their words, so I am going to the park to dig some holes and loosen my grip on my own ideas of form, and approach this later.

By the way, there is an opening at Socrates Sculpture Park on Sunday, and you should come. Not only does the park and the Emerging Artists Fellowship show look fantastic, but you can see me and Takashi taking on New Orleans.

Thursday At A Glance

2007-09-06T22:27:00.001-04:00

Jedediah Caesar

I remember four things:

The photographs by Susan Graham at Schroeder Romero were really dreamy--childlike and dark, but not in a world-weary goth way. Instead they were kind of innocent and low-tech and fun.

The opposite of Susan Graham's photographs are at Rare. Jean-Pierre Roy's paintings were probably best described by Shane Hope as disasterbation.

For all the jibjab about conceptual art that it engendered... Thomas Lendvai at Winkleman was more about jewelry than concept, or even sculpture.

Jedediah Caesar at D'Amelio Terras = Grid. Which makes me think I misunderstood that AiA interview.

More on this later.

On Expecting More

2007-09-06T09:54:00.000-04:00

Blogs are polemical. Someone says something that gets you all riled up, and then you dispute it, and thus the wheel keeps turning. And there is a danger in this. You could wind up taking a side.

Take the conversation that's (very) loosely turning around Thomas Lendvai's installation at Winkleman. Usually these posts on Ed_'s blog are not commented on, except to congratulate and wish dealer and artist well, but this time a conversation has blossomed that is basically about what viewers expect from the art viewing experience.

This is an important conversation to have, and it's important to separate it from conservative arguments like "I don't approve of site-specific work"* v. liberal arguments like "the more I know about art, the more I can appreciate any artwork"*. Both sides of this argument collapse! To place rules on contemporary artmaking is to ignore the 500 years of art history that pushed us into this uniquely lawless space. And to place the onus of understanding any artwork on the viewer's knowledge and sensitivity is to create an army of gullible Yes Men commenting on the fine quality of the Emperor's New Clothes.

No, no, no! I demand more on this Super Thursday. I demand a way of looking at art that denies nothing and expects much. I demand discussions about art that are as sloppy and unpolemical as art actually is! I demand, in the always lurid and in this case appropriate words of JP Gorin, to be kissed while I am being fucked! Because that is what art is about, that's the transaction.

*almost-direct quotes from the afforelinked-to blogorrhea at Edward Winkleman.

Life Begins Again On Thursday!

2007-09-04T19:47:00.000-04:00

If you are still reading this blog, you might have noticed that I have had very little to say about what other people are doing because, well...

...because I have had no idea what other people are doing.

But that sucking sound is my head pulling away from my ass, and without a second to spare! I am looking forward to a few openings Thursday night. But I am only sitting around on Tuesday night in giddy anticipation of one:

Jedediah Caesar, Three Views From Space at D'Amelio Terras

A long, nerdy review on this blog is inevitable. Jedediah Caesar did some very interesting talkin' in the "LA is for Sculptors" edition of Art in America last year, and I am dying to see some equally interesting product.

That sounds bitchy and like I am throwing a gauntlet, but it's really not like that. We all know that sculpture is impossible, and that all good sculptors fail all the time. I am in fucking love with the way Caesar set himself up in that interview as some Sculptural Superhero, saying that he was all about dispensing with form, that he wanted sculpture as organism.

I buy it entirely! I think that the interview was brilliant and brave! He put his finger right on the exact problem in sculpture right now...

...and I am not just saying that because I am engaged in a similar persuit!

Of course, Caesar's 2006 work was really dependent on form. On perfect forms, like circles, or arbitrary forms like blobs or the volumes of bags. It was poking at this idea of organism, and it was close to organizationally different, but it landed on metaphor when the self-stated goal was more like total structural upheaval.

And yeah, I understand why. As someone who similarly spent 2006 aiming at grand thoughts of total structural upheaval and hitting metaphors and representations, all I can say is that I learned a lot and am still in the game. And I am hoping that Caesar is, too.

Seven Days Article!

2007-08-29T20:56:00.000-04:00

The Burlington Weekly, 7 Days, ran a short feature about Solid State Change this week that is interesting because it touches briefly on Middlebury's larger interest in discarded tires.

Thank Godot

2007-08-28T19:47:00.000-04:00

I don't know as any of you needed more proof that Paul Chan is a righteous and insightful motherfucker. Or that Creative Time is a forward-thinking institution, or that the Classical Theatre of Harlem is courageous, or that art can actually do something.

But here it is anyway, courtesy Heart As Arena. Please click here for all the juicy details. They're doing Waiting For Godot on a streetcorner in the Lower Ninth Ward, and in a still-abandoned front yard in Gentilly.

Here's a blurb from Godot snipped directly from the Creative Time press release:

Let us not waste our time in idle discourse!

(Pause. Vehemently.)

Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are nneeded. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

What do you say?

Self-Serving Link Crazy!

2007-08-22T21:25:00.000-04:00

New Orleans Elegy, detail. Currently on view in its entirety at Socrates Sculpture Park.

It's been a busy year...

I updated my portfolio, to include Solid State Change, and that show at Dangerous Curve. And I didn't skimp, I even rewrote my statement, which is (just for Paddy Johnson, just to prove that I can evolve), much less bullshit than it was last year.

And I also want to remind you about the opening of Second Line at Ad Hoc Art. That's Saturday night, 6-11pm. Be there!

And if you can't get enough self-destroying maps of New Orleans, you should come by the Park, where you can not only see my own New Orleans Elegy, but you can see the much more ambitious and wonderful work by Takashi Horisaki, Social Dress, New Orleans.

These two devastatingly beautiful sculptures are by the waterfront until October 26, and are sooooo worth the walk from the N-train!

This blog will soon return to its regular format of unsolicited reviews of other people's shows, musings about modernism, worrying about the environment, and bad lay buddhism.

At The Risk of Sounding Catty...

2007-08-20T20:49:00.000-04:00

...Todd Gibson's cameo at Modern Art Notes took me by surprise because, well... because I rarely read MAN anymore.

And all I have to say is that Tyler Green is either very stupid or very secure to let someone who is so much more interesting and insightful than he is wear his hat for a whole week!

The gut's role in art criticism? An actual meditation on the difficulties of living the life of an artist? Ah, I can smell the actual meat of art blogging roasting on a spit!

Opening Saturday Night--Mark Your Calendar

2007-08-19T14:04:00.000-04:00

Garden District Meets The Mississippi (detail), 2005
cupric sulfate crystals over steel armature.

I made this piece right after Katrina, and it's been sitting around killing itself ever since. It is, like New Orleans Elegy, based on a map of New Orleans' flooding printed in the New York Times. And like New Orleans Elegy, it's made of two materials that are working in opposition. The cupric sulfate crystals are corrosive, and are making the steel armature decay and fall apart. And now you can see it in Bushwick:

Second Line
Art and Film related to the Gulf Coast
August 25 - September 17, 2007
Ad Hoc Art
49 Bogart Street (East Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

Ad Hoc Art is pleased to announce Second Line, a group exhibition opening Saturday August 25 in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The exhibit will include a fundraiser for eight Louisiana charities Thursday August 30. There will be a closing reception Friday September 14, although the work will remain on view through September 17.

The exhibit includes the debut of documentation from Takashi Horisaki’s Social Dress New Orleans installation, concurrently on view at Socrates Sculpture Park. Also a study of Alvin Batiste by Ed Pramuk, software art from David Sullivan, watercolors by Emily Sartor based on Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, Kyle Bravo’s House Conglomeration silkscreens, Mr. Quintron and Miss Pussycat’s thirty minute puppet theater film featuring dance-crazed Formosian termites, and a thirteen-foot plein air landscape from Brooks Frederick depicting the wetlands of Cocodrie, LA.

Jazz funeral parades and their exuberant brass bands are usually followed by an energetic crowd of revelers, known as the “second line”. Attracted to the music, “second liners” release creativity inseparable from the very life celebrated in these marches.

Come to the opening Saturday night! Maybe a street will fall right off in your presence!

Cowboys In Suits

2007-08-15T08:53:00.000-04:00

3. Are artists able, given this existing power structure that has co-opted irony and other kinds of dissent, to truly display bad manners? If so, how?

Examples:

Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, and the Colbert Report in general.
The Yes Men.
The Yes Men.
The Yes Men.
Jon Stewart's Jon McCain interview.

They are all operating from an actual powerful platform that has either been hijacked (The Yes Men only pretend to be representatives of Halliburton, the WTO and Exxon), or in the case of Comedy Central, repurposed.

