STRYKERS TOP 10 OF 2005

Since lists are so annoying and since they are contributing to the downfall of art criticism I thought I would add to the distruction with my own top ten list for 2005. Actually it is just a top two.



Number One:

In both of the magazines that we have read so far this semester what I believe to be the best show of the year was given very little coverage. Although Frieze included a full page image from Mike Kelley's show "Day Is Done" the magazine devoted a total of three sentences to the show.

Olivia and I were able to see Kelley's exhibition over the holiday break, and it completely blew us a way. We probably spent close to two and a half hours navigating the maze of projections, sets and photographs that filled the Gagosian gallery. Usually my patience with video work is very minimal. I remember at the 2004 Whitney Biennial that I did not spend more than 60 seconds with any one video piece, even then It took me a while to slog through all of the video work (actually now that I think of it Goshawk's contention that there is more crappy video art than any other art form may actually be correct). Kelley's work however more than held my attention. His elaborate gothic musicals inspired by the yearbook photographs of extra-curricular activities are both humorous and slightly creepy. Once inside the web of his installation I had a feeling of being in a poorly constructed haunted house where it was unclear whether the ridiculously costumed devils and witches where carrying real spears and magic spells.




NUMBER TWO

Lost on Itunes. I keep buying episodes of this dumb-assed show.

THOUGHTS: A JANUARY GROUP POST

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What's wrong with the forum?

For better or for worse Artforum has decided that art criticism should not be its main focus. Instead of existing as a forum for critical discussion it has become the People Magazine for the contemporary art world. In depth long articles are replaced with top-ten lists, previews, and glossy full page ads for chic Chelsea restaurants. Artforum offers a sampling of what artists are "hot", who is showing where and where everyone is eating. Artforum does this so high school teachers in Nebraska and graduate students in Chicago feel like they are getting a peek into what is happening in New York and L.A.

I do not however think that Artforum's current focus shirks any sort of obligation to criticism or artists. Artforum does not inhabit that space between academia and the market that many artists and institutions operate in. It is firmly planted on the side of the market and is structured to succeed in that market. If there is a crisis in criticism the remedy is not going to come from Artforum, or Frieze or any other commercial art publication. Artforum works just fine as a rolodex of shows and artists and can not be expected to exist as anything else. If we want sources of in depth criticism and discussion is it is up to us to create them. We can not just complain that a certain publication or institution is not what we think it should be.

WAIT A MINUTE

I will not sit back and allow Goshawk to steal the title of "Art World's Shitty Art Depository" from painting and hand it over to video work.

WEAPONS OF ART INSTRUCTION

Again we witness a good talk about intellectualized modes of prefabrication. I cannot avoid admiring the level of control Diana Thater strives for in her projects. That control, unfortunately, does not calibrate the actual way we experience the work.
"Beauty has depth. History has meaning. Screw the market! Keep the faith! History is to be read. Beauty is to be believed. Screw the market. Keep the faith."
Thater's speaking self is bratty and her sweeping generalizations about art may have been considered if they acquired extra dimension or two. The tiny loop of language in the lecture did not intentionally dumb down the work since Thater's manifesto is eight sentences long and sherecitess it like a grocery list every time it appears on screen (9).
The actual installations of China and Delphine are simple, quiet and pretty despite the historical bravado that Thater displays as the inventor of wall projection, durational meaning outside of linear narrative (abstract time), and sculpturo-arhitectural aspects of collaged projections that point to the most literal signifier of video-the color bar. All these things were examined much better long before Thater made anything (also in writing: Kittler, Cavel, Joseph etc.).
Jump looks just like Stryker described it. I feel that the only reason that Thater did not choreograph the rope jumpers is that it would look a lot like Spike Jonze music video (as if it already doesn't). Variant performances of Bob Dylan remind me of works I like that do much more with the multiple processing of popular and personal experience (Huyghe's Third Memory) and the mapping of inter-translation between media and the individual (Holt and Serra's Boomerang). This time Thater had money to make something good and it is still nowhere near Sol LeWitt's pencil art.
The fact that Thater comes from art history shows and not in a good way. I would feel much better if her personal causes and narratives stayed in written form and the video installations become physical attachments to lectures. That would be refreshing.
I do not think that anybody doubts that Diana Thater is a smart woman. She obviously studied art and knows what works (or should work). The lack of imagination and a surplus of calculation result in wrecks of advanced academic content. Diana Thater does not lack content. She lacks vision.
Simply put if one's approach comes from places as abundant as history of art and the end product is self-admittedly boring this does not make the work special even if we are all excited that someone finally wants to make work that strives for multidimensional historic and aesthetic content. I think that we all consider history a meaningful referent. Having your head in the right place is only one element of a good practice. Many academicians have that. But ultimately is it not the way that one permanently deposits meaning into objects that makes one an artist?
Thater designs everything from museum banners to her monographs and this would be cool if one with such license would show range with a resource as vast as design. We all hope for artists like Smithson, Nauman and LeWitt who turn every outlet of their work into media of their own. In Thater's practice the ideas of conceptual greats stay replicated footnotes (Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Nauman's Stomping the studio).
In conclusion, I feel that Diana Thater should be shown to students and it is good that this was that kind of lecture. I hope that students can separate her manner and look at this work as a very crude diagram for the way artists should think about making.

