Critiques

So lets talk about the critiques. I always find them funny, each conversation seems to steer itself away from the work. Why is that? How did you guys feel about your crits?

THE ANSWER

We all have our differing ideas about what is wrong about the current state of the art world. We could have numerous discussions about how to solve what it is that we see as the "problem". But there is no problem with the art world because the problems people have ARE different for everyone involved. The entire suggestion of a single problem or solution suggests that there is an ideal or pure state that we have strayed from and can return to. That is why I think that a certain level of irrational exuberance is needed in the face of these discussions, It not only helps in an artist's practice but is one of the only ways to create any sort of interesting movement within the schizophrenic art world.

One of Chicago's major benefits is that it is not New York. Because the art community here is smaller and less commercially driven artists have more opportunity to influence the discussion. Anyone in Chicago who opens an apartment gallery showing decent work will receive attention. Anyone who wants to create a temporary exhibition or event can do it with very little money and have their contribution considered. If we focus on using these advantages to present and promote intelligent work we can create an energy that would not only raise the level of the work being made in the city but also gain the attention of the national scene.

If instead we focus on not being New York and continually broadcast to the rest of the country that we are in fact not New York that is the position we will stay in. The people who are willing to start galleries and exhibition spaces will then go to New York where they will be allowed to do there thing without constantly being told they are in a second city.




SCHOOL DAYS

After reading "Artists in Their Youth" in this week's New Yorker I was glad that I am not going to school on New York. It seems as though there is little room for failure in the situation described in that article. If our studios where nothing more than mini-galleries when could we take any risks? How could we move beyond the surface of what we are doing? If you have any doubt about what kind of work that environment produces check it out for yourself at www.jacktiltongallery.com. When I went to the site I thought I had accidentally gone to the Illustrators of America home page.

FROM THIS WEEKS NEW YORKER

ARTISTS IN THEIR YOUTH

“School Days,” a new group exhibition featuring the work of nineteen graduate art students at Hunter, Columbia, and Yale, definitely qualifies as an art-world even . Granted, the frenzied search for new talent has had dealers and collectors invading college campuses for several years now, but here was the next generation invading Manhattan, and not in some makeshift Tribeca garage but at the Tilton Gallery, on East Seventy-sixth Street, on two floors of the grand town house where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were married. The opening was packed with young people n festive getups, many of them holding cold bottles of Rolling Rock and displaying masterful tattoos. Janine Cirincione, the gallery’s director, looked elated and a trifle stunned. “Mike Ovitz was in yesterday and bought two paintings,” she told me, straining to be heard above the din. “About seventy percent of the work is sold. I don’t really know what to make of this.

The art on the walls didn’t look like student work. The paintings ranged in size from large to very large, with figurative images outweighing abstract ones by a wide margin: a lot of visionary landscapes and enigmatic narrative scenes. There was one smallish sculpture, surprisingly little photo-based work—the notable exception being a giant, two-panel color blowup of the much abused call buttons in an elevator in Novgorod, Russia—and only two video pieces. What passes for college humor these days was limited to a realist painting called “Yale, Bad Idea,” which showed a middle-aged guy in a Yale sweatshirt shielding his eyes from the sun. The work all looked very accomplished. No amateurish pratfalls here, nor any big risks taken.

“It’s a challenge for me to be in these surroundings,” said Titus Kaphar, a merry-looking Yale student wearing a yellow sweater, a vest, a very short necktie, and a tweed cap. “A lot of insecurity. You do what you do and hope somebody, somewhere—you know.”

“Everything I have here is on hold,” Kianja Strobert, a Yale student in a chic black dress, said. “It’s pretty exciting.”
Natalie Frank, the only Columbia student in the group, was happy to explain her vast allegorical canvas, which is six feet eight inches tall by ten feet four inches wide. “It’s called ‘War,’ and it’s a battlefield, and somewhere between theatrical and realistic narrative,” she said. “It’s about the thwarted ability to actually fight for something, or to be engaged completely in something. Sort of the futility of the whole thing.” Frank currently has a solo show, her first, at the Briggs Robinson Gallery, in Chelsea, and she is not worried that early success may pose a threat to her artistic development. “I started taking drawing classes three times a week when I was ten,” she said. “This has been my goal for some time. I feel ready.”

A lot of artists in the tottering stages of forty-and-over might be horrified by the show. Chuck Close, who graduated from Yale’s School of Art in 1964, said the other day that none of his classmates would have dreamed of showing the work they did in art school; the freedom to experiment, to try new approaches without fear of failing, was essential to finding their own way, he felt. But Deborah Kass, a visiting artist-teacher at Yale, did not seem concerned. “A lot of these people are really good artists, and you just get out of their way,” she said.