These hijinks and face-offs are funny and effective (and can even happen) because they depend upon existing structures. It's not just the suit, it's everything. If these guys were poets, they'd be writing the strictest sonnets--not pumping out some exciting new free verse we've never seen before. They're simply leveraging facts and chutzpah against the existing forms, like:

O'ReillyLimbaughScarboroughCounty
CNNshitstream
Public Speaking
PowerPoint and its kissing cousin, the News Graphic

to arrive at a broader point about power, who's got it, how they keep it, and how tenuous the grasp is on it.

There is an unmodernness to this strategy that is fresh. It's not about the artist as an individual. Sure, Colbert and fils must have enormous egos to do what they are doing, but it can't be about them if it's going to work. This is why the Daily Show is increasingly straight, lameass satire--it's increasingly about Jon Stewart Being Funny and less about Playing Anchor And Yet Delivering More Actual Truth Than 24 Hours Of CNN.

This kind of rudeness is also not about invention or finding anything new. It's about pushing one form against another form:

Content v. PowerPoint
Facts v. Truthiness
News or Public Speaking v. Comedy

And seeing what happens. This is why actual context matters. It's why The Yes Men must be in front of a bunch of conventioneers, why Stephen Colbert had to do the dinner.

And of course, this work has nothing to do with dissent. I know it feels like it does, but in order for this satire to work, it has to employ, not destroy. It has to happen from the inside. It has to say Yes to what is happening on a very deep level. Stephen Colbert is consistently better and more incindiary than Jon Stewart because Colbert is on the Bush Administration's side. Jon Stewart was better as an anchor when he was actively attempting to work the impartiality axis. It gave his anchorship an existential problem and made the news look as broken as it is. Whenever Stewart departs from the form and depends on his own funniness, he is surrendering strength in service of his ego. And he is saying No when he should keep saying Yes.

I tend to think that these strategies can work outside of satire and don't have to be expressly political--that one could push whatever rhetorical strategy into the Full Structure Press and see what happens. And that this work is important if we (the big We--all of us) are to understand power as something we can wield and not just something that is wielded against us.

Power is not just political, it's not just about suits. And there are lots of ways to be bad by playing along.

Solid State Change: Fin!

2007-08-12T18:26:00.001-04:00

Installation was smooth. We got to the site about thirty minutes before the sculpture did... and the crane was a little late. So we waited around.

Video of the rigging job in VT will be posted soon. You'll be able to compare the difference and see that Kent's English Shortening Knot made a difference in how sweetly and evenly it picked. But whatever! Who has time to be fussy? We just got that thing off the truck and placed in a reasonable, uneventful (if not completely flat) way... and ate us some sandwiches!

You know you're in a quaint small town when everyone *loves* the local excavating guy, which in this case is Chris Acker. And yeah. He's a sweetheart and so now I love him too.

In this picture you can see that there was a little problem with a drain right in front of the sculpture, so that it looked like it was sitting at the bottom of a huge cereal bowl. But Chris moved the drain out of the way, and this made everybody rejoice!

Last step was to armor-all the surface until it looked like an enormous piece of licorice. Don't worry, though. This will only happen twice a year. It's important to protect the colored plastic from the sun.

After we took these pictures, we ate a huge lunch with two glasses of cheap champagne!

Lift

2007-08-06T19:48:00.001-04:00

With huge props to Kent Johnson, Chris Yockey, Dave Lewis, Joel Murphy and Glenn Gabel... I am happy to report that Solid State Change is finally hitting the road!

Takashi Horisaki on Studio 360: You Should Listen!

2007-08-05T17:16:00.000-04:00

Chris Yockey inside Takashi Horisaki's Social Dress New Orleans--730 Days After

Takashi Horisaki's Social Dress New Orleans--730 Days After is featured this week on NPR's Studio 360. Even if you feel like you've already seen the project and everything, the segment is worth a listen.

You get to hear from the owner of the house on Caffin Avenue. And interesting aspects of the process of making the mold itself are highlighted. Takashi is good at talking about his work, and I was impressed with his ability to understand how the smallest aspects of this project are an important part of this ambitious whole.

Your LA TV

2007-07-30T10:42:00.000-04:00

Check out this quick video tour of High and Dry, Smoke and Fog, curated by Price Latimer. In it, my work is glimpsed at and briefly described by Coagula's own Mat Gleason!

Opening At Socrates This Sunday!

2007-07-27T19:17:00.000-04:00

Reason #729 to love Socrates Sculpture Park: An awesome crew of Dominican Fishermen got tired of watching and helped Takashi Horisaki with his installation. Image lifted shamelessly off his blog.

You will miss out if you are not at Socrates on Sunday afternoon!

In addition to a possible thunderstorm, there will be great art, and New Orleans-style food and music! And humidity. New Orleans-style humidity. So it will be authentic! Here's the blurb from the press release, copied and pasted for your reading pleasure:

Open Space

Opening Sunday, July 29, 2-6pm

Deborah Fisher
New Orleans Elegy, 2006
July 29-October 28, 2007

Deborah Fisher's New Orleans Elegy is a living work of art that will change over time in its appearance and meaning. Fisher is interested in the structures the earth makes: how crystals grow; accreation; and the way rocks organize and build themselves. New Orleans Elegy is a map of New Orleans made of steel wire "streets" and a bronze overlay. Over time, the interaction of the metals will cause the streets to decay from the bronze leaving only a trace of where they once were.

Takashi Horisaki
Social Dress New Orleans--730 Days After, 2007
July 29-October 28, 2007

Takashi Horisaki's Social Dress New Orleans-
730 days after, came from his deep concern for New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Horisaki spent his
first three years in America living in New Orleans, LA, eventually earning a BFA from Loyola University. His visit to New York in June 2006 made him realize how much those of us living outside of the victimized area fail to grasp the reality of the tragedy suffered by New Orleans residents and the glacially slow recovery process. Conversations with his professor in New Orleans inspired this project. "He told me how difficult
it is for him to make his own artwork still, and I wondered if I, a neutral person- not exactly an
outsider, but with some perspective on the situation- could express their feelings through my sculpture."

Michael Mercil
Shadows From A Dream Of The 20th Century, 2003-2006
July 29, 2007-April 6, 2008

Michael Mercil's shadows from a dream of the 20th Century, is a set of three carved black stone monoliths. The individual pieces approximate the size of grave markers; stones that mark a beginning of western sculpture. Mercil is not a stone sculptor, but here he uses traditional materials and methods to entertain notions of origin and temporality- of the past, as legacy for the future, and the future already becoming the past. The substance of this work materializes the question: "What is the object of sculpture now?"

Solid State Change: The Home Stretch!

2007-07-25T06:03:00.000-04:00

It's getting really really close. On August 6, a big truck is going to come and take it to Vermont! We have lifted and weighed it, and it is only 6000 pounds, which is great news. I don't have to hire a crane! All that's really left now is detail stuff.

Lizz Sullivan, a photographer who was working for the NY Post, came by and took this picture yesterday, and sent it to me. The funny part is that I am relatively clean.

There is an opening at Socrates, Sunday from 2-6pm. Tomorrow I will make a bigger post about it. But put it in your calendar now!

Ben Davis on Tom Friedman Makes Me Wonder: Is It Possible For Any Of Us To Stop Shuckin' And Jivin'?

2007-07-09T10:23:00.000-04:00

Tom Friedman, Aluminum Foil Thing, currently on display at Lever House

I know that this article by Ben Davis is ancient in blogosphere terms, but the Tom Friedman extravaganza at the Lever House is still up through September, and I don't know about you, but it's the closest I will be getting to this year's European Summer Art Orgy.

Davis is right on the money--he's focusing on Friedman's relationship to Aby Rosen's power. The briefest of summaries to start:

These deft-shiny-intricate-yet-silly-and-disposable sculptures currently on display at the Lever House are, in Davis' words, "allegories of frivolity, of surplus wealth." Davis notices that there is a smartness to Friedman's sculptural practice that is entreprenurial--Friedman's schtick is to make something out of nothing. But that this smartness does not place him in a critical position, that this work is dedicating itself to power.

Amen, brother Davis! But what about the big picture? We all learned in school that Friedman's ironic strategy here is supposed to be critical of Rosen, even though it obviously is not--what about that? What winds up being the critical or ironical target?

What about all the other good boys and girls just trying to get somewhere in Chelsea? The army of scared kids in skinny jeans carrying nothing more than the crushing debt of their MFA and a quirky little interest in doilies or seafaring tales, or poor, white trash? What's their relationship to power?

What about us?

I think Davis has just scratched the surface here. And that there is a little Friedman in all of us. And that the effects of this kind of court-jesterism are not as benign as we think they are. I know that artists generally consider themselves powerless, but I don't think that's exactly true.

