+ WRITING

The following MP3 list is a short overview of some of the music I’ve been listening to lately, while making things.
Ghosts.mp3
01-Door-Opens-Both-Ways.mp3
02 Beach Point Pleasant.mp3
04 Movement II_ Sleeping Invader.mp3
07 Should have taken acid with you.mp3
03 Hearing Damage.mp3
07 Lovers' Carvings.mp3
10 Maria Lionza (Album Version).mp3

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Watching another person’s hands can nearly be as mesmerizing as working with your own.

I’m quite fond of the process of drawing, and love the claim of using it as a form of thinking [as though it were doing it on its own]. Perhaps, this post will act as a simple, subtle reminder to do something with your hands today.

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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Experiencing representation via representations, is one of the primary ways in which contemporary visual art retains its contextual power and distributes its specialized language. Because I’ve remained ‘connected’ to art through these various channels of art world media, I thought it might benefit others, who are also removed from happenings of the global art world, to share these sources. I’ve already shared a good amount of these video sources in previous posts, so I’ll compile them all below. Introducing yet another ongoing post…

The Behavioral Guide to Artist, Gallery and Institutional Performances
The Tate Channel (Beta)
Vernissage TV
ART:21
The Walker Channel
SFMOMA Video Archive
NewArtTV

As you can see, there is so much to watch that you can simply replace making art with looking at it, unless of course all you like to do is look at it.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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The Art School As Fashionable Education Culture theme that I touched upon on in the previous entry of +ART SCHOOL is beginning to surface once again in the work of artist collective Bruce High Quality Foundation’s installation/performance-series called Bruce High Quality Foundation University.
Read more about the free and unaccredited University in this NY Times article by Roberta Smith.

Listen to the Bruce High Quality Foundation discuss their previous work, Isle of the Dead, below.

[Additional information on the unforeseen catastrophe that is relational aesthetics, coming soon.]

Required Reading: As stated before, elements of the codification of various professional art behaviors are listed in Paper Monument’s I like your work: art and etiquette, pictured below. [Highly Recommended]

Happy Educating!
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Art is a language of caring, that is clearly realized in the roles of the conservator, preparator, archiving photographer, curator, security guard [the list goes on], and etc. Together, these roles become a family [in its ideal state of nurture] for a work of art, intending upon the task of keeping the objects at hand alive and thriving. And because art, thanks to modernism and its post, is primarily concerned with the history of individuality, each indexical gesture on the object is aligned with the concern and fascination of ‘what was this person thinking,’ or ‘how was this person feeling when they did this.’ Because this language of care is a byproduct of its maker no longer being able to do this on their own, or the investment of value an institution frames an artist and their work in, we begin to imagine the care they/we give as being reciprocal. If we are able to continue to hold an individual and their contributions close to our everyday lives, well after they’ve died or if they’re simply too far away to encounter, the repetition of this care allows us to imagine it happening for us, after we no longer live. Thus, another feedback loop is established and art’s particular methods of corresponding to the abstractions of death become a universal behavior and ritual, akin to that of any religion but separate because of contextualization.

For a beautifully constructed, operatic version of what I’ve been describing, please watch the TateShots video below. It’s a behind the scenes look at the Tate’s exhibition, Turner and The Masters.

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Is Struggle the quintessential art expression? Eh, probably. We’d simply call the contemporary visual artist, a trickster [for the most part] if our culture were more folkloric or mythological. And as you can imagine, the trickster has a somewhat difficult role with the emotional arduousness of living with social shame caused by disobeying normal rules and/or conventional behavior. But thanks to feedback-loop-logic, the trickster is only inspired by such social condemnation and thus pushes more emphatically against the walls of its boundaries. Thus, we can simply say that restraint begets creativity [i.e. Matthew Barney] because we say that creativity solves problems [and creates them at times when there are none for the problem solving entity to assimilate and transform].

