collaborative
institutional critique
social space
Image: Henk Tukker, 1988: At youth centre De Isselt girls are trained to be metalworkers.
I Can’t Work Like This
Project, 01 May – 23 Jun 2012
Exhibition, Assembly, Workshop, Event
‘I Can’t Work Like This’ is initiated by Casco director Binna Choi and artist Matthijs de Bruijne, developed together with union organiser and member of SEIU Valery Alzaga, art historian Beatrix Birken, philosopher and assistant professor at UvA Johan Hartle, and with the assistance of Casco project coordinator Suzanne Tiemersma and Casco intern Loes Degener.
“What do you mean, you can’t work like this?” The project ‘I Can’t Work Like This’ creates a platform for examining our working conditions in the permanent crisis of the neo-liberal economic regime, and for learning how workers from variant sectors can get effectively organised. We propose to do this through a collaborative and transdisciplinary approach involving art, design, action and theory.
In recent years, a sector of the federation of trade unions in the Netherlands (FNV Bondgenoten) started reconsidering the limits of its old “service unionism model” and opted to experiment with an “organising model” to build up an organisation from below marked by grass-roots action and a high degree of self-organisation by its members. This was a drastic departure from the unions’ previously top-down structure and their function as quasi-insurance for workers with fixed contracts. However, numerous problems regarding labour organisation today – such as the increase of freelance/flexible contract work or the often invisible and poorly remunerated work of undocumented migrant workers – still tend to be beyond the scope of most unions. Hence, there is more to do.
While labour conditions in general have changed, the sphere of art and culture too has undergone paradigmatic shifts. In what official policy now calls “the creative industries”, a focus on the affectivity and creativity goes hand in hand with an effective valorization of the managerial over the artistic. Institutions feed off the commitment of “art workers” who tend to merge their work and life, while maintaining a bureaucratic superstructure that seems to become more dominant in an age of funding cuts and insecurity. This situation suggests the need for re-examination, re-articulation and new constellations: It is time to voice what kind of “work” it is that “art workers” do, how and for whom do we work. And it is time to suggest new forms of organising and becoming collective subjects.
Taking the forms of an exhibition and public events, the project will present different relations between art and labour-related struggles, suggested through documentations of actions, contemporary and historical artworks, designs and other artifacts. The exhibition includes works by artist Charlotte Posenenske, Argentinean art collective Tucumán Arde (Archivo Graciela Carnevale) and British film collectives from the 60s and 70s. It also documents a few exemplary cases where the struggle for better working conditions merge with aesthetic practices, such as in the work of the Carrotworkers’ Collective, Jinsuk Kim & Hope Bus movement, as well as contemporary organising models used in campaigns by Justice for Janitors, workers of Silicon Valley and the Dutch Cleaners Union.
Where will this artistic research lead? By discussing the relation between art workers and unions, between artistic practice and labour-related struggles, ‘I Can’t Work Like This’ hopes to stimulate new alliances between aesthetics and politics. In the end, its question is simple: Why don’t we find a common ground and get aligned with other workers in taking action for better working conditions?
• 15 May 2012 • View comments
performance
institution
social space
irony
![Image: Rendering by OMA of the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art
Marina Abramović Teams with Koolhaas’ OMA to Convert Old Theater into Performance Art Institute
By Stephanie Murg on May 15, 2012 7:49 AM
Artist Marina Abramović began her Met Gala Monday in Queens, inside MoMA PS1′s geodesic Performance Dome, where she detailed her plans to transform a crumbling old theater in Hudson, New York into the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation for Performance Art (MAI for short). Hours later, having sharpened up her all-black ensemble, she was striding up the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of the Art on the arm of James Franco. “Today is a big day for me,” she told the morning assembly of press, curators, critics, and friends after a warm introduction by PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach. “In the life of an artist, it’s very important to think of the future. When you die, you can’t leave anything physical—that doesn’t make any sense—but a good idea can last a long, long time.”
Her good idea is to channel 40 years worth of pioneering performance art into a living archive-cum-laboratory that will explore “time-based and immaterial art,” including performance, dance, theater, film, video, opera, and music. The focus will be on “long-duration” performances, those lasting for between six hours and…forever. “Only long-duration works of art have a serious potential to change the viewer looking at it and also the performer in doing it, because the performance that is long becomes more and more like life itself,” she said. “There’s no division between normal daily activity and the performance. This is what I experienced especially at my [2010] performance at MoMA, which was three months long. That really changed me mentally, physically, in many other ways.”
Abramović commissioned OMA to transform the crumbling theatre that she acquired in 2007 into a space for training artists and audiences alike. “It has an interesting level of decay,” said OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu, pointing out a rotted column and ghostly baselines from the building’s post-theater incarnation as an indoor tennis court. “The project has to house a very specific program of long-duration performance, so the first thing we decided to do was insert a very monastic box inside that can house many things. It’s actually slightly bigger than the tennis court, so you can still play tennis if you wanted to.”
Shigematsu is leading the project with Rem Koolhaas, an old friend of Abramović. The firm welcomed the challenges of designing for different types of visitors, from artists to meta-viewers. “What’s interesting for us architecturally is that you get these layers of audiences,” Shigematsu said. “The audience that gets trained to be an audience, and the audience that observes the audiences getting trained to be an audience. Typically, you’re just watching the performer, but you start to get this kind of cross-view of people looking at each other and no longer know who is the performer and who is the audience.” Inside, the plan is to carve out a wall of rooms that will face the main performance space. Changes to the exterior will be minimal, aside from opening up some windows and making an atrium for the entry canopy.
The timeline for the project remains vague. In the most optimistic fundraising scenario, the Institute would open in 2014. Paris art dealer Serge Le Borgne has already signed on as director. In the meantime, Abramović will continue instructing interested parties in her “Abramović Method” of performance. “We will continue doing these experiments everywhere until we have the physical building,” she explained. Read on for more details gleaned from last week’s press conference.
Why did you decide to create this Institute rather than a foundation?Marina Abramović: A foundation mostly is to present your own work, but for me it was very important to create a situation, create a center, for different things, where all seven performing arts can be shown—you’re talking music, dance, opera, video, film, performance art that I’m doing, and any other performance art in the future for which we don’t yet have a name.
Why did you name the Institute after yourself?MA: Not because I want to live forever. I took my name because I feel like I’ve become a brand, like Coca-Cola. When you hear “Marina Abramović,” you know it’s not about painting. It’s about performing art, and it’s about hardcore performing art.
Why do this in Hudson, New York?MA: I was trying to create this institute in Brooklyn, and it was impossible to find the right location. When I went to Hudson, and I saw the building in Hudson, which was a former theater built in 1929—Martha Graham even performed there at some point—I knew it was really the right place and the right location. Plus, it’s so comfortable. It’s just two hours from New York. And it’s isolated in a way that is less stressed than New York, stress-y life.
Visitors to the Institute will be able to enroll in a school of sorts to learn “the Abramović method.” What does this involve?MA: When you enter the space you have to put on a lab coat with “The Abramovic Method” embroidered on it. This is very simple: the lab coats make you different from the normal viewer and turn you into an experimenter. Then you go to the school. You are given headphones that completely block outside sounds, and it’s suggested that you close your eyes most of the time. You have to leave all of your belongings and also sign a contract with me that you give me your word of honor that you will spend two-and-a-half hours in this experiment. And then when you do that you get the certificate of accomplishment.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m42upnwm9o1r7q1gao1_500.jpg)
Image: Rendering by OMA of the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art
Marina Abramović Teams with Koolhaas’ OMA to Convert Old Theater into Performance Art Institute
By Stephanie Murg on May 15, 2012 7:49 AM
Artist Marina Abramović began her Met Gala Monday in Queens, inside MoMA PS1′s geodesic Performance Dome, where she detailed her plans to transform a crumbling old theater in Hudson, New York into the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation for Performance Art (MAI for short). Hours later, having sharpened up her all-black ensemble, she was striding up the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of the Art on the arm of James Franco. “Today is a big day for me,” she told the morning assembly of press, curators, critics, and friends after a warm introduction by PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach. “In the life of an artist, it’s very important to think of the future. When you die, you can’t leave anything physical—that doesn’t make any sense—but a good idea can last a long, long time.”
Her good idea is to channel 40 years worth of pioneering performance art into a living archive-cum-laboratory that will explore “time-based and immaterial art,” including performance, dance, theater, film, video, opera, and music. The focus will be on “long-duration” performances, those lasting for between six hours and…forever. “Only long-duration works of art have a serious potential to change the viewer looking at it and also the performer in doing it, because the performance that is long becomes more and more like life itself,” she said. “There’s no division between normal daily activity and the performance. This is what I experienced especially at my [2010] performance at MoMA, which was three months long. That really changed me mentally, physically, in many other ways.”
Abramović commissioned OMA to transform the crumbling theatre that she acquired in 2007 into a space for training artists and audiences alike. “It has an interesting level of decay,” said OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu, pointing out a rotted column and ghostly baselines from the building’s post-theater incarnation as an indoor tennis court. “The project has to house a very specific program of long-duration performance, so the first thing we decided to do was insert a very monastic box inside that can house many things. It’s actually slightly bigger than the tennis court, so you can still play tennis if you wanted to.”