Consider this post a placeholder that asks three questions:

1. What is the propaganda value of art and artists that are good to power by playing bad, edgy, abject or ironic? What exactly are collectors buying when they pay these court jesters?

2. Is it possible to figure out exactly how artists are powerful by looking at how classic artistic strategies of dissent became strategies of dedication?

3. Are artists able, given this existing power structure that has co-opted irony and other kinds of dissent, to truly display bad manners? If so, how?

New Orleans Elegy At Socrates Sculpture Park!

2007-06-30T20:24:00.001-04:00

Hey, so there is going to be an opening July 27, complete with other people and food and a big latex tentmold of a real house from New Orleans and Michael Mercil. Details will be posted on this blog. I hope to meet you there!

For the time being, this is my tire connection, Dudzai. He used to be in the Foreign Service. But the political situation being what it is in his native Zimbabwe, he is now in the second-hand tire business here in Queens, right across the street from the park.

I feel very fortunate to have met Dudzai, and not just because he gives me all the tires I need. He thinks a lot, and has a lot of interesting things to say about everything from global warming to the value of working with your hands to why we are in Iraq...

...and of course, I appreciate the primer on African Dictators.

What A Difference Three Weeks Makes!

2007-06-30T20:10:00.000-04:00

I don't mind admitting that I post these pictures in an effort to cheer myself on. The middle knuckle on my left pinky finger is getting a little swollen. And I have a muthah of a welding burn on my right calf.

It's over seven feet tall now at its highest point. Total length is about 23 feet.

There are only two real goals left. It needs to grow toward the wall (that large structure covered by the tarp), oh, between 6 and 30 inches, depending on where you look.

And it has to get a solid connection to the ground. Right now it's on dollies, which are basically the same as the steel footings it will be welded to. And it's developed a little bit of a wobble because of the distance between most of the rubber and the concrete below. This will probably get solved when the real foundation gets covered with topsoil and grass. But why chance it? The rubber should drape over the footings and act as a big stabilizing skirt.

Oh, and finishing. So three goals.

Gioia To Graduates: Art Is Political

2007-06-29T06:06:00.000-04:00

Thorough exegesis of this great commencement speech by Dana Gioia, who heads up the NEA, can be found on Artblog Comments this morning.

I have nothing to add but vigorous fist pumps and shouts of "Amen!"

We lose our capacity to dream, engage and resist when school-aged children don't get the opportunity to explore in art class; become band nerds; dream at least briefly of becoming dancers; or find the only balm I can think of for being a teenager--becoming involved in a production of Sarte's No Exit.

I don't think it's a coincidence that we live increasingly in a world chockablock with passive entertainment even as we live in an empire over which we have no control.

Confession Time!

2007-06-27T21:50:00.000-04:00

I am one of those assholes who, for the last four years or so, has been sending the AIM Program ten of my hard-earned dollars along with a really stupid answer to their requirement:

Artist statement describing your work and professional goals (maximum 200 words)

And I am posting this because I know I can't be the only one. I generally chafe so bad at the Professional Goals part that I wind up writing some 100-word Taoist treatise-in-a-teapot about how having goals as an artist equals creative death.

I know... And then I send them ten dollars. Only an artist, right???

It's that time of year again. And I was looking up at the J train at the corner of Lorimer and Broadway when suddenly it dawned on me that I was responding to rigidity in a stupidly rigid way.

So, what the fuck? I actually believe what I wrote this year, and perhaps that is an end in and of itself. I'll share it with you:

I am in the inspiration business.

A lot of things must change because our democracy is broken and we are cooking our planet.

There are no answers yet; just questions and problems. With that in mind, I want to be a decent pre-revolutionary.

I am looking for specific truths by looking at the way the earth builds itself, and how it decays. So far, I have found:

Everything we build is destined for the rock record
Corrosion is a powerful metaphor
Everything has a narrative arc of creation and decay. Sculpture should too.

I work to contextualize my current body of work in three important ways:

1. Middlebury College’s Environmental Studies building provides an excellent context for my work and contains my core audience--the next generation of thinkers who are putting this questioning into action. I want to place more large public installations like Solid State Change in this academic context.

2. Many other cities that will be under water because of human activity should be publicly represented in a way that brings the future into the present. I want large-scale bronze and steel sculptures like New Orleans Elegy to be commissioned by the Netherlands, the Maldives, New York City, Miami, etc.

3. Companies like BP, ExxonMobil and ADM should back up their eco-friendly advertising dollars by buying my art for their corporate offices. I want every corporate headquarters to own a huge corrosive crystal map, similar to Garden District, of their home city, so that decision makers can watch their own beautiful home slowly decay while they make huge decisions that affect our collective future.

(Ummm..... Don't tell the good folks at the Bronx Museum that it's actually 260 words.)

Freeganism

2007-06-21T08:11:00.001-04:00

Check out this interesting article about freegans in the Times.

I am fascinated by aesceticism, but I don't trust it. What do you think?

Vivoleum!

2007-06-17T21:18:00.001-04:00

This press release is copied and pasted directly from my inbox. Please do read it in its entirety, follow the links... and God Bless The Yes Men!

June 14, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

EXXON PROPOSES BURNING HUMANITY FOR FUEL IF CLIMATE CALAMITY HITS
Conference organizer fails to have Yes Men arrested

Text of speech, photos, video
GO-EXPO statement
Press conference before this event, Friday, Calgary
Contact: mailto:fuel@theyesmen.org
More links at end of release.

Imposters posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC)
representatives delivered an outrageous keynote speech to 300 oilmen
at GO-EXPO, Canada's largest oil conference, held at Stampede Park in
Calgary, Alberta, today.

The speech was billed beforehand by the GO-EXPO organizers as the
major highlight of this year's conference, which had 20,000
attendees. In it, the "NPC rep" was expected to deliver the long-awaited
conclusions of a study commissioned by US Energy Secretary
Samuel Bodman. The NPC is headed by former ExxonMobil CEO Lee
Raymond, who is also the chair of the study. (See link at end.)

In the actual speech, the "NPC rep" announced that current U.S. and
Canadian energy policies (notably the massive, carbon-intensive
exploitation of Alberta's oil sands, and the development of liquid
coal) are increasing the chances of huge global calamities. But he
reassured the audience that in the worst case scenario, the oil
industry could "keep fuel flowing" by transforming the billions of
people who die into oil.

"We need something like whales, but infinitely more abundant," said
"NPC rep" "Shepard Wolff" (actually Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men),
before describing the technology used to render human flesh into a
new Exxon oil product called Vivoleum. 3-D animations of the process
brought it to life.

"Vivoleum works in perfect synergy with the continued expansion of
fossil fuel production," noted "Exxon rep" "Florian Osenberg" (Yes
Man Mike Bonanno). "With more fossil fuels comes a greater chance of
disaster, but that means more feedstock for Vivoleum. Fuel will
continue to flow for those of us left."

The oilmen listened to the lecture with attention, and then lit
"commemorative candles" supposedly made of Vivoleum obtained from the
flesh of an "Exxon janitor" who died as a result of cleaning up a
toxic spill. The audience only reacted when the janitor, in a video
tribute, announced that he wished to be transformed into candles
after his death, and all became crystal-clear.

At that point, Simon Mellor, Commercial & Business Development
Director for the company putting on the event, strode up and
physically forced the Yes Men from the stage. As Mellor escorted
Bonanno out the door, a dozen journalists surrounded Bichlbaum, who,
still in character as "Shepard Wolff," explained to them the
rationale for Vivoleum.

"We've got to get ready. After all, fossil fuel development like that
of my company is increasing the chances of catastrophic climate
change, which could lead to massive calamities, causing migration and
conflicts that would likely disable the pipelines and oil wells.
Without oil we could no longer produce or transport food, and most of
humanity would starve. That would be a tragedy, but at least all
those bodies could be turned into fuel for the rest of us."

"We're not talking about killing anyone," added the "NPC rep." "We're
talking about using them after nature has done the hard work. After
all, 150,000 people already die from climate-change related effects
every year. That's only going to go up - maybe way, way up. Will it
all go to waste? That would be cruel."

Security guards then dragged Bichlbaum away from the reporters, and
he and Bonanno were detained until Calgary Police Service officers
could arrive. The policemen, determining that no major infractions
had been committed, permitted the Yes Men to leave.

Canada's oil sands, along with "liquid coal," are keystones of Bush's
Energy Security plan. Mining the oil sands is one of the dirtiest
forms of oil production and has turned Canada into one of the world's
worst carbon emitters. The production of "liquid coal" has twice the
carbon footprint as that of ordinary gasoline. Such technologies
increase the likelihood of massive climate catastrophes that will
condemn to death untold millions of people, mainly poor.