Jack Tilton hove into view, a youthfullooking man in an open-collared white shirt. Asked about the perils to young artists of showing so early, he said, “We’re thinking of doing a think-tank session here in the gallery. Get a diverse group of older and younger people, give them a good dinner, and talk about this. If you have a strong enough philosophical base you’re not going to get knocked off your feet by greed and capitalism.” He continued, “You have to act more as a muse. You’re not forcing capitalism down their throats. It’s more, let’s get together.”


— Calvin Tomkins

IMPONDERABILIA AND IRRATIONALITY (enumerating knots-idealist)

Mathematics: profound abstract structure: antonym of vernacular vulgarity.


P.S.
Cabinet is an almanac of general content one acquires in high school everywhere else in the world. Where grownups are hipsters, where depth is unachievable, knowing a surface of subjects is cool so it goes well with the wine, cheese, caviar and champagne of openings and dinner parties. Easy living, easy answers to easy questions.
P.P.S.
I appreciate crossdisciplinarity. The look of Cabinet is as close to perfection as a serialized magazine can get. I just cannot get over its tone.

COLLECTION

WATCH ME

POSSIBLE PRIME KNOTS

I refuse to think that Cabinet is just a random collection of topics, it is true that there was no spelled out connection between articles or is their an obvious purpose for the articles they chose, but since when is the obvious interesting.

There are two things that struck me. First it seems that the articles in the first section were describing different forms of practice and were not just general content. The knot mathematician is someone focused on working and reworking relationships between a limited number of elements. It is the idea of the infinite that drives such a person to continue in such a seemingly numbing practice. But this is the same reason many painters paint. Richard Tuttle is constantly reworking and balancing only a handful of elements in his work, always looking for that next "new" combination. Tuttle's paintings are often dismissed as too simplistic or boring by those who encounter them for the first time, but often they become more interesting for those willing to give them their attention. The focus and devotion that exists in their making is visible in the paintings confident simplicity and unapologetic presentation. These same elements can be misunderstood by a viewer unwilling to look at the work on its terms but instead try to impose their ideas of what makes a painting "good".

Second is the idea of ruin. It is interesting to me that both Frieze and Cabinet decided to focus on ideas of failure and ruin in their inaugural 2006 issues. Is this because there is a new longing for ruin as a check on the explosive growth and homogenisation of the world? Or is it a comment on the state of the art world itself? While reading this magazine I found myself thinking of the art world as one massive and massively unstable structure. Top heavy with too many artists and biennials and lacking a strong foundation, yet continuing to be built upward driven by feverish market speculation and demand. Is this focus on ruin a prediction, is this structure going to come crashing down? And if so will the ruins it leaves be grand and beautiful like the ruins in Rome or will they be unyielding and blunt like the cement structures created by Germany during the second world war?

I could be that Cabinet is just a random collection of interesting articles. But what is interesting about reading it that way? There are many conclusions a reader can come to about the purpose of this magazine but none of them can be sure if they are correct in those conclusions. But isn't it better for us as readers to allow for the possibility of those connections, and isn't that allowance also needed in viewing and interpreting artwork?

SIC ITUR AD ASTRA

The concepts that surround the construct of identity have evolved into branches of discourse such as culture theory (inside anthropology), psychology and history to name a few. When an artist who is specific to a temporal cultural geography attempts to reproduce or represent the issues surrounding identity within the very specific personal circumstance it has been proven extremely hard to transcend that specific circumstance. The work that deals with gender, race, sexuality and other manifestations of identity politics is extremely hard to judge when it fails to depart the subjective incident. On the other hand, when a work launches its politic beyond fixed subject and reveals a coalition between the viewer and the other there is an exchange of social vulnerability and then the plane of discourse reenters the real sociality to do the work of politics. Art, as a system of hermetic variables is the only space where the control over the same can be demonstrated to a political end (in the real world this model of coalitional politics cannot be tested due to number of unknown and uncontrollable variables unless you work for a think tank concerning model theory at NSA). To conclude, art can do the work of activism in the most humane ways and when it does it well it keeps working for an amount of time that it takes for it to be normalized or incorporated into the culture industries. Historically a minute number of artworks have avoided the negative assimilation. It seems that due to the nature of its effect, art that addresses the issues of a specific temporary situant has an expiration date on its optimal intensity (power to transcend outside of formal quality, allegory and referentness (historiography)) but can never be historically discredited due to its self contained sense of resonerality.