Shigematsu is leading the project with Rem Koolhaas, an old friend of Abramović. The firm welcomed the challenges of designing for different types of visitors, from artists to meta-viewers. “What’s interesting for us architecturally is that you get these layers of audiences,” Shigematsu said. “The audience that gets trained to be an audience, and the audience that observes the audiences getting trained to be an audience. Typically, you’re just watching the performer, but you start to get this kind of cross-view of people looking at each other and no longer know who is the performer and who is the audience.” Inside, the plan is to carve out a wall of rooms that will face the main performance space. Changes to the exterior will be minimal, aside from opening up some windows and making an atrium for the entry canopy.
The timeline for the project remains vague. In the most optimistic fundraising scenario, the Institute would open in 2014. Paris art dealer Serge Le Borgne has already signed on as director. In the meantime, Abramović will continue instructing interested parties in her “Abramović Method” of performance. “We will continue doing these experiments everywhere until we have the physical building,” she explained. Read on for more details gleaned from last week’s press conference.
Why did you decide to create this Institute rather than a foundation?
Marina Abramović: A foundation mostly is to present your own work, but for me it was very important to create a situation, create a center, for different things, where all seven performing arts can be shown—you’re talking music, dance, opera, video, film, performance art that I’m doing, and any other performance art in the future for which we don’t yet have a name.
Why did you name the Institute after yourself?
MA: Not because I want to live forever. I took my name because I feel like I’ve become a brand, like Coca-Cola. When you hear “Marina Abramović,” you know it’s not about painting. It’s about performing art, and it’s about hardcore performing art.
Why do this in Hudson, New York?
MA: I was trying to create this institute in Brooklyn, and it was impossible to find the right location. When I went to Hudson, and I saw the building in Hudson, which was a former theater built in 1929—Martha Graham even performed there at some point—I knew it was really the right place and the right location. Plus, it’s so comfortable. It’s just two hours from New York. And it’s isolated in a way that is less stressed than New York, stress-y life.
Visitors to the Institute will be able to enroll in a school of sorts to learn “the Abramović method.” What does this involve?
MA: When you enter the space you have to put on a lab coat with “The Abramovic Method” embroidered on it. This is very simple: the lab coats make you different from the normal viewer and turn you into an experimenter. Then you go to the school. You are given headphones that completely block outside sounds, and it’s suggested that you close your eyes most of the time. You have to leave all of your belongings and also sign a contract with me that you give me your word of honor that you will spend two-and-a-half hours in this experiment. And then when you do that you get the certificate of accomplishment.
• 15 May 2012 • View comments
Social Space
discourse
dialogue
residency
Draft Programme of the Inter-format Symposium on Remoteness and Contemporary Art
17-21st of May, 2012, Nida Art Colony, Neringa, Lithuania,
www.nidacolony.lt
Over 30 curators, art & residency centres directors and project managers as well as artists are comming together to Nida to discuss and reflect on working and living in remote areas, on the theme of “remoteness”, with an emphasis on community building, interaction with local inhabitants, and site specificity. 4 days will role on with lectures and workshops, discussions and chats with tea, performances and site-specific artworks.
• 13 May 2012 • View comments
the other
thinking
thinking about other people thinking about other people thinking about other people’s spaces
JeongMee Yoon
The Pink Project - SeoWoo and Her Pink Things
Light jet Print, 2006.
(Source: hvidt)
• 13 May 2012 • 26 notes • View comments
opportunities
rural space
Earthship Biotecture is selecting 10 apprentices to work side by side with at least 5 members of the Earthship crew. We will be completing a two-week project of finish work on an existing Earthship. Work to be done iincludes laying flagstone and wood for flooring, mud plastering, greenhouse finish work, rough-in greywater botanical cell plumbing as well as a custom Earthship septic/blackwater system.
• 11 May 2012 • View comments
interview
cliche
irony
design
![MIKE MILLS
Interview with Asher Penn
BAD DAY MAGAZINE
ISSUE 11, JULY, 2011
Over the past two decades, Mike Mills’ quiet, consistent contribution to popular culture is difficult to quantify. Looking over his resumé of music videos and design work, it’s hard not to exclaim, “He did that, too?” The art for Air’s Moon Safari, as well as their music videos; the Washing Machine cover for Sonic Youth; that Supreme logo with the accent over the ‘e’; and all the X-Girl graphics. Constantly evolving, Mills has moved from design to videos to feature films, bringing to these projects a direct sensibility that is disarmingly human. His latest film, Beginners was released this June.
Asher Penn: I read in an interview that when you graduated from Cooper
Union in 1989, you didn’t really want to participate in the art world; that it would be more interesting to infiltrate culture at large. How did you come to that decision?
Mike Mills: Well, it would be unfair for me to just write off the art world. The first thing I do when I go to London is I go to the Tate; when I go to Paris I visit the Pompidou, and I am a museum director’s son. So it’s not like I have disregarded the art world completely, and the few times I do get to have gallery shows I embrace it, I enjoy it. But when I was graduating from Cooper, I was a very good little Hans Haacke student—
Asher: I’ll admit I actually don’t know anything about Hans Haacke.
Mike: [Laughs] That’s good to say. Well, the short of it is he’s a really interesting conceptual artist and really de-materialized the art object. He then became more political and did a lot of work about critiquing art institutions, like museums. He did an amazing piece about this Monet painting about asparagus: he found each person that had owned this painting, and it was a weird index of power through the twentieth century. When I was a student in the late ’80s and it was when Soho was becoming the big art industry gallery place, Haacke’s class was so much about institutional critique, and uncovering the real economic basis of the art world that the art world loves to deny it has.
Asher: Okay.
Mike: And being a museum director’s son I already had a taste of that, and it seemed so much more exciting to work in the public sphere. I was lucky enough to start doing record covers for Sonic Youth and Blues Explosion and I’d see those posters upon Broadway and I’d feel like, “Aw I made it!” I got out of the art world and onto Broadway and it was so exciting, and it still is. I just did a Beastie Boys cover and last night I was driving down Sunset and saw them on all of the bus benches. That’s still the most exciting thing for me.
Asher: I feel like the art world is almost allergic to some of the themes you engage with head-on: vulnerability, emotion, depression and sentimentality. Why do you think that is?
Mike: I never really thought of it like that. The art world definitely doesn’t avoid sadness. Many artists make work about sadness, I think what I do is different because I’m happy to make a poster, or a museum video, or a film. But in truth I try to rely on my real personal world, and believe that there’s enough there to make art about. I think I’ve taken some of the intentions of the big art world and put them into another context.
Asher: Was pursing graphic design a subversive decision for you?
Mike: Slightly. But I also really liked it. My first job was working for M&Co., you know, Tibor Kalman? I was helping him do his speeches with these really elaborate slide shows.
Asher: Wait, what were these lectures?
Mike: My main job was helping Tibor with these very complicated slide-shows he was doing at the time. I helped him write a little bit, but mostly just organized and kept the hundreds of slides going. He was tough back then, a complicated guy, but I learned a lot. He really wasn’t a designer, he was a thinker. He made us present ideas in tiny sketches no bigger than a quarter, partially so that we wouldn’t get caught up in what they looked like; everything lived or died on how good of an idea it was.
Asher: But you did actually study graphic design at Cooper a little.
Mike: I really only took one or two classes, there were a lot of amazing designers there, one of them being Marlene McCarty who was also in Gran Fury at the time. They were the graphic design wing of Act Up. I was sort of like, the little kid wannabe in that group. You know what I mean?I helped them just a couple of times but I greatly admired them and how Act Up was using aesthetics and creative solutions to a very socially engaged condition.
Asher: It was also really direct, right?
Mike: Super direct. The art world can be sort of a contained theatre of protest, but the ambition was real protest, really involved with some sort of civil destruction.
Asher: What was your student work like?
Mike: A bunch of different stuff. I was doing a lot of sculpture, very geometric stuff about family and relationship and power. Stuff like that.
Asher: When I think about the trajectory of you career, starting from graphic design to music videos to short films to features, it seems totally organic and seamless. Were some of these shifts more of a struggle than that?
Mike: Oh yeah. [Laughs] It wasn’t a clear plan like that. That sounds so easy like this programmed flow. It definitely was anything but easy to keep starting over, it’s always so hard. I got to a certain level as a graphic designer and when I wanted to do music videos, no one thought of me that way; I didn’t go to film school, I didn’t have a reel. So I had to struggle for a long time to get to do music videos, I’d have to do them for free. Eventually, that got me doing ads, and that’s great, you start making money, but then I wanted to do features, so I had to start all over again to get to do feature length stuff. So it would be a misrepresentation to say it was an organic flow. It is sort of like me getting braver and braver, from when I was in my mid-twenties to now. When I was twenty-five I never thought I could make a feature film. It would be like going to the moon, just something so complicated and difficult and big and Hollywood—I didn’t even understand it. But I slowly began to work in a very public atmosphere, an entertainment atmosphere and I just grew and my confidence grew.
Asher: It seems like much of what you do is so much of this negotiation between communication and self-expression. Do you feel like cinema or narrative filmmaking is the ultimate medium for that?