"If our idea of energy security is to increase the chances of climate
calamity, we have a very funny sense of what security really is,"
Bonanno said. "While ExxonMobil continues to post record profits,
they use their money to persuade governments to do nothing about
climate change. This is a crime against humanity."

"Putting the former Exxon CEO in charge of the NPC, and soliciting
his advice on our energy future, is like putting the wolf in charge
of the flock," said "Shepard Wolff" (Bichlbaum). "Exxon has done more
damage to the environment and to our chances of survival than any
other company on earth. Why should we let them determine our future?"

About the NPC and ExxonMobil
About the Alberta oil sands
About liquid coal

Takashi Horisaki

2007-06-13T07:29:00.000-04:00

There's a project space at Socrates, over where the fishermen hang out along the fence, that will have an interesting show July 27 through October 28.

I'll have a little bronze piece, a map of New Orleans, fastened to this ancient old pier that's been buried in the park forever.

Takashi Horisaki, on the other hand, is doing something much more ambitious. He is in New Orleans right now, taking a latex mold of a house ravaged by Katrina. And he's rolling up the whole thing in a couple of weeks and coming to the park, where this big latex bag of a house is going to become a kind of a large tent.

Check out pictures and stories of this process on his blog.

He's already jumped through some serious bureaucratic hurdles to get it done, made friends with the Army Corps of Engineers and found tremendous local support. And I am sure he is also cursing the humidity and inevitable rain as he waits for each coat of latex to dry!

If anyone wants to help him get his piece installed at Socrates, click here to find out how to give him a tax-deductable donation, and how to get in touch with him if you have time to donate.

His budget is tight and his aims are noble. He needs all the help he can get!

Ease On Down The Road

2007-06-11T15:41:00.000-04:00

If you're in LA, and missed seeing my work at Dangerous Curve... and if you let the show in Pasadena pass you by... fear not!

"High and Dry, Smoke and Fog"
A group show curated by Price Latimer

June 15 – July 6, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, June 15, 2007 • 6 – 9 pm
Open to the public on Fathers Day, June 17, 2007 11am - 5pm in for "Concours on Rodeo."

featuring work by:
Jason Adams, Mattia Biagi, Jennifer Celio, Deborah Fisher, Whitey Flagg, Adam Harteau, Cheryl Kelley, Michael Markowsky, Doug Martin, Blue McRight, Joel Morrison, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Reynolds,
Ed Ruscha, Eddie Ruscha, Salvatore Scarpitta, Lola Scarpitta, Kim Schoenstadt, Christoph Schmidberger, Chloe Sells, Shelter Serra, Nikki Van Pelt and Jeremy Wagner

Free cocktails
Music by DJ Mike B.

269 N. Beverly Drive
Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Continued tusky walrus-sized thanks to Tim and Kathy at Dangerous Curve!

Progress

2007-06-05T19:44:00.000-04:00

So with about two months to install... it's starting to look a little like the concept drawings. It's a little over 20' long as of today, and about 5'3" tall (almost as tall as I am).

It's just got to get taller. And a little longer. And tidier. And it has to get installed in a way that makes sense. No problem!

Of course, I can't be satisfied. I wish the back was in the front. I like the steel.

Reason

2007-06-01T07:44:00.000-04:00

So when I am not screwing tires together, lately I've been:

reading Al Gore's Assault on Reason
chipping away at Slouching Towards Bethlehem
and chatting with Mark diSuvero a little bit about art and structures--he's making a big structure at the park.

And I have a few observations.

Mark diSuvero and Joan Didion are very different kinds of structuralists. Mark is all about defying gravity by starting from a flat place and controlling geometry--drawing upward in space. Didion is more of a moldmaker or an enameler, collecting observations that do not seem to have any structural integrity on their own, until they are laid in or over an idea, describing it, with little bits of Didion's conclusion stippled in like hardware cloth, lending lots of rigidity or truth.

They are both creating structures using external ideas about truth. Flat surfaces and geometry are external. The tackiness of Vegas or the meaning of some woman's dress and its tattered hem are external. Cultures create these things--they are not intrinsic.

The art comes out of a belief in these structures. Mark has a passion--a zeal--for the way he works and for structural integrity that is almost ecstatic. It is a beautiful thing about him. And Didion believes enough in the power of this storyfinding and this process of turning stories into ideas that she applied it to the most terrible set of stories--the sudden loss of her immediate family.

This kind of work is what I think "reason" means. diSuvero and Didion are reasoning people. And this is making me realize that there has to be a certain amount of belief operating in order to reason.

In a world that is increasingly relatavist, increasingly belief-less, this orientation is less and less possible. But does that mean that structure or reason is impossible?

I am only at page 40, but so far Al Gore is structuring his argument about reason (and the structure of the Senate) on a romantic, backward-looking vision of print media being good, and television being bad. Ugh!

He has a television company, so I am hoping that he is just warming up.

I do think that there are other ways to create truth and structure, but they are not as flashy or grand as the belief-way. And I think that Gore might be well-positioned to figure out this paradigm shift, because he's a super-practical guy, and because he digested global warming.

We'll see.

Sculpturally Relevant

2007-05-27T22:41:00.000-04:00

I was unimpressed with the mini-wave of Sculptures-About-Siding that shook my little neck of the Emerging Brooklyn Artist Universe a couple of years ago. Everything I saw seemed kinda shitty. Kinda going-to-Harlem-in-ermine-and-pearls.

Yeah, so Greenpoint is tacky and has bad architecture, and yeah so it's gentrifying rapidly despite siding. Where's the meat???

Leave it to Miss Heather to drop the artsy fartsy pretense and bust with the goods. Siding python, indeed.

Beauty... Continued

2007-05-20T22:10:00.000-04:00

Geoff forgave me for calling him a motherfucker! And he wrote some interesting things about beauty, and that deserves its own post.

You know what I hate about beauty?

The way it turns into moral rectitude. Beauty is not useful if it's a way of distinguishing right from wrong, because that too-quickly becomes an according to whom problem.

Geoff, you list toward this when you equate compassion (that word again!) with beauty.

That said, you know as well as I do that I also love a lot of things about beauty, and that I use it often. Here is what I wonder when I deal with beauty:

When is beauty a crutch? When is it me collapsing into some romanticism or ease of knowing what is "right"? And is there a way to use beauty that is pioneering? That is about delving into the unknown instead of clinging to what is already known?

Generally, I fail the beauty quiz miserably. The more I use beauty, the less I am exploring, and the more I am knitting my brow about right and wrong, or just trying to get it done. I often use beauty to know where I am going, and that kind of beauty is boring and not useful!

Beauty is usually a marked trail that I hike along, or a compass that I whip out. But not always. A handful of times beauty has emerged after I have completely lost my shit and have been staggering blind with a serious deadline looming, convinced that I have totally fucked up and will wind up with nothing.

At this stage, I don't think beauty functions as a marked path because I don't control it and didn't demand it, although I am quite bossy and controlling, and would have if I could. Instead, it has all these emergent properties that I watch, or even follow. And so if I were to continue the outdoorsy metaphorin', I would say that I follow this beauty out of the forest or thicket or whatever to a new place, a place that I would not have gotten to if I hadn't gotten lost and found this beauty and clung to it.

So when Geoff says:

The one thing that is the common denominator in work that is considered beautiful is that it is compassionate. Compassion full. When an artist realizes in a work, or when a work realizes through an artist, past his or her navel, that we are all dealing with the same condition at some level. This requires intense accountability and stems from intense vulnerability... but every beauty full work from Felix Gonzales Torres to a cave painting (past all bullshit mental criticisms) has this root of compassion.

Well, I don't buy that, because to say that is to say that beauty is this external and universal goal that remains unchanged regardless of the context. Who knows how the folks in Lascaux were thinking about beauty? And in my opinion, FGT's work is about values like sharing that we consider good, and frankly I don't find that beautiful as much as I find it nice.

But I do still think that this awful word, compassion, or its equally mealy-mouthed synonym, empathy, are at the root of what is interesting or necessary here. And I see why Geoff used FGT as an example, because it is about shared experience, or the fact that, to quote the above quote, "we are all dealing with the same condition at some level." I don't mind admitting that what I am after is grand. It's that shared place, in which universal statements are not sophomoric, because Geoff is right. We are all dealing with the same condition at some

(um... existential?)

level.

I don't have any other big pronouncements to make about beauty, because mostly I wrestle with beauty and lose. But, on the rare occasions that beauty has been useful to me, it has led me to a place where it's not about me or anything else I know anymore.