Screw the Market, Keep the Faith!!

I was thinking yesterday about how annoying Diana Thater's lecture was. I can't figure out if it was because she was so self-obsessed and obnoxious or if it was because the work seemed so flat. I can not imagine wanting to engage with any of her pieces, I'm not even sure that I would be able to. Most of the vital information for each piece seemed to be absent in the work and installations themselves, even Ms. Thater acknowledged that many of the pieces were in fact "boring". I'm not saying I expect a circus every time I walk into a gallery space, but I do believe that the work has to contain something to draw you in. But Thater's pieces just seemed like generic examples of early video work. The Jump Rope piece was an exception, but it seemed more like an old dog spending a lot of money to prove that she can do new tricks. I think Diana should leave the slick music video art to Doug Aiken. Am I off base? Am I just reacting to her personality? What do you guys think?

Venn

Art criticism has to become accountable for its lack of place. It has to reexamine its values and goals and incorporate itself where it will do most work, where it will expand the dialectic of history and theory (social discourses completely cut off from social reality) and give them outlet. The academic incest has to stop. It is illegal and unethical.

Def 1

Operators:
The hybridization that cultural studies brings to fields of discourse cannot be designated into a disciplinary category. The inherent problem that this non-operative categorization might bring is that if academia is to keep its disciplinary boundaries cultural studies must remain rendered as an approach not a field in itself. As a discursive field cultural studies makes every branch of discourse that functorizes across disciplines its subcategory.

too (long+stff)

Since this blog is to study the contemporary “crisis” in art criticism witnessed by readers of print media, it is best not to take the field of art criticism as an axiom. Why does art criticism exist? When did it have a non-crisis (stable) existence? If this period existed, the present state of criticism implies that something was lost. But what is it? Is it power over the market? Did the evolution of the art market in late seventies and eighties abolish the critic by taking away the power to judge the value of artwork that enters the market? Is that it?
At this point it is obvious that the art market can take care of itself. The educational institutions manufacture artists, and the products from elite programs enter the market immediately after grad school. Resulting exhibitions rarely provoke practices that are void of market consciousness as a protoconcept. The market is in the minds of the artists more often than actual content. It always was. There is nothing unusual about that.
In every field that claims to produce discourse for some kind of public value (good) only about 1-5% of work actually displays disciplinary advancement. The rub is that within the applied and pure sciences the crap is unnoticed and quality research is selected for its intensic qualities, it is championed, and utilized. In sciences the bad work is useless both for the market and academia. There, crap cannot be changed into gold by writing about it since there is no space for diagnostics and polemics. It is simply a waste of time.
However, in the art world, outside of academia, there is no separate control judgment before the academic work enters the market construct. The educational institution has already assigned value by stamping the graduate with a seal of approval. The work enters the market without a critic. And that is not the fault of the artist or the market. That is an outcome of years of improper positioning. Art criticism got lazy. Art criticism considered educating the artists beyond bfa's and apprenticeships an external issue. Art criticism only wanted to be there at the end when the work is in the salon to judge. Like 200 years ago. But, unfortunately time never waits.
Superstructure changed over and over again. Baudelaire and Verlaine are dead. Art criticism is in state of being rendered completely obsolete. The market simply bypassed it by institutionalizing its values within the education of artists, curators and historians (people who have actual economic stake in the artworks). The values of the art market are the rules of any market: it is in its interest that it buyers keep buying, and institutions that facilitate the product must keep at it. Once bought objects must not depreciate. The market must entice the investors with promise of profit. This leaves the market without interest in variables that could take the power to value away (or back).
This is of course as all very plain atom within the set constituting a crisis that spans beyond criticism. It is within art itself and the meaning of this word within a cultural matrix. We must not forget the problem of art. How did it come to be? What is the function of art? The market, the educational institution, the artists themselves: whom do they serve and answer to? What is their responsibility towards the public outside of the hermetic sphere of art culture? Is there such responsibility? These days the general public ritualizes the visual outside of the museum. It avoids ingesting advanced art. Is it because since the 1930’s the use of visual tools divided into high academic art and culture industry, evolving into a visual world where images cannot be trusted and since the fabrication of images originates in the field of academic art the artist cannot be trusted. The new world of images is there for the market and it is impossible to separate the people selling self-normalization from the people who want to give means for avoiding the same. There is something powerful in images that is proven to be easily corrupted. There is a responsibility to take that very thing back into the discourse that facilitates social vulnerability- a model that invites the outside public back into the visual that instrumentalizes the social. How is that to be done? This question is closely tied with the reasons for the existence of art and since the moratorium on art is unenforceable we have to face these issues as ones that cannot be tested for relevance. They are here.

Artforum Jan. 2006

I think we should start talking about this fine magazine. I get Artforum every month, but I have to admit that this was the first time that I have actually read the whole thing. I usually use it as a guide for what shows are going up and paid more attention to the ads than the articles. This is hard because Artforum has obviously made an effort to limit advertising in order to focus on the magazines content.

What Interested me the most were some of the artists included in the introduction of new artists First Take. Specifically I thought the work of Cao Fei, Ryan Trecartin and Tamy Ben-Tor was very interesting. What do you guys think?

Stryker

falcon force strikes again and again!

CRISISLORD ANNOUNCIATION AND VISITATION STAGE