Mike: For me it is. I also think that writing novels would be an amazing space to do that in. And I always envy bands and albums—what they do is so emotional, intimate and personal, it works on such a subliminal level and it’s public. You buy it cheaply, it’s all over the airwaves, it’s very shared, and people dance to it in groups. I would love to work in that context, the music scene has everything I want in one bubble, but I’m not a musician. For me, there’s nothing else I can do that asks
people to sit for 100 minutes and think about what I’m talking about. So just for sheer duration, it’s the most demanding conversation I can have with an audience. I can put in my graphics, drawings, my writing, I can put in my photography, it does become like the biggest box into which I can put everything.
Asher: There’s such a huge contrast between working with an image or an artwork—which is a very insular, personal experience—to working with an actor. Was working with people in this way a skill you had to learn?
Mike Definitely. When you go from working alone as a designer or artist to a crew of twenty to thirty people, it’s the hardest. Even with just time and money constraints, it’s really hard to learn, doing videos really taught me a lot about that. I am a very disciplined, budget-orientated kind of person, and with filmmaking it behooves you to be conscious of all the physical constraints. That took a few years, but once I picked it up I must say I really loved it. I love having this little extended family, and being the captain of the ship, I like being the director. And I love actors. I think as a formerly very, very shy person I am super impressed with actors and their ability to be so un-self-conscious. It’s so fun to be around them, they’re so emotionally juicy and expressive. It’s not unlike when I was in a band in high school, trying to be a good punk rock kid and trying to be free but not being that good at being free, still being quite self-conscious. And here I am meeting all these people that are fucking great at being free. I love being around that and I love collaborating with them on these characters. When I was writing Beginners, I was promoting Thumbsucker (2005), so I was hanging out with Tilda Swinton and Lou Pucci all the time, we were on a press tour. And Lou and Tilda, they would always blow me away with being more wild and free than me. No matter what I do or how old I am, I’m sort of like the perpetual graphic designer boy who is a little shy. You know the party scene in Beginners when she’s got laryngitis?
Asher: Sure.
Mike: That really happened to Lou, he had laryngitis, he met a girl and couldn’t talk, so he was writing on these pads. And it made him have this deeper relationship with her than he would have had otherwise. I sort of think about these kinds of people when I write, and I like self-referential things. I love films that refer to filmmaking, my videos refer to filmmaking, my graphic design refers to graphic design—everytime you do that I just feel like you’re being more honest.
Asher: When I was watching the movie, there were all of these creative moments where characters did these things that almost function likesmaller art works; creative acts that in a different context could be your art, or something that you made. What happens when you put that creative output into a fictional character’s narrative?
Mike: Yeah, that’s the first time I did that and I have to say I really enjoyed it, it was really interesting. To have me make graphics for this character named Oliver, to make that in this fictional film, actually somehow was really fitting to me. It didn’t feel as foreign as one might think, to put my art into this narrative and have these different people do it in different places.
Asher: At the same time I’m curious—you know how much you can
actually learn about somebody through a self-portrait; which parts are you adding in, and what are you taking out?
Mike: Well when you have a dream all the people that you put in your dream are really you, right? When you write something, every character is some kind of expression of you. Sometimes you know you’re showing a part of yourself, sometimes you don’t know how much you’re showing. That portrait about my dad and myself is really subjective, or just one version, or me playing around with both of our characters. So it’s not at all a memoir or anything like that, but I tried to put a lot of me in it. Beginners is a huge self-portrait, people ask me all the time, “How much is it all about you?” Clearly there’s a lot of my art in it, my dad really did come out, I really had trouble believing in love and all that. At the same time, if you just saw the film and met me, the longer you got to know me the more you would be disappointed. [Laughs] It’s just pieces of me.
Asher: I was wondering if I could list some of your old graphic design works and you could make some kind of comment about them.
Mike: Sure.
Asher: Let’s start with TG-170.
Mike: What do I say?
Asher: Anything.
Mike: I used to live right around the corner from there in the Lower East Side—Terry’s an old friend of mine. I did it for free or little money, and I love those kinds of projects. I feel like I’m still doing them, when I do my wife’s book cover or something, that’s the best kind of design work. You get so integrated with the clients and the audience they’re trying to reach, it ends up coming from a very natural place.
Asher: Okay, next: Supreme.
Mike: With Supreme, when I did the shirts and stuff, it was using one of my favourite strategies. You associate skateboarding with the street, especially with punk or hip-hop or underground culture, and everything I did with them was very over-ground looking, mainstream looking. That was what made it, hopefully, interesting. I sort of did the same thing with Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine, which I did around the same time. It’s taking on a corporate, industrial, kind of Swiss looking design language and putting it onto this supposedly subversive, rough, culture. Doing
the wrong visual solution, I love that strategy.
Asher: Marc Jacobs.
Mike: Which? I did a lot for him.
Asher: The early stuff, with the lips.
Mike: I remember Marc was obsessed with Fiorucci, and that was kind of great because that wasn’t my taste at all. One great thing about being a graphic designer and working with people who aren’t graphic designers, is their taste breaks all the
taste rules of the graphic design world. At the time Fiorucci wasn’t hip at all, but I also remember Marc talking about lips and I said, “Oh lips! But that’s so cliché,” and Marc said, “Cliché’s are great! Clichés are powerful. Clichés are what we all share.” That was the first time I had ever heard anybody say that.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3u7ams7ea1r7q1gao1_400.jpg)
MIKE MILLS
Interview with Asher Penn
BAD DAY MAGAZINE
ISSUE 11, JULY, 2011
Over the past two decades, Mike Mills’ quiet, consistent contribution to popular culture is difficult to quantify. Looking over his resumé of music videos and design work, it’s hard not to exclaim, “He did that, too?” The art for Air’s Moon Safari, as well as their music videos; the Washing Machine cover for Sonic Youth; that Supreme logo with the accent over the ‘e’; and all the X-Girl graphics. Constantly evolving, Mills has moved from design to videos to feature films, bringing to these projects a direct sensibility that is disarmingly human. His latest film, Beginners was released this June.
Asher Penn: I read in an interview that when you graduated from Cooper
Union in 1989, you didn’t really want to participate in the art world; that it would be more interesting to infiltrate culture at large. How did you come to that decision?
Mike Mills: Well, it would be unfair for me to just write off the art world. The first thing I do when I go to London is I go to the Tate; when I go to Paris I visit the Pompidou, and I am a museum director’s son. So it’s not like I have disregarded the art world completely, and the few times I do get to have gallery shows I embrace it, I enjoy it. But when I was graduating from Cooper, I was a very good little Hans Haacke student—
Asher: I’ll admit I actually don’t know anything about Hans Haacke.
Mike: [Laughs] That’s good to say. Well, the short of it is he’s a really interesting conceptual artist and really de-materialized the art object. He then became more political and did a lot of work about critiquing art institutions, like museums. He did an amazing piece about this Monet painting about asparagus: he found each person that had owned this painting, and it was a weird index of power through the twentieth century. When I was a student in the late ’80s and it was when Soho was becoming the big art industry gallery place, Haacke’s class was so much about institutional critique, and uncovering the real economic basis of the art world that the art world loves to deny it has.
Asher: Okay.
Mike: And being a museum director’s son I already had a taste of that, and it seemed so much more exciting to work in the public sphere. I was lucky enough to start doing record covers for Sonic Youth and Blues Explosion and I’d see those posters upon Broadway and I’d feel like, “Aw I made it!” I got out of the art world and onto Broadway and it was so exciting, and it still is. I just did a Beastie Boys cover and last night I was driving down Sunset and saw them on all of the bus benches. That’s still the most exciting thing for me.
Asher: I feel like the art world is almost allergic to some of the themes you engage with head-on: vulnerability, emotion, depression and sentimentality. Why do you think that is?
Mike: I never really thought of it like that. The art world definitely doesn’t avoid sadness. Many artists make work about sadness, I think what I do is different because I’m happy to make a poster, or a museum video, or a film. But in truth I try to rely on my real personal world, and believe that there’s enough there to make art about. I think I’ve taken some of the intentions of the big art world and put them into another context.
Asher: Was pursing graphic design a subversive decision for you?
Mike: Slightly. But I also really liked it. My first job was working for M&Co., you know, Tibor Kalman? I was helping him do his speeches with these really elaborate slide shows.
Asher: Wait, what were these lectures?
Mike: My main job was helping Tibor with these very complicated slide-shows he was doing at the time. I helped him write a little bit, but mostly just organized and kept the hundreds of slides going. He was tough back then, a complicated guy, but I learned a lot. He really wasn’t a designer, he was a thinker. He made us present ideas in tiny sketches no bigger than a quarter, partially so that we wouldn’t get caught up in what they looked like; everything lived or died on how good of an idea it was.
Asher: But you did actually study graphic design at Cooper a little.
Mike: I really only took one or two classes, there were a lot of amazing designers there, one of them being Marlene McCarty who was also in Gran Fury at the time. They were the graphic design wing of Act Up. I was sort of like, the little kid wannabe in that group. You know what I mean?I helped them just a couple of times but I greatly admired them and how Act Up was using aesthetics and creative solutions to a very socially engaged condition.
Asher: It was also really direct, right?
Mike: Super direct. The art world can be sort of a contained theatre of protest, but the ambition was real protest, really involved with some sort of civil destruction.
Asher: What was your student work like?