2007-05-17T18:42:00.000-04:00

Figured that some images might be useful when thinking about ArtPowerlines' great point about the Russian Avant Garde v. Social Realism that can be found here.

Response to Jason

2007-05-12T07:07:00.000-04:00

Jason Laning and I must stop hijacking this thread about alternatives to commercial art galleries and have our political discussion elsewhere. Jason, thanks for continuing this important discussion with me.

To catch up folks who didn't invest in the links:

In a nutshell, Jason is involved in Institutional Critique and wants to change the total fucking horror we witness by more traditional means of protesting the power structure from the outside. And while we agree that these are totally horrific times, I think that Zizek is right, that the rhetoric of protest he is referring to has been completely co-opted by those who want to control us, and that we have to figure out a new language for dreaming and changing. I think that the strategies of institutional critique and the (now conventional) rhetoric of protest does more to distance and romanticize real problems like poverty and inequality and WAR, and that the tools Jason wants to use are generally used to let rich imperialists off the hook and keep all our oh-so-civilized hands clean.

Where we left off, Jason used Thoreau's Civil Disobedience as an example of how to bring down the mighty evil Bush administration.

Jason:

I understand your take on Thoreau as being active. I guess the crux of my argument is that this kind of action used to make much more sense than it does now.

Protests are not effective when they are called "focus groups" by the president, and when the point of the protesters seems to be to disassociate themselves from the government (ie, Not In My Name) and not to take ownership of it. Don't pay taxes? That is a strategy of the rich, and while I hate the idea of paying for all this dying, I don't want to leave things we need unfunded (like superrich people get to do...)

And voluntary imprisonment? It looks so strange in the context of Guantanamo to think about voluntary imprisonment. It seems so quaint (to use a Gonzales-ism) to think that anyone gives a fuck that you have imprisoned yourself when we are holding people who have done nothing wrong in jails and torturing them for years.

We simply do not live in a society that values life in a way that makes your voluntary imprisonment meaningful.

At the risk of sounding highfallutin', I am looking for a new rhetoric of protest--new ways to dream about better days for all. And that is probably going to shake out like everything else in life. It's probably going to be impossible to just go out and find, and it is probably going to need some sideways action.

For this reason, I do think that the most political things one can do right now are not explicitly political, but more generally intellectual. And I think that this is true because we have lost our very language for action and dreaming. I want to know what the world looks like when humans engage, because there is so much disengagement (masquerading both as apathy and as protest). I want to know how to increase the negative capacity of the average citizen, because we have to be able to stare down such horror. I want to make complexity interesting, because Karl Rove is counting on your eyes to glaze over.

I want to know how to talk about truth in a way that is not about power and not about relatavism, because the powerful have co-opted relativism and are using it to perpetrate the biggest fucking lies.

Jason, in other words, I want to examine power, and truth, and figure out how much power an artist can have to find truth, because truth is a rudder. I think that work is also a rudder, and so I want to know what work looks like, and I want to strip away all the romantic layers of distance that cover everything and ask empowering questions like how does it work? What is holding all this up? What is the structure that is over me? What happens if I touch this? What happens if I break it? I can't do this from the outside. Well, I can, but I can't get the same kind of information. It is one thing to critique someone else's building, and another entirely to make your own. I want to look at all this evil we have wrought with the intimacy of a tinkerer, not the distance of a critic.

I am sure that you will find these tactics distressingly vague, especially since we have argued about political art in the past. But you know, I honestly believe that hammering away at this problem like Thoreau, no matter how much I respect Thoreau's work many years ago in bringing about a total revolution in thought, is not going to do anything today except make folks feel okay about living in an empire.

I think that this is why art and artists and intellectuals (the Thoreaus of right now!) have so much to offer. I think that this is why MLS is wrong, that this is a great time to be an artist. It is a paradoxical time when at the same time we are so urgently lost and so totally comfortable. It's like we are living in that last two minutes before you jump out of bed, realizing that you are an hour late for work. I want to be ready, I want to know where my pants and my toothbrush are. Anything can happen. It is a time of amazing potential, and I don't want to be saying no to it. I want to figure out how to say yes in a way that is meaningful and good and is not a lie or a gloss.

Frankly, if I knew what that meant, I would stop making art and start going and doing it. But I don't know yet. So I screw tires together and think about it.

Implicated

2007-05-10T19:38:00.000-04:00

On Romantic Bullshit

2007-05-07T23:05:00.000-04:00

In the previous post, Geoff and I started groovin' on some mysterious bullshit... and we both have had some romantic zingers, and I would like to land on this one:

My feeling is that all great works of art, the timeless ones... understand this thing of which we speak. And that it is what we consider beauty in the end. I don't think it is such a mystery, and i think by making this beauty undefinable or unobtainable, just out of reach, we continue to enjoy our laziness.

This is verbal kung fu. In this statement, Geoff manages to bust with some totally romantic bullshit and simultaneously call me out on some totally romantic bullshit! All great works of art have this one thing in common? It's really that easy?

And we are actually talking about beauty?

And yet, this beauty-waving motherfucker has the presence of mind to see that yes. I am absolutely being lazy when I say I cannot describe that which is right in front of me!

Seriously now. We are both (inappropriately) gettin' our Keats on. I don't think that we are talking about anything as vague as "beauty" or "the human condition" any more than I buy that it is truly unexplainable or untouchable or in any other way beyond us.

I think the thing that's messing with the verbiage is that we are both looking for "something greater." All that looking can cause you to strain yourself. To look too far ahead, behind or to the side.

I think it is this straining that causes romantic lapses. And I think that the only cure for this straining is refocusing on that which is in front of you.

Let us, then, refocus on reality, and on what is directly in front of us:

The question was, "What is the aesthetic of implication?"

And Geoff and I so far have concluded, I think, that it's an aesthetic of interconnectedness and vulnerability, of cause-and-effect, an absence of separations. Geoff thinks beauty plays a role, and I would love to hear why because I have a very troubled relationship to beauty myself. We both agree that a lot of the verbiage surrounding western-buddhist dogma (like compassion) is unhelpful, but are somewhat at a loss when trying to figure out what to replace it with.

We seem to agree that there are existential truths that are illuminated when one focuses on the interconnectedness of all being, and what that looks like. You perhaps see the vast potential of your own self, your capacity to become boundless or accept more than you previously thought possible.

I would argue that there is a Real Magic angle to all this. That even though there is no romance or other slight-of-hand, you can actually become larger than you thought you could...

...it's just that in order to do this, you have to become much smaller than you thought you were.

EDITED TO ADD:

Geoff, when I called you a motherfucker in this post, I meant it in a friendly way, in the same way you would call a friend a bad-ass. And when I wrote that you wrote bullshit, I took it for granted that I think we both know that we were both kinda bullshitting...

...and that neither of us could help it. It's a big topic.

Now that I am re-reading this post, I am seeing that you, or someone else, could have thought that I literally think that you are a motherfucker! And that instead of making fun of us, a too-fast read could make it seem that I am just making fun of you!

I think enough blog-spit has been swapped between us for you to trust that I have a deep respect for you and am a potty-mouthed kidder! But the other twenty- or thirty-something of you:

Geoff is a great guy and I am not really calling him a Motherfucker, and I am not making fun of him as much as I am trying to inject a little levity in an otherwise too-serious discussion that we are both engaged in.

Implicated

2007-04-30T08:52:00.000-04:00

The problem with liberalism as we know it is that it's oppositional.

Institutional critique stands outside institutions and describes the way power works. Fine art applauds anything that offends, at any price. Card-carrying democrats know that they cannot stop the war, so they cry that it is "not in my name."

Liberalism uses the concept of against. It says that we are right in relationship to this wrong that is outside us, that we separate ourselves from. We have tuned in and dropped out and turned on.

But it is absurd to attempt to oppose that which you create. Democrats and Republicans are part of the same fake democracy that caters pretty much exclusively to big business at the expense of the citizen, and yet this fact does not excuse this administration's tyrrany! Mark diSuvero and Richard Serra, bless their hearts, pushed their rhetoric of protest at the last Whitney Biennial, and it was not powerful. What was powerful was the institution that they helped to create, draining the meaning from their protest. What more do you need? The institution swallowed the Peace Tower whole, for chrissakes! I don't need any more evidence that Chrissie and Paul were truly curating--that they were truly telling us a story about the zeitgeist!

Opposition from within creates all kinds of ridiculouslessness, like conservatives getting all up in Al Gore's business for flying a lot and therefore having a relatively large carbon footprint. Looking at this absurdity and attempting to oppose it creates art that is abject, art that throws up its hands, or looks only inward, or just says fuck this, and fuck you.