Instance 1: Kerry James Marshall talk at University of Chicago (trivia: one African American in the audience, I brought two friends and the talk went an hour over (being good U of C kids that they are and I was, we peed down our pants instead of leaving)).
Intro: incredible art market success and biennale pedigree that would have made both Andy Warhol and Picasso blush.
Credibility: childhood that describes historical geography of black civil rights movement (Kerry grew up in 1960’s in Birmingham, Alabama and moved to Watts, Los Angeles in 1963 steps away from Black Panther HQ(1967)) Beginning the talk, Mr. Marshall really made an effort to appear humble but after a couple of minutes that gesture seemed like a formality as he addressed his mission : to render the concept of (in)visibility of blackness in America. He then talked about this career as sequence of calculated strategies to enter the museum structure where this mission would best be launched into discourse. Marshall compared himself to Rembrandt and Leonardo in his beginnings and his later goals took on the theodic proportions only to anchor into a physical goal: to put one of his giant paintings inside every museum in the world. The paintings that were not monuments to fallen heroes of black liberation (Memento series) were testament to genocide of blacks by white racists in America. The work my friend Saul found most impressive by was Heirlooms and Accessories, a group of three medium size photographs of lockets on white background, each locket rendering a generation of white women from youngest to oldest. The women's faces were posing beautiful smiles. Then it was revealed that each of those faces was taken from a group photograph of a southern lynching of a black man. The women’s faces still showed effortless ease and confidence, without hysteria or fear of ever being caught. The venue for his work was Chicago's Historical Society. Nobody in the audience saw it installed. Most were nodding in some kind of pathological trance as if they were trapped by guilt one generation removed. Some were knitting. Some were sleeping. It is undisputable that Kerry James matters. We came out of the hostage situation knowing just that.

Instance 2: Dave McKenzie talk at UIC. (trivia: Dave McKenzie is a good guy “with his heart in the right place”). After the identity art torch has been passed to him , McKenzie displayed the confidence of a graduate art student and showed work to match. None of his pieces, especially the videos, went beyond cleverness and formulaic strategizing. When work like the piñata started actually saying something about the dynamic between atrosic memory and leisure rituals, McKenzie shied from elaborating on the absence of that strategy in the rest of the work. Kerry James readdresses the visibility of such relationships constantly. I think that Marshall is a genius painter and that he has earned his right in the pantheon of great painting, not just great black painting. I feel that mediocre work like McKenzie’s should not be rushed into discourse because it is not strong enough yet to withstand the weight of identity politics. The problem is that there is just not enough good art out there (including art by African Americans) and people like McKenzie are here in order to preserve an appearance of multiculturalism so that people who want to feel liberal can then exempt themselves from real life responsibilities towards the racism and genocide that the poor and minorities still miraculously endure. And finally the issue of space. This work takes up visible space. This is, of course, why curators and art historians cannot be let off the hook when they make atrocious decisions. At least artists have the luxury of experimenting within their own space instead within institutional practice.

Instance 3: And finally the gradation from the best to the worst ends with Barbara Degenevieve's Objectifying the Abject: Exploitation, Political (In)Correctness and Ethical Dilemmas at gallery 400: pictures of sterilized homeless men inside pristine hotel rooms, some watching porn, some not. The video included is a durational document of this “exploitation”, a work self aware to a point of pain. I wish Barbara had something to say about requirements of citizenship. I wish there was some conflict that went beyond this very pretentious exchange of modeling for money. This work remains just a desire for a statement, a wish that the appearance of controversy will generate some kind of commentary or polemic. That is what Barbara Degenevive produced at best: a weak statement. The preparation that the models had to go through would have been justified if 1. she documented them at her home, which would have unsettled the sense of sterile security or 2. if she kept them in the hotel but instead of paying them she gave them a choice of sexual pleasures to be administered by her (since she rendered sexual people who are not considered sexual beings in everyday life). The exchange, as things stand, was flat and resolved and deepened nothing; it was just very boring. I know that we are supposed to learn from bad examples but enough, really.

Ná Elbereth veria le, ná elenath dín síla erin rád o chuil lín

ARAGORN
Bado na Ennorath!

Gondor! Gondor, between the Mountains and the Sea!
West Wind blew there; the light upon the Silver Tree
Fell like bright rain in gardens of the Kings of old.
O proud walls! White towers! O wingéd crown and
throne of gold!
O Gondor, Gondor! Shall Men behold the Silver Tree,
Or West Wind blow again between the Mountains and the Sea?

BUSH BEING SLAMMED BY REV. LOWERY AT KING FUNERAL

Ramble 212121

I think it is kind of interesting to hear from twenty curators, however when reading this issue cover to cover the different curators and the institutions they represent begin to blend together. Add to that the fact that I have already read interviews with many of the curators in the other magazines we have read this semester and I found that I had a difficult time focusing on what each individual had to say.