Mike: A bunch of different stuff. I was doing a lot of sculpture, very geometric stuff about family and relationship and power. Stuff like that.
Asher: When I think about the trajectory of you career, starting from graphic design to music videos to short films to features, it seems totally organic and seamless. Were some of these shifts more of a struggle than that?
Mike: Oh yeah. [Laughs] It wasn’t a clear plan like that. That sounds so easy like this programmed flow. It definitely was anything but easy to keep starting over, it’s always so hard. I got to a certain level as a graphic designer and when I wanted to do music videos, no one thought of me that way; I didn’t go to film school, I didn’t have a reel. So I had to struggle for a long time to get to do music videos, I’d have to do them for free. Eventually, that got me doing ads, and that’s great, you start making money, but then I wanted to do features, so I had to start all over again to get to do feature length stuff. So it would be a misrepresentation to say it was an organic flow. It is sort of like me getting braver and braver, from when I was in my mid-twenties to now. When I was twenty-five I never thought I could make a feature film. It would be like going to the moon, just something so complicated and difficult and big and Hollywood—I didn’t even understand it. But I slowly began to work in a very public atmosphere, an entertainment atmosphere and I just grew and my confidence grew.
Asher: It seems like much of what you do is so much of this negotiation between communication and self-expression. Do you feel like cinema or narrative filmmaking is the ultimate medium for that?
Mike: For me it is. I also think that writing novels would be an amazing space to do that in. And I always envy bands and albums—what they do is so emotional, intimate and personal, it works on such a subliminal level and it’s public. You buy it cheaply, it’s all over the airwaves, it’s very shared, and people dance to it in groups. I would love to work in that context, the music scene has everything I want in one bubble, but I’m not a musician. For me, there’s nothing else I can do that asks
people to sit for 100 minutes and think about what I’m talking about. So just for sheer duration, it’s the most demanding conversation I can have with an audience. I can put in my graphics, drawings, my writing, I can put in my photography, it does become like the biggest box into which I can put everything.
Asher: There’s such a huge contrast between working with an image or an artwork—which is a very insular, personal experience—to working with an actor. Was working with people in this way a skill you had to learn?
Mike Definitely. When you go from working alone as a designer or artist to a crew of twenty to thirty people, it’s the hardest. Even with just time and money constraints, it’s really hard to learn, doing videos really taught me a lot about that. I am a very disciplined, budget-orientated kind of person, and with filmmaking it behooves you to be conscious of all the physical constraints. That took a few years, but once I picked it up I must say I really loved it. I love having this little extended family, and being the captain of the ship, I like being the director. And I love actors. I think as a formerly very, very shy person I am super impressed with actors and their ability to be so un-self-conscious. It’s so fun to be around them, they’re so emotionally juicy and expressive. It’s not unlike when I was in a band in high school, trying to be a good punk rock kid and trying to be free but not being that good at being free, still being quite self-conscious. And here I am meeting all these people that are fucking great at being free. I love being around that and I love collaborating with them on these characters. When I was writing Beginners, I was promoting Thumbsucker (2005), so I was hanging out with Tilda Swinton and Lou Pucci all the time, we were on a press tour. And Lou and Tilda, they would always blow me away with being more wild and free than me. No matter what I do or how old I am, I’m sort of like the perpetual graphic designer boy who is a little shy. You know the party scene in Beginners when she’s got laryngitis?
Asher: Sure.
Mike: That really happened to Lou, he had laryngitis, he met a girl and couldn’t talk, so he was writing on these pads. And it made him have this deeper relationship with her than he would have had otherwise. I sort of think about these kinds of people when I write, and I like self-referential things. I love films that refer to filmmaking, my videos refer to filmmaking, my graphic design refers to graphic design—everytime you do that I just feel like you’re being more honest.
Asher: When I was watching the movie, there were all of these creative moments where characters did these things that almost function likesmaller art works; creative acts that in a different context could be your art, or something that you made. What happens when you put that creative output into a fictional character’s narrative?
Mike: Yeah, that’s the first time I did that and I have to say I really enjoyed it, it was really interesting. To have me make graphics for this character named Oliver, to make that in this fictional film, actually somehow was really fitting to me. It didn’t feel as foreign as one might think, to put my art into this narrative and have these different people do it in different places.
Asher: At the same time I’m curious—you know how much you can
actually learn about somebody through a self-portrait; which parts are you adding in, and what are you taking out?
Mike: Well when you have a dream all the people that you put in your dream are really you, right? When you write something, every character is some kind of expression of you. Sometimes you know you’re showing a part of yourself, sometimes you don’t know how much you’re showing. That portrait about my dad and myself is really subjective, or just one version, or me playing around with both of our characters. So it’s not at all a memoir or anything like that, but I tried to put a lot of me in it. Beginners is a huge self-portrait, people ask me all the time, “How much is it all about you?” Clearly there’s a lot of my art in it, my dad really did come out, I really had trouble believing in love and all that. At the same time, if you just saw the film and met me, the longer you got to know me the more you would be disappointed. [Laughs] It’s just pieces of me.
Asher: I was wondering if I could list some of your old graphic design works and you could make some kind of comment about them.
Mike: Sure.
Asher: Let’s start with TG-170.
Mike: What do I say?
Asher: Anything.
Mike: I used to live right around the corner from there in the Lower East Side—Terry’s an old friend of mine. I did it for free or little money, and I love those kinds of projects. I feel like I’m still doing them, when I do my wife’s book cover or something, that’s the best kind of design work. You get so integrated with the clients and the audience they’re trying to reach, it ends up coming from a very natural place.
Asher: Okay, next: Supreme.
Mike: With Supreme, when I did the shirts and stuff, it was using one of my favourite strategies. You associate skateboarding with the street, especially with punk or hip-hop or underground culture, and everything I did with them was very over-ground looking, mainstream looking. That was what made it, hopefully, interesting. I sort of did the same thing with Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine, which I did around the same time. It’s taking on a corporate, industrial, kind of Swiss looking design language and putting it onto this supposedly subversive, rough, culture. Doing
the wrong visual solution, I love that strategy.
Asher: Marc Jacobs.
Mike: Which? I did a lot for him.
Asher: The early stuff, with the lips.
Mike: I remember Marc was obsessed with Fiorucci, and that was kind of great because that wasn’t my taste at all. One great thing about being a graphic designer and working with people who aren’t graphic designers, is their taste breaks all the
taste rules of the graphic design world. At the time Fiorucci wasn’t hip at all, but I also remember Marc talking about lips and I said, “Oh lips! But that’s so cliché,” and Marc said, “Cliché’s are great! Clichés are powerful. Clichés are what we all share.” That was the first time I had ever heard anybody say that.
• 10 May 2012 • View comments
discourse
printed matter
the world
irony
Ghetto Child
by Patrick Bobilin
As a 24-hour Facebooker, psychotic tweeter, part-time electronic musician and all-around digital native, I’m probably the least likely candidate amongst my friends to call the internet a ghetto. But as art criticism has rapidly disappeared from print (aside from art world specific publications), I find it alarmingly short-sighted to see how quietly-into-the-night criticism was herded over to a completely new medium, almost entirely without question. Like Dylan going electric, David Lynch working with video and James Franco’s art career, significant shifts in media definitively transform the shape of the message. What ends up in print left on the train, at the laundromat or sitting on the café table is undeniably different that what ends up in a Twitter feed or as a Tumblr meme. Before any new trajectory is planned it would be important to account for how print and digital criticism can utilize medium specificity given their respective fixity and placelessness, the importance of cultivating “regional dialects” and how images that are generated by exhibitions (and circulated digitally) are also generative of exhibition practices.1
What a curator like Charles Esche so diplomatically terms as the “planetary consciousness” of 2012’s art world, I would call “globalized capitalist” in the old-fashioned Reagan/Bush/Clinton tradition. The uniform use of English in the art world and the prevalence of left-leaning publications like e-flux2, the biennializing of artistic production in art schools worldwide3 and the promotion of cosmopolitanism amongst curators4, historians and critics amongst others, have contributed to a two-way mirror of false unification in art world politics, practice and actual material production. Art begins to look like Art whether you see it in Korea, Venice, Sharjah or the Americas. Contemporary art looks like an eternal meme because of the ubiquity of contentless gestures, the art-not-art “casual sculpture” that I would argue as embodied by a gesture that appears constantly in university galleries, alternative spaces and museums of contemporary art—a stick, often painted but sometimes not, leaning against a wall.
The internet has medium-specificity, something long understood by both educated and casual hackers, veterans of Arpanet and the more savvy of the younger branch of the millenials. It should not be a contradiction to be a digital native and an advocate of criticism in print. Rather than having all critical material being dumped into the annals of Google, weekly printed columns of art criticism can be an important localized cultural pulse or at very least a magnet for a richer discussion than what can be found amongst the merely descriptive material of most online—and what is left of printed—criticism.
One of the arguments that I use to uphold the importance of printed art criticism is the power of short-range broadcast media. Short-range broadcast media, by its very definition—I’m talking here of newspapers, radio, public access T.V.—addresses a geographically limited audience. For this reason, working within this media (with any degree of success or receptiveness) requires taking into account the audience and to offer locally relevant discourse. Just as the art installation has marked its territory through its specific dealings with space and bodies than that of the art object which can be displaced, transported and commodified in a very different way, the “site-specific” criticism of online publication is inevitably bound to function differently than criticism that is invested in cultivating regional dialects.