I say fuck that. I am implicated, and so are you. As part of an imperialist nation, I am an imperialist. And as part of a capitalist society, I am a capitalist. The Dalai Lama is right. George W. Bush has been my mother. We are cooking the planet, killing thousands of Iraqis, fucking our own poor and patriotic by sending them off to die in a war that we say is "not in our name." We all have a lot of blood on our hands, and there is nothing abject about that. I can't talk for you, but that is a situation that I have a serious emotional investment in.

If the aesthetic of opposition (I am right, and this is wrong) is moving more and more toward the abject, what is the aesthetic of implication?

Against

2007-04-28T07:11:00.000-04:00

You build off of what is already level, flat or "true".

When you do that, you can put a measuring tool against that one good thing and make sure all other things conform to the goodness or rightness that is already apparent.

In this way, "rightness" or "trueness" in building is relative--it travels throughout a structure. And it is also something made my humans. Trees are cut into planks and then shoved through a planer until all four planes are flat and true. Steel is melted and extruded into the right shapes, shapes you can put a square against.

I TA'ed introduction to art history for Sheldon Nodelman, and he has a theory that starting from a flat or true place--and the subsequent convenience of the right angle--is an Egyptian innovation. I do not have a comprehensive enough understanding of history to prove him right or wrong.

But I absolutely buy the gestalt: the flat plane and the right angle can make you feel so powerful that you try to change that which is unchangeable... like death.

These are conceptual tools that make "structure" as we know it possible. Material can rise up out of the earth and defy its nature mostly because once we have a true starting point--we can make infinite triangles that will go infinitely upward.

(Thanks, Brancusi)

Anyway, I am wondering if it is necessary to think about structure in terms of working against that "truth" that you create first. Because any "truth" that comes from my lips or hands is not truth at all... at worst it's just the tyranny of my own small mind, and at best it's just an arbitrary convention.

The crappy part is that this question has the capacity to collapse quickly into a saccharin Goldsworthyan naturefest. To be clear: I am not talking about spirals or stacking stones or working without tools. That Andy Goldsworthy sure is a clever chap, but I hate the way he fancies himself unimplicated when he is just pushing his truth all over the countryside.

I am not talking about that kind of conservatism. I am talking about that moment when you realize that you are not talking about nature at all, because you can't. Because all you know is materials. And you want to know what these materials would do if you could have an honest conversation with them about where they came from and what they can do. A conversation in which they did most of the talking.

I am talking about that awkward moment in a conflict when you realize that you have been a real bully with your version of the truth, which you see suddenly is not true at all, and so you have to shut up and listen.

See Me In Pasadena

2007-04-23T10:55:00.000-04:00

Until May 31 you can see my work at the vacant Homestead House in Pasadena (Colorado at El Molino).

Continued huge thanks to Tim Quinn and Kathryn Hargraves at Dangerous Curve, and also to Phantom Galleries LA.

More Event Information can be found here, including driving directions.

All Didion, All The Time

2007-04-21T20:48:00.000-04:00

Last year it was Matthew Barney...

...this year, if I manage to follow through, there will be sustained looking at Joan Didion.

I'll start by admitting my ignorance. I hadn't read anything by Didion until March of this year. I bought Slouching Towards Bethlehem because I was mystified by the success of The Year of Magical Thinking, which I will probably never read because I am just too afraid of death and even more afraid of being the last one standing. I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to read that book, or even talk about it publicly. And yet last year folks did, and I figured that The Year of Magical Thinking must be some steely, girdered thing indeed if Didion can manage to sit and talk to Terry Gross about this total fucking horror of everyone dying because that horror is now a work of prose.

It seems obvious that turning reality into a story is an organizational task. That it's about creating structure. And speaking of structure, it turns out Slouching Towards Bethlehem was, to quote the horse's mouth, "...the first time (Didion) had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart."

I want to know how to structure that, because "things fall apart" is a theme around here. And I am interested in what exactly Didion does in the face of that falling apart. When things fall apart, it is easiest to be abject, aloof, ironic. A smartass or a know-it-all. Part of the peanut gallery. Didion doesn't seem, so far, to collapse in any of those directions, and in so doing she seems to create structure out of a specific kind of structurelessness that seems really relevant right now.

Why I Never Write Anymore

2007-04-17T19:34:00.000-04:00

When I am not screwing tires to tires, I can be found wandering around my house with a dustmask on... pry bar in one hand, trash bag in another. I don't read these days, either. Or go out for drinks. Or watch movies.

Good thing this is temporary. I declare August Netflix Month! Nothing but juleps with fresh mint and stoop sittin' and Fellini! Everyone's invited.

Saws

2007-04-03T19:17:00.000-04:00

Joel Murphy's Crusty Old Farts Hopping Around On Their Peckers Controlled by Their Alien Subconscious" [aka 'saws'] will be on view for TEN DAYS ONLY at the Chelsea Art Museum, which is great because you have to see it in person.

See, the chainsaw-whippers control the shoppingcart reciprocating saws in the center of the room by making sparks! and noise! Which makes the peckersaws go KUGUGUGUGUGUGUG! as they push themselves around pathetically in a little circle.

Clicky Here to see a little video, get an explanation of what you are seeing, and basically see for yourself why you really should see it in person.

The opening is Thursday night. You can't possibly have something better to do.

More Solid State

2007-03-29T07:48:00.000-04:00

So it's growing taller! Right now it's almost half as tall as I want it to be.

And about half as tall, and the big news that it's structurally sound! I can pick it up like it's a rigid thing and not like it's a really, really heavy and funny-shaped futon!

Knight of the Living Dead

2007-03-24T09:21:00.000-04:00

Zizek is discussing torture in today's Times.

The lesson to take from our treatment of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is that we have created a legal grey area in which there are "legal" and "illegal" criminals and in which torture is legitimate for some and not others, and that the ethical consequences of this are vast:

A precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.

And I'll have something to say about this later. I have to eat some pancakes before I face the loss of our civilization's greatest achievement.

Speaking of Structural...

2007-03-17T16:54:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted in awhile, and it's not because I despair.

I bought a house, and its structure is... interesting and troubled, and deeply buried beneath a lot of layers of flimsy cosmetic coverups. I do continue to think about Zizek, Chelsea, democracy and Didion. It's just that lately I do this thinking while I am jabbing screwdrivers into joists, figuring out what to replace and what to repocket, and removing layer upon layer of lazy landlord bullshit. The inside of my house is going to be so much bigger once I have removed all the walls that seem to have been erected for the sole purpose of hiding something. I am going to pay a carting guy a lot of money (about as satisfying as paying a dentist), but hopefully I'll emerge from this with a much better understanding about what structure means.

Posting might be a little thin over the next few months, but who knows? This high-stakes structural work is really inspiring, even though I have no idea how to talk about it yet.

Wish me luck.

Structure v. Romance

2007-03-06T11:06:00.001-05:00

I write for emotional reasons. I write, mostly, to find ways to hope.

And I haven’t been posting for awhile, and it’s because all the other people writing about Zizek left my thinking about hope in a funny place, and I so had to despair for a little while before I figured out that it is good to have a diagnosis like Zizek’s after all.

Because as soon as I started thinking in Zizek’s terms, I started seeing evidence of his gigantic Loss (or true victory) everywhere. And the only response I could give it was really romantic. I wrote draft after draft of Holden Caulfield-esque rants about this and that being so fake and hollow, and how nobody sees the problem, but I do, and then I would read every single one of these manifestos and shake my head and say to myself that I am not fifteen, and that I don’t actually know much. And that thinking about the culture that we live in in terms of its fakeness in relationship to an ideal (that exists where? In my own head?) is really quite...

...distancing. Romantic. Part of the problem.

Because what is real? And who am I to say that the world I live in is fake? I mean, I hate that Manhattan is, increasingly, a giant outdoor mall, or that Chelsea is full of art that is not very good, as much as the next guy. But if I hang myself with a braided leather belt in a changing room at the Gap, I am still dead.

Seeing that my only responses proved Zizek right made me feel rather stuck. But then I had the good fortune to read Joan Didion’s 1967 essay, Slouching Toward Bethlehem this weekend. I don’t have it in front of me. But she follows some hippies around the Haight, which is full of drugs and naive kids, and kids are starving themselves to death and getting raped and basically it’s not all free love like it was cracked up to be.

But it’s not just about that. She is telling a story about selfish people. They care a lot about being loose and free and breaking down walls. But they don’t seem to see that there are walls, or structures, within a society that are useful. She focuses on the transaction cost that comes with breaking down societal structures. It creates situations where three-year-olds are getting high, in which homeless girls with punemonia are left on someone’s floor for ten days without anyone to care for them. And these situations are genuinely horrible, but she doesn’t tell this story as a moralist. She tells the story as a structuralist. She sees that these hippies’ goal is simply a life without the multiple drags of money or family or responsibility to others. Being a hippie, to Didion in this essay, seems to be the ultimate expression of radical individualism.