The sense I did get is that "The Curator" is definitely the star of the art world. Because of their ability to create careers they are much more influential and respected than most artists. That is because most of what we see in the art world is decided by these people. In the beginning of the magazine Alex Coles makes the argument that curators should be viewed as stylists who "Shuffle and filter" the available artwork just as a stylist would bring together a variety of materials and fabrics to create a really great look. My initial reaction to this analogy was to vomit into the magazine. Is Coles suggesting that curators are the creative and innovative force within the art world and that artists are just simple minded producers who don't really understand how to discuss or represent their work, and if it were not for the curators intervention artists work would have little or no relevance? Yes of course that is what he is suggesting and the annoying thing is that once I was able to get the taste of vomit out of my mouth I realized that he is not completely wrong. Although artists are the creative force in the art world we do not always do such a great job of presenting our work or ideas. We also are realistically unable to create the kind of exposure and attention that a curator of a museum can.

It is true that there are a number of underground and artist run spaces that work to fill the space of the curator, but honestly while these venues offer good places for exhibitions and discussion the shows are rarely ever noticed outside of a regional scene. In the situations that they do gain attention they become co-opted into the museum system. A good example would be the Providence artist group Fort Thunder. This small group of RISD grads took over a warehouse in Providence filling it with their electric prints, paintings, costumes and eerie collections. The warehouse also became a site for their intensely loud band Lightening Bolt to perform. Fort Thunder began to gain national attention just as the street art/faux-naive/ do-it yourself trend took hold in the late nineties. Because of this they became a favorite of many curators, all of a sudden hallucinogenic Fort Thunder installations began to pop up in museums around the country (you may remember the installation at the 2002 Whitney Biennial). As the group was gaining more prominence the warehouse in Providence where everything started was torn down and Fort Thunder could only be seen in museums and galleries. Unfortunately most artist run spaces and groups disappear when their buildings, money or patience does. My point is that you can show and work outside of the museum and the curators reach but you will not really be able to escape a regional discussion unless you are taken up by the institution.

But lets say you don't give a fuck about the national scene and are content with being a large fish in your pond. The realty is still that running these type of spaces can be a real pain in the ass, and require a lot of your time. For four years I was the president of the artist cooperative Vox Populi, and let me tell you it was a lot of work. We were constantly working to raise enough money for rent and and exhibition cards, while trying to organize a large group of very different personalities. On top of the large time commitment we were all working for little or no money. Ultimately the time I had to devote to Vox began to interfere with my artwork. It is hard enough to balance a full time job with art making, let alone two full-time jobs.

What am I getting at? Well besides trying to meet my word count requirement I'm suggesting that although our reaction to the positioning of Curators as the "stylists" of the art world may be negative it really is not such a bad thing that they are filling that role. Curators can and do create a lot of opportunities for artists, many of them are even nice people with good intentions. And no matter how large of a personality a curator becomes good work within their shows still gets attention. So I suggest we let them be portrayed as the titans that they see themselves as. As artists we have very few people concerned with promoting our work. Most are either concerned with commodifying or profiting from it or discrediting it. So I say the growth in the importance and in the number of curators is a good thing that ultimately provides more opportunity and exposure for artists while allowing them to focus on making their work.

Dave McKenzie

I have always enjoyed the amazingly well crafted and witty work of Tom Friedman. For me his work exists as a series of intelligent one liners dealing with issues of seeing, self and science (the three S's). His pieces also exhibit a wonderful everyday approach to art making. Instead of tackling large issues or ideas directly with the intention of "saying something" his work exists as a constant diary of thoughts and ideas. I of course am not alone in admiring his work. Ever since he became well known in the mid 90's his work has been looked to and mimicked by artists across the country. At this moment there are hundreds of sugar cube sculptures and human hair insects being created in graduate school studios alone. Consequently a Friedmanesque approach to art making has become familiar and expected. What is more it has become a style. And is the case of most work made "in the style of" most work made by Friedman imitators lacks the honesty and intelligence of the original.

I found Dave McKenzie to be a very convincing and enjoyable lecturer. Because of this I found myself wanting to believe that his explanation of the ideas behind the work coincided with the pieces shown. O.K. handing out bobble-head dolls of yourself is about creating a relationship with strangers, and those upside down mugs are doing something, I get it. Once I left Jewel however I began to question if this was the case. Don't get me wrong I thought that almost all of his pieces were interesting, either because they were funny or clever or, as was the case with the pinata, unintentionally provocative. I am just not convinced that the work was really unified or fully developed. This was especially true with the videos, I mean what was that dance piece anyway? While beginning to offer interesting views on race and identity his work still seems to clouded. There seems to be an eagerness on behalf of curators and critics to rush McKenzie into being an "Important" artist. I wonder however if that eagerness will stifle what interesting elements are beginning to appear in his work and end up identifying him as just another artist working in the style of Tom Friedman.

How wrong am I?