I would never advocate a “dumbing-down” of ideas, nor would I suggest the erection of rigid theoretical or intellectual territorial boundaries, the hyperbolic antithesis to irresponsible academically-promoted cosmopolitanism. Something close to Kenneth Frampton’s “Critical Regionalism”5 could be a useful and important conceptual foundation for distilling “regional dialects” in contemporary art. Instead of encouraging artists to create for the general audience of an international biennial, an important role for critics could be to mark out the emergent “regional dialects” that arise over time from either individual or groups of artists working within a given geographical context for a certain amount of time. I don’t mean to mythologize or exoticize the geographical, or exalt the superficial uses of urban/rural images but to say that the regional and local inevitably find their way into the work of any artist. Although the digitally published text is jettisoned to a utopian nowhere, accessible to anyone anywhere (except perhaps China6) the writing and the work that it discusses are nevertheless generated from some aggregate of locally-derived phenomena.
This isn’t some conservative call for the nostalgic age where great writers like Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin or even Baudelaire published cultural criticism in popular media. For all the perennial Chicken Little-ing and the claims of doomsayers suggesting that any medium could ever be eradicated, we still have trains, radio and even major record labels. But all these forms have been forced to adapt to a changing landscape, whether socio-economic, geographic or technological. But instead of adapting, becoming sharper and more assertive, contemporary art criticism has become coy when it comes to judgment and raising its collective hands to the sky and asking “What can be done?!” I’d like to offer plainly, “Try short range broadcast media.”
In “The Politics of Installation” Boris Groys describes art fairs and exhibitions as no longer for a cultural elite or in service of art buyers and instead a part of mass culture as administrated and organized by the artist.7 For Groys, installation becomes political in the artists’ use of public space populated with bodies to generate site-specific work that cannot be exchanged. The artist in this case refuses the elite, who would once be responsible for the purchase and exchange of artwork. The artist, through an administration of space, generates a democracy through authorship.8
However, through the propagation of images of shows from an unlimited geographical range of exhibitions, the general neutrality of exhibition spaces and the absence of any spatio-temporal significance in images of artworks, internet art criticism can exhibit a tendency to cater to an elite. With sites looking as neutral as gallery walls, images without any spatial specificity are able to be removed from a context and arranged alongside other images just as paintings can be purchased from galleries and arranged along with any of the buyers’ home furnishings. The ideal .jpg of a painting is unmarred by specific lighting conditions or its location in space. Any shot of the work in space is typically only supplementary and shown in an effort to describe the scale of the given artwork.9 By not being able to quantify and therefore propagate the experience of installation work, work that can be bought and sold, travel, move and be removed from the context of its exhibition, becoming an easier subject for internet art criticism to deal with and an easier material for curators to pick up by the handful, so to speak.
Art that can be distilled and reduced to a single image subjects itself to the tenets of commodity exchange. In this way, there is almost no difference between looking at an artist’s website, looking at installation images on a gallery website and visiting the gallery itself. Through long-range broadcast media, attempts to discuss exhibitions that are geographically or temporally remote to the viewer/reader have necessitated this format of documentation. Writing that doesn’t pique a viewer interest or warrant a visit to the exhibition alongside images that tend to summarize the work(s) of art on exhibit tend to be generative of exhibitions that are disappointing in their use of actual exhibition space. The same becomes true of a discursive/review cycle dependent upon the cycle of a monthly international publication over that of a weekly local discourse. The exhibition becomes merely a foundation for the creation of installation images that generate more physical exhibitions for the artist, the visitation to which becomes completely secondary. Having access to images of inaccessible places is a useless and inert state of affairs which can generate only further inertness. Reading about exhibitions in Tokyo is interesting but if the only interaction a viewer can have is remote (in such cases as when there is no local art criticism) the critics’ job becomes to merely describe with one or two .jpgs and 500 words that can and—perhaps should—do nothing more than read like the opening of an uninteresting short story.
Boris Groys describes the installation as dependent on institutional support for generating frameworks to house the work or for the work to react to. The kind of short-range media I describe would similarly depend largely upon a complex and reliable institutional support coming likely from an extremely large publication/network/station. Net criticism could be described as more like painting than installation in that as painting’s only demand is that canvas continue to be woven and oil continues to be refined; art criticism online is dependent upon domain hosting. This accounts for much of the utopian feel of online criticism. As someone vehemently opposed to the market and having directed a vocally anti-capitalist gallery devoted to the experiential, I’m skeptical of running for cover under the umbrella of an institution. But there are institutional frameworks that offer something locally important and an active critical discourse in a large publication (the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Baltimore Sun for example) would be able to trace the history of these cities and their cultural output—keeping them from being merely jumping off points for artists who as of now are pressured to embrace the real-estate nightmare and ever-present gentrification of New York City. Local cultural criticism from this standpoint is as green as rooftop gardening, sustainable and perhaps better for the local economy. By taking action and fracturing the already fractured “art world,” regional dialects would enrich the greater discursive framework so long as the short-range broadcast always attracts the useful interfering noise of the wide-range broadcast.
This digital native culture, with ever cheaper and constantly obsolescent devices, supposedly short-attention spans and the speed of networking, searching and reposting, may not believe in the future in the way that previous generations did—the generations that clamored for more, better and faster then blamed the surprisingly well-adjusted millenials who find themselves born into it. This essay risks nihilism at this point, but I assert with complete sincerity that, just as theater can offer a different experience than cinema and just as the physicality of audiocassettes saw its long-deserved renaissance alongside the release of the iPod touch, there are things that the daily newspaper has to offer that the constantly aggregating and personally tailored Google search can’t. Cultivating regional art dialects will further enrich and perhaps shock the system of contemporary art back into a place that can be responsive to critical—critical as in temporally urgent—needs as opposed to making broad-stroked attempts to connect to a falsely uniform international taste. Thanks to networked communication, an international art world is always at hand in enriching ways, but unfortunately, despite 2.0’s offering of an incredible amount of user-generated content, the relationship is by definition lopsided. The international can be seen by the local but the local is all but invisible to the international. Though it can and will be archived and stored both digitally and physically, the material publication of the newspaper has a social finality, definitive broadcast range and limited temporality, the appeal and importance of which can begin to reveal themselves when forced into the harsh light of contemporary media practices that demand print media adapt and provide something that digital information technology cannot.
Patrick Bobilin is a Chicago-based artist, educator and director of Noble & Superior Projects.
- Beyond the boundaries of digital work and “internet aware art”, the seemingly “ideal” exhibition, installation image or .jpg of a specific work lacks any visible mark or geography.
- Many of the e-flux ilk discuss a specific art world jargon called “globish” that describes the English that circulates around the art world—Jennifer Allen’s essay “Speak Easy” (http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/speak-easy/) is almost frightening in its warm embrace and unquestioning forgiveness for the propagation of the colonizer’s language.
- Students are constantly asked to think of what a work would look like in a gallery, to be able to speak to some kind of general audience while also creating works that are both personal and universal, without even a rudimentary idea of the myriad politics of exhibition practices (and often without being taught the differences between galleries and museums)—Boris Groys’ “The Politics of Installation” is more elucidating in 10-pages than this authors’ 7 years of arts education.
- Martha Nussbaum’s “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” validly argues against nationalistic pride and instead advocates goodwill and good citizenship that allows for an individual to be at home anywhere and subvert arbitrary difference in favor of acceptance—however, in curatorial practice, cosmopolitanism has become a vehicle for elitist jet-setting, superficial pseudo-ethnography of international art scenes and has re-inscribed the class boundaries that have long plagued the art world.
- “Towards a Critical Regionalism”—here Frampton uses the example of air-conditioning and central heating as offering architects and planners to ignore the environmental realities of a region in their design. Frampton also mentions the use of artificial lighting in art galleries as muting the poetics of light and space possible by the introduction of natural light in exhibition spaces.
- ;)
- http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-installation/
There is the undeniable necessity of an institutional support structure in most cases, but more artists are working outside of those physical and bureaucratic frameworks.
Brian O’Doherty “Inside the White Cube” describes the aesthetics of installation shots. Your humble author would describe a few that should bring an image to the reader’s mind—Pensive Young Woman, Bespectacled Man Holding Drink, and occasionally, Child Pointing in Awe.
• 9 May 2012 • 1 note • View comments
discourse
resource
dialogue
internet
Pool
Louis Doulas
Pool is an online platform and publication dedicated to expanding and improving the discourse between online and offline realities and their cultural, societal and political impact on each other.
• 2 May 2012 • View comments
discourse
making
medium
![Constantin Brancusi, Self-Portrait in the Workshop (c. 1933-34)
Medium Specificity in our Midst
Farrah Karapetian
J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan introduces the immortality of its title character through his shadow, which he needs, but which he has lost to the protective jaws of Nana, the dog. In the Disney version, the shadow, liberated from Peter’s body, has found its own posture, and only conforms again to his movements when Wendy sews it onto him. One of the realities of my perspective, is that despite a determination to speak roundly about mediums in terms of a generalizing tendency, my attention was, years ago, captured by one medium and it is to one medium that I return, again and again. I admit this right away in case I, like Peter Pan, seem to be soon trying to glue the shadow of the medium of photography onto its body with soap after others have understood it as inexorably freed.