And the beauty of Didion is that she sees that this radically individualistic life lacks the love and care that is embodied and expressed in structures like family, law and ethics.

And so it goes, right now. In 2007, not 1967. Where the abject reign of the individual reaches epic heights. The Me Generation has evolved only so far as the My Generation.

The only response to this radical indivudalism that makes any sense is to find the strength in what is still structurally sound. This is not to be conservative. It is not backward-looking. It’s not about valuing what used to be real and is now fake and hollow. Instead, it’s about finding cultural leverage. The Bush Administration is relying on people to be too selfish to understand how democracy works. Has he broken it or not? Is the Chelsea Machine dependent upon capitalism and capable of accepting strong expression, or is it disseminating a specific set of mannered rationalizations for imperialism, and therefore culturally worthless?

These are questions of strength.

Three Cheers for Zizek!

2007-02-22T18:34:00.000-05:00

Both Jodi Dean and HighLow were right to start by looking to the horse's mouth:

The true victory (the true 'negation of the negation') occurs when the enemy talks your language. In this sense, a true victory is a victory in defeat. It occurs when one's specific message is accepted as a universal ground, even by the enemy.

--Slavoj Zizek presents Mao: On Practice and Contradition

And Dean wastes no time asserting that the political left in America has simply not figured out that the terms of the dream must change, that their message is not just accepted by the enemy... it's really being put to work by the enemy. (I particularly like her example of imperialist asshole presidents "spreading democracy...")

Dean's diagnosis, a'la Zizek? Because the enemy has taken over our language, we lack even the ability to say what we want, to state exactly what's wrong. We have lost the language for dreaming.

Highlow superbly takes this one step further, past politics and into art. He's right about irony and all those other "tried and true methods of revolt - ugly painting, pornography, appropriation, "low" art..." These strategies are no longer saying No to anything. They are referring to a tension that is such old news that the art doesn't just look stagnant or mannered. It looks as conservative as "spreading democracy."

Highlow sees the empty rhetoric of protest art being rebranded as a "niche style(s) that in fact resemble the establishment more than they confront the establishment and the practitioners are allowed to continue on with their illusions of dissent."

And honestly, I think he's being too nice. Allowed to continue on with their llusions of dissent, my eye! I could just be crabbin' on Armory Season... but I think the picture is much more round. I think art buyers are out there actively rationalizing imperialism by buying art that has a specific countercultural manner.

All this leaves me shilling for an old argument: The most important political action an artist can take is to make apolitical art. Political strategies in art wind up telling viewers what to think, and this works too well, and takes us all away from Zizek's goal:

...in a radical revolution, people not only have to 'realize thgeir old (emancipatory, etc.) dreams'; rather, they have to reinvent their very modes of dreaming.

I know that this is frustratingly indirect, and that we live in perilous times, but I will say it again. Art that moves past all those old counterculture tropes and into the unknown is about the only thing that can get us back on the dreaming path.

Get Thee To Pierogi

2007-02-19T06:53:00.000-05:00

Michael Schall, Mining The Crevasse, 2007. Image stolen from Pierogi's website.

There's a hint of earnestness in the air. And I like it.

I know, I know. That is not a sexy hook in a world where Dash Snow still manages to titilate. But it is interesting. Instead of seeing Some Lazy Strewn Something, or Documentation of a Studied, Self-Oriented Artist's Personal Obsession, or Pretty Doodles...

...I walked into Pierogi Saturday and found art that takes itself a little seriously. That does existential heavy lifting. That asks questions.

Michael Schall's drawings and Jonathan Schipper's Pinnate Phlogiston installation work well together--it was great to look at Schall's work while smelling exhaust and listening to gallerinas explain that they can only run the sculpture for thirty seconds because it poisons them. This atmosphere gave the drawings a sense of danger that they would otherwise aspire to. And Schall's drawings evoke a bleakness and carefulness that sets a person into the right frame of mind to watch Schipper's Firebird birds slowly, lamely turn. There is a stupidness to this piece--the way it poisons, the inelegance of the kinetic gesture and how that clunkiness compares to how expensive it looks--that could turn a viewer off. You could look at this thing and start trying to fix it, or start running up the budget for it in the McMaster-Carr Catalog In Your Mind. But in this installation, after looking at Schall's drawings, you can see it for what it actually is and kind of fall in love. This thing is a poem written by a teenager, complete with shadowy effects and too much explanation and eight cylinders of bravado with no wheels, going nowhere. It is the first effective thing I have seen come out of the 2003-04 Chelsea Goth Obsession. It actually harnesses angst to a larger, truly important question. It actually asks about the space between the engine and the tree. How necessary.

Schall's work is much more straightforward--less ambitious, but also less frought. These careful blandscapes out of graphite on paper are looking at the space between what we build and the earth it sits on. And they derive a certain cold elegance by focusing pretty much exclusively on that boundary and nothing else. The logic of these drawings seems to be in flux. Sometimes the image is driven by verbs--the earth swallowing up or lifting the built world--and sometimes its more of a visual thing, as in: I see a vista of spindly peaks and imagine that there are conduits inside these peaks. Of course, I am biased. I like the verb-driven drawings. A lot. And I like them because they are cold and elegant and simple. They are the opposite of histrionic. They want to understand, not judge or fear.

If they don't already, I think that Schall and Schipper should collaborate, or at least have coffee regularly. I envision a world in which Schall takes more chances, and in which Schipper makes elegant choices that foil or complicate his desparation and striving, and that world makes me grin from ear to ear. These artists are doing important intellectual work, and it is going to be great fun watching them continue to grow, learn and push. They are framing "the environment" as the existential problem it is, and we all desperately need this kind of understanding.

Even if it means abandoning irony and taking a chance on riskier, more rigorous tactics.

More About Truth, or What I Saw On My Trip to Los Angeles

2007-02-10T11:28:00.000-05:00

Let me start with a quote from Artblog Comments:

Now, if consciousness and selfhood derive not from a single coherent source such as a soul, but from many scattered sources, for me to allow my current idea of who "I" am to determine what my work will and won't be is at the very least restrictive. Better in my estimation to let the impulse to create and my responses to the results instruct me on what this "I" truly consists of, its boundaries and its true nature.

Mmmm, truth. How can such a simple idea be so slippery? I think that the problems with truth are all in where you put your perceiving organism. It's a problem of vectors, and Bill illuminates this by thinking about the source of consciousness, and his lovely assertion that the vectors moving between the creator and the creating are going the wrong way. We are accustomed in western culture to looking at consciousness as an inside-outside problem, and to think that it's a matter of getting our insides out for all the world to see.

Caspar David Friedrich, Prehistoric Tomb in the Snow, 1807, shamelessly lifted from the Getty's website

Joel and I were talking about this at the Getty, where there is currently a weird little show juxtaposing Caspar David Friedrich and Gerhard Richter. Of course, Friedrich is supporting the dominant paradigm here. His paintings are sublime because he takes what's inside and throws it outside, through his eyes, onto what he sees in the landscape. So if you were going to draw vector lines to understand the truth of a Friedrich painting, you would draw two lines going from his "soul" inside him, out his eyeballs, into the world, where they then coat everything he sees in his sense of self. In other words, each Friedrich is an outside that is full of his insides. We know this paradigm--it is a staple of expressionism. And I would argue that we have not rejected this relationship between the artist's inside and outside, but we do think that it's more ironic. After all, Friedrich's truth is not my truth, and who does he think he is to speak for me, that Dead White Motherfucker?

Kendell Carter, Hommie, 2006, shamelessly lifted from the Hammer's website

There is much contemporary art that still shadowboxes that basic inside-to-outside paradigm, but to much less thrilling effect because it's not about truth anymore--rather, it's about truth's absence. Kendell Carter's artist-as-consumer installation at the Hammer is not offering a new set of vectors as much as it's shortening the lines. He sees design, hiphop culture, breakdancing, ikea, graffitti and bling, and he is therefore a part of its commodification. So his insides still move out into the world, and they still take what is external to the artist and infect it with meaning, but the meaning isn't about truth.

And this makes sense, because we know that Friedrich and Pollock were both living a kind of arrogant lie, right? That this is not a good way to find truth, right? But I would argue that it might be more fun and more powerful to find new avenues toward truth instead of issuing an ironic statement about the lying nature of this relationship.