Case in Point: China, and the Chinese Art Market boom.
Where as some of the market boom in China may seem like the precursory surface glam of “The Great Recession,” there is an undercurrent intending to tip the unbalanced level of psychic trauma caused by the mnemonic generation’s* relationship to the last 60 years [and many more] of dictatorship. The New York Times has a brilliant video called Forbidden Art in China that undeniably illustrates this point.

Unfortunately, the only comparable ‘collective’ restraint placed upon American creativity is Capitalism and its economy [which is closely linked to religiosity]. With that said, it’s rather strange that art which takes that thread of collective meaning as a basis for its process is commonly reduced to a superficial hologram of the political dynamics which occurred during the 60′s and 70′s. Or, perhaps that’s the misfortune of the baby boomer generation, which is primarily responsible for those dynamics during that period and also primarily holds the majority of teaching positions within creative education, as they continue to refuse their inability to return to the discomfort of systemic confrontation. Hence the cliché of concern.

[*'mnemonic generation' is the term I'm giving to the generation of individuals that has the furthest claim of interpersonal/public memory. If there is an actual term for this, please tell me what it is in the comments for this post.]

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ART’S NOT FAIR, is a generic way to generalize the art fair experience. And fashion show performances are more exciting for the ‘audience.’

This sort of simplification is an all too common approach to summing up the experience of an art fair and its surrounding event organism. The reason for the simplification, is of course the overwhelming nature of the art fair as a far removed situational phenomenon which is designed to be specifically not everyday.  This removal of the everyday is a strategy common within the field of fine art and with yielding results as the participant must then use their capacity for creative interpretations to reinvent the field in which they are viewing [or at least that is the ideal framework]. The amplification of this strategy places high volumes of pressure on the individual set with the task of reinvention. Thus, the failure to remember individual components reoccurs and the experience is reduced to that of simply being overwhelming. Perhaps this element of other-worldlyness bolsters sales?

With that said, Art Forum Berlin wasn’t as overwhelming as previous fairs I have attended, including that of the American version of Art Basel. The well tailored space of the fair, in addition to its extremely well tailored gallerists and attendants, made for a calm and collected navigability through halls of booths. With the fair format withstanding, the occasional stand-out gallery and/or artist was usually taken up in clever exhibition tactics. While the stand-alone-full-wall-scaled-portal-sized paintings still proved to be effective at spatial situation, galleries devoted to installation, of any kind, stole the spectacle.

A personal standout was the work of Omer Fast. He’s recently been included in the exhibition National Gallery Prize for Young Art, at the Hamburger Banhof, in Berlin. He was also part of the Whitney Biennial in 2008, with a video installation called “The Casting,” which you can watch and listen to him talk about in this YouTube video. His video in Art Forum Berlin was a narrative that jumped around scenarios but focused on a young boy, in a suit, lip-syncing the narrative of a mortician as he discussed the reasons why death is such a difficult collective process. Clearly an off-topic exercise with universal meaning that was as awkward as it was well-crafted [even on a standard flat-screen television]. It was simply mesmerizing and emotional, two characteristics that seemed uncommon within the spectacle orgy.

For a more exacting depiction of the John Bock spectacle, “The greased bendsteering in the luggage gets tangled up with the white shirt,” or in Deutsch, “Die abgeschmierte Knicklenkung im Gepäck verheddert sich im weissen Hemd,” watch this video made by Vernissage.TV.

[Additional personal standouts are pictured above.]

(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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A user’s guide to artist in the studio behavior. Terry Winters does a wonderful job of breaking the art activity down into a visual vocabulary, while still remaining ‘painterly’ enough to not be too cerebral and therefore off-putting. He also pleasantly performs the intellectually accessible older artist man. Notice the way his gaze appears to be concerned about whether or not the language he is using is appropriate to your literate-ear. Clearly he is confident, beyond his years, with the speech he has prepared and practiced for this performance.

And yes, I’m only playing TateShots videos on this site because it matches the inherent aesthetic.

(1 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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