In the early twentieth century, an artist would be most likely have been fluent with the deployment of one medium and literate in its technical matrices: Brancusi’s photographs supported his sculptural practice, even if through the lens of history, these stand on their own. Today, an artist more likely than not makes use of more than one material or technique, even in the making of one piece, let alone throughout the bulk of his or her practice. An artist is, in today’s context, fluent in the deployment of more than one medium, literate in the technical matrices of more than one medium, and aware of how the conversation surrounding one medium affects another. This is true even for those artists whose work is fairly consistently presented, say, as a photographic print, a video, or a painting; performance, sculptural installations, or any number of other strategies can be understood as an important part of the processes. Each of these mediums is to be understood in terms of what it means, ontologically as well as art-historically, in order that any one medium might be effectively borrowed and used.
Although a concerted focus on the parameters of any one medium is not a trend within contemporary art, medium-specificity exists broadly as a practice of election and narrowly as a practice of investigation, especially within the lens-based practices of photography and video.
This is an effect of modernism, even as it resists it (or need not bother resisting it anymore): the election of affinity towards any one particular medium as the appropriate vehicle for content or concept is a recognition of that medium’s (questionably evolving) capacities as well as of its (questionably evolving) reception. Today, such election occurs most frequently with respect to the lens-based practices of photography and video, suggesting an implicit acceptance of these mediums’ (or, as I will treat it, this medium’s) identities. When an artist—even one enrolled in the interdisciplinary or new genres department of some MFA program—chooses to confine a fruit of their project in the product that is a photograph or video, he or she tacitly acknowledges that product’s capacities, both presently and historically. This might seem strange, given the rejection of ontology that an interdisciplinary perspective might suggest. Decidedly interdisciplinary artists are not working on The Photograph, but they may choose The Photograph to communicate their work, and their work works upon it. Within photography departments (at schools, museums, and other institutions), the same practice might be identified, although there is more likely in this case a consciousness of working on The Photograph, even if other motivations—through references to other media and through content—are important. Either way, a consciousness of medium exists that is different from a mid-twentieth century medium specificity, but that relies upon recognition of the codes of the particular medium employed. Despite half a century, then, of the assumption of a deregulated field of practice, there appears to be a kind of natural law to the idea of the medium: something of which even artists who would not subscribe to a primacy of the medium in any way make use.
To suggest that artists today recognize, honor, and perpetuate the codes of any one medium takes this writing naturally back to medium specificity as it stood fifty years ago, with the sorting out of the particular natures of each medium, per Clement Greenberg’s declaration in Modernist Painting that each art has to “determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself”.[1] To his mind, he said this not to “subvert” production, but rather to cultivate reflexive practice within each medium, using Kant as an example: “Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic” and “was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism.” This way of thinking often addressed essential material conditions, but not when his attention turned to photography. Unlike the characteristics that essentialize the medium and practice of painting, photography’s concerns for Greenberg were literary above all else: photography’s “triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial,” ‘form’ in photography is reluctant to become ‘content,’ “the purely formal or abstract is a threat to the art in photography” and the most egregious of such work “has never been anything but abortive as art”.[2] If this might discourage the development of a photography along its material codes, it does not depart from the way photography had been and did develop over the course of the next fifty years and is an ontology that remains largely at play in the way the medium operates today.
Photography was not Greenberg’s focus, nor was it the focus of Michael Fried at the time, whose thinking in Art and Objecthood (1968) embodied modernism at its height. In fact, through paintings and sculptures were the products Fried discussed in that essay, no specific medium was the object of Art and Objecthood, nor was medium-specificity, per se. In this text, Fried identified the protagonist of minimalist (literalist) work—and the antagonist of modernist work—as theatricality: a concern “with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work”.[3] Of the more immutable characteristics in theatrical work is a sense of presence— through which the work demands to be taken seriously—and a “persistence with which [an] experience presents itself”, making the beholder into a subject and establishing “the experience itself as something like that of an object.” This latter condition Fried drew from Tony Smith’s account of an experience on a turnpike: a special experience that for some (such as Fried) might encourage artmaking, but that for Smith suggested the “end of art”. At stake in this essay was not any one medium or abstraction versus figuration, despite the work Fried championed otherwise at the time. At stake in this essay was the role of the beholder: is the work dependent on the beholder—“incomplete without him”—or is the work something that, as Fried says of Tony Caro’s work, “essentialize[s] meaning as such—as though the possibility of meaning what we say and do alone makes” the work exist as art? [4] Does the work stand on its own, embodying a clear sense of the author’s intention, or does it depend upon its reader to function?
This point of philosophy—rather than of art history or of criticism—manifests forty years later, for Fried, in one medium in particular: photography (and video.)[5] Fried’s text of 2008, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, outlines the ways in which art photography of the contemporary period asserts its authorship and by extension, its completeness, its to-be-looked-at-ness, its lack of existential need for a beholder. That this is today a photographic phenomenon is clear, but that it is not a phenomenon of other mediums seems not to be quite the point; it is a turning point for the Picture that perhaps only photography could achieve. Fried cites Walter Benn Michaels as saying that photographers have made efforts to establish their work “as pictures” and therefore photographers in particular have picked up a thread previously knitted to painting—per Fried’s own scholarship through Manet and Courbet. Although Fried discusses the artistic strategies of Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall, Thomas Demand, Thomas Struth, and other photographers in ways specific to their practices of photography and in fact says (in his conclusion, of the practice of Thomas Struth’s family portraits) that some of this work is “inconceivable outside the medium of photography”[6], the essential point of Fried’s scholarship in this case seems to re-establish the relevance of the question of authorship to the particular technique of photography (a phrase I borrow from Michel de Certeau’s definition of the philosopher.) The ontology at issue here is that of the Picture; the Photograph is an evolved Picture.
Asked to respond to Fried’s book on photography, curator emeritus at the Getty Museum Weston Naef, expressed a belief that medium-specific study should begin with a study of the individual medium’s materials:
“The interpretive method that Fried championed for studying painting and sculpture of the 1960s was first to understand artists’ materials and how they behave, then to think about what this means for the resulting work. …The early writing would have been a good model to follow [in Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before], since creative decisions about materials and process are as fundamental to the art of photography as they are for the art of painting.”[7]
The problem with Naef’s perspective here, which he goes on to remedy by listing the material processes behind some of the photographers whose work is unpacked in Fried’s book, is not just that he misstates the object of Fried’s championship as an interpretive method instead of as this essential issue of the beholder, but that he presumes a material identity for the photograph that is not widely shared. When an interdisciplinary artist borrows the Photograph for use in a project, he or she does not borrow a type of film, a length of exposure, or the idea of cameralessness; he or she borrows the philosophical question of authorship in a posture specific to the loaded history of mediatic depiction.
I too believe that it is important to understand an artist’s materials and that photography has at its disposal many magics that go beyond content and composition. I do not, though, believe that these materials and processes are what the medium widely represents to those within its exclusive practice or to those who elect to use it but who operate outside of photography’s exclusive practice. That is not to say that the medium cannot evolve to represent more than the Picture in the hands and imaginations of artists, but it is to say that within and without the discipline, the Photograph is used to depict. Jeff Wall has said that the photograph “cannot find alternatives to depiction”, that “it is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things”, that photography through reportage “elaborates its version of the Picture, and… is the first new version since the onset of modern painting in the 1860s, or, possibly, since the emergence of abstract art”.[8] This idea comes not just from Wall’s experience as a photographic artist nor his research and thought on the subject, but from Greenberg and from John Szarkowski. It is an idea that translates into the far reaches of how photographs are used in sculpture and how they are written about. It is how photographs are seen and used, even when their concerns appear abstract, and even in a deregulated field of interdisciplinary practice.
In 1964, MOMA mounted the exhibition, the Photographer’s Eye, and the catalogue essay by John Szarkowski notes that “to quote out of context is the essence of the photographer’s craft. His central problem is a simple one: what shall he include, what shall he reject?” For Szarkowski, this is a question of authorship, not of journalistic editing, although he did not look down upon journalism: “the factuality of [the photographer’s] pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, [is] a different thing than the reality itself” [9]Throughout the 160 exhibitions John Szarkowski produced for New York’s MOMA between 1962 and 1991, it is the “unadulterated” act of “visual editing” that characterized the medium as he saw it. In a time during which materials—paint, flatness, rectangularity—might have characterized the essential components of painting, the likewise material components of photographs were not to be understood as the essential components of the photograph. “You’re not supposed to look at the thing,” said Szarkowski. “You’re supposed to look through it. It’s a window” (2006). In terms of Greenberg’s “effects exclusive” to the medium, Szarkowski, and the work of artists he championed, including that by Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and William Eggleston, suggest that a) the photograph is uniquely transparent, materially, as an object and that b) the practice of photographing is uniquely one of inclusion and exclusion—i.e. of intentionality, despite the effects of chance, which also uniquely define (for Szarkowski, and, in 1980 in Camera Lucida, for Roland Barthes) photographic practice.