Carter is smart with his eyes, and he knows that looking at things gives them values that shift from context to context, from class to class. And that's what Hommie/Homey is about--it's about presenting signifiers from different kinds of people together, with a big handful of hiphop and graffitti over the whole thing. Carter's statement is loud and clear:

"I feel bad about the commodification of hiphop/graffitti/breakdancing culture, and yet I am a part of that act of commodification because here I am, self-conciously, in a museum, and I see that."

And yes. Carter is right, but it lands with a thud. What's the larger point? Where is the redemption? Why am I standing here?

I stood in Carter's installation for a long time because the obligatory video verite included some really fun breakdancing footage. And I kept thinking to myself, you know, I am a skinny little white girl from the whitest town on the planet and everything, but I can't help but think that Carter should be watching the breakdancers and ditching the design fetish. Design is part of that taking over the external world with your eyes paradigm that Friedrich represents for a few more paragraphs, and Carter obviously knows that this is a dead end. But the breakdancers are doing something else entirely. They are throwing out if-then statements about the relationship between their bodies and the sidewalk, and in doing so they are finding a thousand tiny truths about gravity and their own biology, and how they can bend and break these rules of physics and physical embodiment. What they are doing is powerful.

Like Bill Gusky, the breakdancers are switching the vectors. Instead of looking out into the world and attempting to grab and hold and own and conquer, because we know that's a dead end, they are letting the world (the floor, really) hit them and responding. And in that constant adjustment, they are finding more than what we previously thought was possible.

Um... and I would call the results from that process of infinite adjustment a large set of tiny truths that are beholden to no individual because they came from without and not from within.

Gerhard Richter, Wald (892-1), 2005, shamelessly lifted from the Getty's website

Okay, back to the Getty. The Friedrich paintings were juxtaposed with Richter paintings. And yeah. This seemed awfully random to me as well. But if you sit down and really look at the show, the vectors become quite clear. Richter, like Carter's breakdancers, is moving from the outside in. His work is consistently about these kinds of small truth, about the truth paint contains when subjected to a negotiating process, about the truth of a photograph, the truth of images. Perhaps Gusky would say that Richter is not restricting himself to talking about himself, that he would rather be a conduit through which experiments about the nature of reality pass.

Some Influence: New Sculpture At Dangerous Curve

2007-02-06T12:21:00.000-05:00

I'm back in New York, and LA was a blast! I saw great art, I met fantastic people, I had a really, really nice opening. For now, I cannot thank Tim and Kathy at Dangerous Curve enough, for taking a chance on an out-of-towner, and for throwing such a generous party, and for being so great in general. I wish I had some paparazzi shots, but for now this will suffice. Here are a few candid images of the art, courtesy James Graham:

There is so much to write about. Brent Burkett, hold on to your hat: I am finally ready to talk about the difference between LA and NY... after I unpack.

Heading to LA

2007-01-31T07:21:00.000-05:00

I'll be in Los Angeles this afternoon, and hopefully will get to see some good stuff. If you are in town, come see my good stuff Saturday night.

Solid State Change

2007-01-28T16:53:00.000-05:00

This project for Middlebury College started looking like a sculpture for the first time today... so I went ahead and took pictures. This is the beginning of the process. All that expanded metal is going to be cement. And probably three-dimensional and not so much like a plank (although I am digging the way it is lifting off the ground right now...). And it's going to be much taller--right now it's only about three feet off the ground. Eventually it's going to be about 9 feet tall...

...I think.

One of the funniest things about this project is the fact that it's a process piece that I made a model and concept drawings for. The difference between the drawings and the thing itself will be very interesting to watch unfold.

The Strategy:

1. Let the tires and whatnot accumulate and deform the expanded metal shape
2. See what shapes result and "lock in" those shapes with a bunch of armature steel.
3. Build a fake curved wall and figure out the best possible relationship between the sculpture and the wall
4. "Lock in" that relationship with more steel.
5. Add cement, cut and cover naked screwheads, and generally finesse it into something that someone would want to keep around for twenty years.

The proposal and concept drawings for Solid State Change can be found here.

Installation and the Self-Consciousness of Sculpture

2007-01-24T14:38:00.000-05:00

Caveat: Unless it’s Rachel Harrison (the woman who is not an art historian) or Franz West (the Austrian), it is almost impossible to figure out who is talking on this podcast. If only Handforth was more invested in his Britishness. If only Ellegood and Burton didn’t sound so similar. The chances of me misattributing a quote or paraphrase are excellent.

EllegoodBurton asked about the difference between installation and sculpture. And she made a distinction that I found intriguing. She categorized installation as viewer-focused, that it wants very much to make the viewer feel this way or that. Sculpture, on the other hand, stands alone. It can’t consider you (I think this is what Burton meant when she said it doesn’t need you) or how you feel, and this creates an antagonistic relationship between sculpture and viewer. I thought that making this distinction was quite insightful.

The artists didn’t really talk about this distinction very well in that moment, with that microphone. And I can understand. It’s hard to extemporaneously throw out a few clever words about how this works, because it’s complicated and subtle. Besides, I don’t know about the panelists, but I have never thought about my own work in these terms before.

But what the heck? I'm always game for a few paragraphs.

Sculpture is bounded--it has an inside and an outside, and you only have access to the outside. So relating to it is a lot like relating to a person. Charles Long went in this direction on the podcast, but digressed into how sculpture kills people. And that’s an interesting topic, but let’s get that original thought--the thought about the sculpture being like a body--back on track.

Both physically and emotionally, we have a tense relationship with the inside/outside dynamic of humans. Who doesn't pore over anatomy books? Intestines are cool. But your intestines? Maybe not so much. It's hard to think of yourself and your friends as fesh, as intestines. Isn’t it? It’s one of those things that we all know. You are not some homogenous sausage that can be sliced into slices that will all look the same. If I cut into you, all your different parts will become apparent. But we can’t seem to walk around with this in mind.

This is one of the most amazing things about being in shock because you’ve been wounded. It's a transcendent state in which your gore is completely acceptable.

Similarly, everyone wants to know about your emotional life and what you are thinking and feeling... except that they don’t. They don’t want to know at all. I find this problematic relationship between one’s emotional inside and outside much more interesting than the no-brainer revelation that your organs are both awful and fascinating.

We love confessions and seek them out because they create intimacy. But at the same time we have no idea what to do with that intimacy once we’ve got it. The only way I can think about this is to tell a story in which I fucked up:

I had a student who was being really disruptive and aggressive in a college class. I didn’t want it to escalate, so I went the intimacy route. I told her I was worried. I asked her to talk to me about what was going on. Let’s just say I got a lot more than I bargained for. She told me everything and I was left having to say that I am her teacher, and that I am concerned about her behavior in my classroom, and that she needs to the student health center. The remainder of the semester that knowledge of this student’s inside life hung over the classroom, made interactions difficult, made her question her grade, made everything all wrong. If only I had honored her fight to keep all that stuff inside and just asked for appropriate behavior!

I erred because we live in a world in which intimacy is supposed to be good (think Oprah and Dr. Phil) when in fact it is often terrifying and inappropriate. Putting your inside life on the outside is a defilement of structure. Your worries and woes, before they are anything else, are unsupported when you put them outside. That’s why we all walk around monitoring those boundaries between our inside and our outside life.

A sculpture is caught up in that kind of inside-outside problem. It’s not that it doesn’t need you, it’s that it has this inside life that may be like my student or it may be like your most cherished lover. And there is something very powerful in making an object that can offer up some, all, or none of that inside/outside relationship. One of the things I love about Tara Donovan’s work is its basic honesty. It is what it is--armatureless and homogenous. In a weird way, just stacking straws or piling toothpicks is a lot like getting away with wearing your heart on your sleeve.

Just as other people are not thinking about you (rather, they are totally engaged with their own internal dialogue and whether their pants look as bunchy as they feel), a sculpture is not thinking about you. Unlike a service-oriented installation, a sculpture is sitting there like every other asshole, figuring out how to hold itself together, completely engaged with its own relationship between its inside and its outside. Now that I have written a little bit about it... I would call this sculptural trait self-consciousness. And I think, to briefly touch Nick’s latest post, that this self-consciousness makes turning every installation into an Installation unnecessary.

I know this isn’t Rachel Harrison, Mark Handforth and Reality. I still don’t know what to say about Reality that hasn’t already been said last week. I’ll stop promising, and just say that the Next Stop could be:

Buddhism, Paradox and Gil Scot Heron: Why Charles Long Is My New Sculpture Boyfriend.

Apocalypse Alert

2007-01-22T19:08:00.000-05:00

This image comes to you courtesy of Edward Burtynsky

High, Low and In Between is kicking your endtimes ass all over this wasteland.

If you haven't already, I strongly suggest pouring yourself a neat bourbon and settling in for the night.