This faith in the photograph as simultaneously fact and fabrication, plus this conviction that the photographic object is transparent, is what enables artists throughout the Conceptual period of the 1960s and ‘70s to elect the photograph as the medium through which they could communicate. The photograph’s role “in, or as, Conceptual Art” (per Jeff Wall’s essay of 1995), the photograph’s participation in reportage before and after the period of the 1960s and ‘70s to which Wall refers, and the solid footing that the photograph gained at MOMA under Szarkowski as a product like reportage but not of reportage: Each of these roles, for the Photograph, provides it with an identity that artists both working and not working on the Photograph borrow.
This same period during which Fried established authorship as a central issue of artmaking and during which Szarkowski sanctioned an unadulterated—but still highly authored—photograph at the Museum of Modern Art saw the development of the question of artist as author in a different respect as well. Roland Barthes, in his essay of 1967, “Death of the Author”, writes that any “text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” He goes on to explain that these multiple citations come into “dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation” and then locates the one place in which the “multiplicity is collected” as the reader—not the writer: “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.” One kind of artist working with the Photograph, at this time, became a reader, and in so doing, did not represent the death of authorship, but in enacting a certain kind of self-reflexive photographic phenomenon, re-represented mediatic imagery. The Pictures generation was of course named for the interest of the artists involved in reworking media culture. Cindy Sherman shot film stills starring herself; her film stills were acquired in 1995, following Szarkowski’s departure from MOMA, when Peter Galassi turned the attention of the museum’s photo department—and the institutionalized identity of the Photograph—towards more and more explicitly authored photographs. This does not represent a turn away from Szarkowski’s “unadulterated” photograph, but a building of the understanding of the intentionality of the photographer as author.
If an artist today works with photography or video, they work from inside the logic of lens-based mediums; an awareness of this logic and the historical contexts of lens-based mediums is key to each of these projects. The notion that medium specificity still exists in the multiplicity of today’s art practices may or may not be surprising. Certainly, our institutions preserve departments for the various mediums, even as they speak of their shows or students in interdisciplinary terms. It should also be fairly comfortable to think of interdisciplinary artists as electing affinities with particular mediums. Work across a spectrum of mediums is made possible by the turn toward fabrication and paid labor initiated in the 1960s; part of the luxury of such election is validated by an understanding of the medium as an institution with its own identity and regulatory matrices within which meaning is made. Why is a photograph an appropriate means of communicating this idea? Why fiberglass? Not only the material itself becomes a part of the metaphorical underpinning of the piece, but the fabricator him or herself: Why must I employ this kind of commercial craftsman or another? What does his or her particular skill represent on a cultural level?
Even those artists who choose to work in one primary medium must by needs of our contemporary supply chain employ others in their process who are more familiar with the minutiae of the medium’s matrix. A photographer who chooses to work with film trusts a lab to develop it and sometimes to print it. A painter may not mix his or her own pigments. A sculptor in the Unmonumental tradition of the last ten years might use materials that are inexpensive so as to be able to manipulate them his or herself, but, as Charles Ray put it, “Does fabrication begin with the materials an artist selects? Is an artist who uses plywood alone in his studio working with unseen fabricators?”[10] Surely, the plywood was made by someone in a factory and bears with it its own commercial connotations that are part of the meaning of the final piece. The artists in these cases are making use of the skills of others whose lives are closer to the materials qua materials.
It is possible to regard and test a medium from within that medium, and yet in doing so to regard and test its equals and opposites: a photograph, showing sculpture, is not sculpture, and a photograph showing performance is not performance. The nature of a Modernist photograph is to show, and so the photograph of sculpture or performance is still a photograph. What of a photograph that behaves like sculpture? What if it knocks about on the floor or changes in time? Relationships between mediums are useful, even when an artist is trying to suss out the identity or particular nature of the primary one at hand. Photography’s fairly simultaneous origin by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England is an example; “lacking other ways to make understandable their prodigious discovery, both inventors described their creations as types of drawing”.[11]Part of what drove these men towards capturing imagery photographically was the choice they had between it and the act and results of drawing, just as part of what drove Moholy Nagy to experimentation in photography was the alternative it presented to painting. Sculpture drove Thomas Demand to photography. There is a difference between where these artists and others came from, mediatically, and where they arrived; in that very difference and in that election is the specificity of a medium.
Although there are other specificities to contemporary artmaking, not the least of which are responsive attitudes toward site, viewer, or market, medium specificity is necessarily still at play. It is at times liberated from the body of the individual artist—one may not be necessarily a photographer or a painter—but the mediums themselves bear with them as much specificity if not more than ever before. Deregulation of the practice of art has ostensibly meant the removal of critical rules that constrain the operation of individual artists, reducing institutional control of how art is made and shown. This has not necessarily been the case, though; a natural law of each medium guides the election of that medium by individual artists, whose practice is no longer constrained by positive (man-made) law.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3ehwqFeF81r7q1gao1_400.jpg)
Constantin Brancusi, Self-Portrait in the Workshop (c. 1933-34)
Medium Specificity in our Midst
Farrah Karapetian
J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan introduces the immortality of its title character through his shadow, which he needs, but which he has lost to the protective jaws of Nana, the dog. In the Disney version, the shadow, liberated from Peter’s body, has found its own posture, and only conforms again to his movements when Wendy sews it onto him. One of the realities of my perspective, is that despite a determination to speak roundly about mediums in terms of a generalizing tendency, my attention was, years ago, captured by one medium and it is to one medium that I return, again and again. I admit this right away in case I, like Peter Pan, seem to be soon trying to glue the shadow of the medium of photography onto its body with soap after others have understood it as inexorably freed.
In the early twentieth century, an artist would be most likely have been fluent with the deployment of one medium and literate in its technical matrices: Brancusi’s photographs supported his sculptural practice, even if through the lens of history, these stand on their own. Today, an artist more likely than not makes use of more than one material or technique, even in the making of one piece, let alone throughout the bulk of his or her practice. An artist is, in today’s context, fluent in the deployment of more than one medium, literate in the technical matrices of more than one medium, and aware of how the conversation surrounding one medium affects another. This is true even for those artists whose work is fairly consistently presented, say, as a photographic print, a video, or a painting; performance, sculptural installations, or any number of other strategies can be understood as an important part of the processes. Each of these mediums is to be understood in terms of what it means, ontologically as well as art-historically, in order that any one medium might be effectively borrowed and used.
Although a concerted focus on the parameters of any one medium is not a trend within contemporary art, medium-specificity exists broadly as a practice of election and narrowly as a practice of investigation, especially within the lens-based practices of photography and video.
This is an effect of modernism, even as it resists it (or need not bother resisting it anymore): the election of affinity towards any one particular medium as the appropriate vehicle for content or concept is a recognition of that medium’s (questionably evolving) capacities as well as of its (questionably evolving) reception. Today, such election occurs most frequently with respect to the lens-based practices of photography and video, suggesting an implicit acceptance of these mediums’ (or, as I will treat it, this medium’s) identities. When an artist—even one enrolled in the interdisciplinary or new genres department of some MFA program—chooses to confine a fruit of their project in the product that is a photograph or video, he or she tacitly acknowledges that product’s capacities, both presently and historically. This might seem strange, given the rejection of ontology that an interdisciplinary perspective might suggest. Decidedly interdisciplinary artists are not working on The Photograph, but they may choose The Photograph to communicate their work, and their work works upon it. Within photography departments (at schools, museums, and other institutions), the same practice might be identified, although there is more likely in this case a consciousness of working on The Photograph, even if other motivations—through references to other media and through content—are important. Either way, a consciousness of medium exists that is different from a mid-twentieth century medium specificity, but that relies upon recognition of the codes of the particular medium employed. Despite half a century, then, of the assumption of a deregulated field of practice, there appears to be a kind of natural law to the idea of the medium: something of which even artists who would not subscribe to a primacy of the medium in any way make use.
To suggest that artists today recognize, honor, and perpetuate the codes of any one medium takes this writing naturally back to medium specificity as it stood fifty years ago, with the sorting out of the particular natures of each medium, per Clement Greenberg’s declaration in Modernist Painting that each art has to “determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself”.[1] To his mind, he said this not to “subvert” production, but rather to cultivate reflexive practice within each medium, using Kant as an example: “Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic” and “was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism.” This way of thinking often addressed essential material conditions, but not when his attention turned to photography. Unlike the characteristics that essentialize the medium and practice of painting, photography’s concerns for Greenberg were literary above all else: photography’s “triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial,” ‘form’ in photography is reluctant to become ‘content,’ “the purely formal or abstract is a threat to the art in photography” and the most egregious of such work “has never been anything but abortive as art”.[2] If this might discourage the development of a photography along its material codes, it does not depart from the way photography had been and did develop over the course of the next fifty years and is an ontology that remains largely at play in the way the medium operates today.
Photography was not Greenberg’s focus, nor was it the focus of Michael Fried at the time, whose thinking in Art and Objecthood (1968) embodied modernism at its height. In fact, through paintings and sculptures were the products Fried discussed in that essay, no specific medium was the object of Art and Objecthood, nor was medium-specificity, per se. In this text, Fried identified the protagonist of minimalist (literalist) work—and the antagonist of modernist work—as theatricality: a concern “with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work”.[3] Of the more immutable characteristics in theatrical work is a sense of presence— through which the work demands to be taken seriously—and a “persistence with which [an] experience presents itself”, making the beholder into a subject and establishing “the experience itself as something like that of an object.” This latter condition Fried drew from Tony Smith’s account of an experience on a turnpike: a special experience that for some (such as Fried) might encourage artmaking, but that for Smith suggested the “end of art”. At stake in this essay was not any one medium or abstraction versus figuration, despite the work Fried championed otherwise at the time. At stake in this essay was the role of the beholder: is the work dependent on the beholder—“incomplete without him”—or is the work something that, as Fried says of Tony Caro’s work, “essentialize[s] meaning as such—as though the possibility of meaning what we say and do alone makes” the work exist as art? [4] Does the work stand on its own, embodying a clear sense of the author’s intention, or does it depend upon its reader to function?
This point of philosophy—rather than of art history or of criticism—manifests forty years later, for Fried, in one medium in particular: photography (and video.)[5] Fried’s text of 2008, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, outlines the ways in which art photography of the contemporary period asserts its authorship and by extension, its completeness, its to-be-looked-at-ness, its lack of existential need for a beholder. That this is today a photographic phenomenon is clear, but that it is not a phenomenon of other mediums seems not to be quite the point; it is a turning point for the Picture that perhaps only photography could achieve. Fried cites Walter Benn Michaels as saying that photographers have made efforts to establish their work “as pictures” and therefore photographers in particular have picked up a thread previously knitted to painting—per Fried’s own scholarship through Manet and Courbet. Although Fried discusses the artistic strategies of Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall, Thomas Demand, Thomas Struth, and other photographers in ways specific to their practices of photography and in fact says (in his conclusion, of the practice of Thomas Struth’s family portraits) that some of this work is “inconceivable outside the medium of photography”[6], the essential point of Fried’s scholarship in this case seems to re-establish the relevance of the question of authorship to the particular technique of photography (a phrase I borrow from Michel de Certeau’s definition of the philosopher.) The ontology at issue here is that of the Picture; the Photograph is an evolved Picture.
Asked to respond to Fried’s book on photography, curator emeritus at the Getty Museum Weston Naef, expressed a belief that medium-specific study should begin with a study of the individual medium’s materials:
“The interpretive method that Fried championed for studying painting and sculpture of the 1960s was first to understand artists’ materials and how they behave, then to think about what this means for the resulting work. …The early writing would have been a good model to follow [in Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before], since creative decisions about materials and process are as fundamental to the art of photography as they are for the art of painting.”[7]
The problem with Naef’s perspective here, which he goes on to remedy by listing the material processes behind some of the photographers whose work is unpacked in Fried’s book, is not just that he misstates the object of Fried’s championship as an interpretive method instead of as this essential issue of the beholder, but that he presumes a material identity for the photograph that is not widely shared. When an interdisciplinary artist borrows the Photograph for use in a project, he or she does not borrow a type of film, a length of exposure, or the idea of cameralessness; he or she borrows the philosophical question of authorship in a posture specific to the loaded history of mediatic depiction.
I too believe that it is important to understand an artist’s materials and that photography has at its disposal many magics that go beyond content and composition. I do not, though, believe that these materials and processes are what the medium widely represents to those within its exclusive practice or to those who elect to use it but who operate outside of photography’s exclusive practice. That is not to say that the medium cannot evolve to represent more than the Picture in the hands and imaginations of artists, but it is to say that within and without the discipline, the Photograph is used to depict. Jeff Wall has said that the photograph “cannot find alternatives to depiction”, that “it is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things”, that photography through reportage “elaborates its version of the Picture, and… is the first new version since the onset of modern painting in the 1860s, or, possibly, since the emergence of abstract art”.[8] This idea comes not just from Wall’s experience as a photographic artist nor his research and thought on the subject, but from Greenberg and from John Szarkowski. It is an idea that translates into the far reaches of how photographs are used in sculpture and how they are written about. It is how photographs are seen and used, even when their concerns appear abstract, and even in a deregulated field of interdisciplinary practice.
In 1964, MOMA mounted the exhibition, the Photographer’s Eye, and the catalogue essay by John Szarkowski notes that “to quote out of context is the essence of the photographer’s craft. His central problem is a simple one: what shall he include, what shall he reject?” For Szarkowski, this is a question of authorship, not of journalistic editing, although he did not look down upon journalism: “the factuality of [the photographer’s] pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, [is] a different thing than the reality itself” [9]Throughout the 160 exhibitions John Szarkowski produced for New York’s MOMA between 1962 and 1991, it is the “unadulterated” act of “visual editing” that characterized the medium as he saw it. In a time during which materials—paint, flatness, rectangularity—might have characterized the essential components of painting, the likewise material components of photographs were not to be understood as the essential components of the photograph. “You’re not supposed to look at the thing,” said Szarkowski. “You’re supposed to look through it. It’s a window” (2006). In terms of Greenberg’s “effects exclusive” to the medium, Szarkowski, and the work of artists he championed, including that by Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and William Eggleston, suggest that a) the photograph is uniquely transparent, materially, as an object and that b) the practice of photographing is uniquely one of inclusion and exclusion—i.e. of intentionality, despite the effects of chance, which also uniquely define (for Szarkowski, and, in 1980 in Camera Lucida, for Roland Barthes) photographic practice.
This faith in the photograph as simultaneously fact and fabrication, plus this conviction that the photographic object is transparent, is what enables artists throughout the Conceptual period of the 1960s and ‘70s to elect the photograph as the medium through which they could communicate. The photograph’s role “in, or as, Conceptual Art” (per Jeff Wall’s essay of 1995), the photograph’s participation in reportage before and after the period of the 1960s and ‘70s to which Wall refers, and the solid footing that the photograph gained at MOMA under Szarkowski as a product like reportage but not of reportage: Each of these roles, for the Photograph, provides it with an identity that artists both working and not working on the Photograph borrow.
This same period during which Fried established authorship as a central issue of artmaking and during which Szarkowski sanctioned an unadulterated—but still highly authored—photograph at the Museum of Modern Art saw the development of the question of artist as author in a different respect as well. Roland Barthes, in his essay of 1967, “Death of the Author”, writes that any “text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” He goes on to explain that these multiple citations come into “dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation” and then locates the one place in which the “multiplicity is collected” as the reader—not the writer: “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.” One kind of artist working with the Photograph, at this time, became a reader, and in so doing, did not represent the death of authorship, but in enacting a certain kind of self-reflexive photographic phenomenon, re-represented mediatic imagery. The Pictures generation was of course named for the interest of the artists involved in reworking media culture. Cindy Sherman shot film stills starring herself; her film stills were acquired in 1995, following Szarkowski’s departure from MOMA, when Peter Galassi turned the attention of the museum’s photo department—and the institutionalized identity of the Photograph—towards more and more explicitly authored photographs. This does not represent a turn away from Szarkowski’s “unadulterated” photograph, but a building of the understanding of the intentionality of the photographer as author.
If an artist today works with photography or video, they work from inside the logic of lens-based mediums; an awareness of this logic and the historical contexts of lens-based mediums is key to each of these projects. The notion that medium specificity still exists in the multiplicity of today’s art practices may or may not be surprising. Certainly, our institutions preserve departments for the various mediums, even as they speak of their shows or students in interdisciplinary terms. It should also be fairly comfortable to think of interdisciplinary artists as electing affinities with particular mediums. Work across a spectrum of mediums is made possible by the turn toward fabrication and paid labor initiated in the 1960s; part of the luxury of such election is validated by an understanding of the medium as an institution with its own identity and regulatory matrices within which meaning is made. Why is a photograph an appropriate means of communicating this idea? Why fiberglass? Not only the material itself becomes a part of the metaphorical underpinning of the piece, but the fabricator him or herself: Why must I employ this kind of commercial craftsman or another? What does his or her particular skill represent on a cultural level?
Even those artists who choose to work in one primary medium must by needs of our contemporary supply chain employ others in their process who are more familiar with the minutiae of the medium’s matrix. A photographer who chooses to work with film trusts a lab to develop it and sometimes to print it. A painter may not mix his or her own pigments. A sculptor in the Unmonumental tradition of the last ten years might use materials that are inexpensive so as to be able to manipulate them his or herself, but, as Charles Ray put it, “Does fabrication begin with the materials an artist selects? Is an artist who uses plywood alone in his studio working with unseen fabricators?”[10] Surely, the plywood was made by someone in a factory and bears with it its own commercial connotations that are part of the meaning of the final piece. The artists in these cases are making use of the skills of others whose lives are closer to the materials qua materials.
It is possible to regard and test a medium from within that medium, and yet in doing so to regard and test its equals and opposites: a photograph, showing sculpture, is not sculpture, and a photograph showing performance is not performance. The nature of a Modernist photograph is to show, and so the photograph of sculpture or performance is still a photograph. What of a photograph that behaves like sculpture? What if it knocks about on the floor or changes in time? Relationships between mediums are useful, even when an artist is trying to suss out the identity or particular nature of the primary one at hand. Photography’s fairly simultaneous origin by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England is an example; “lacking other ways to make understandable their prodigious discovery, both inventors described their creations as types of drawing”.[11]Part of what drove these men towards capturing imagery photographically was the choice they had between it and the act and results of drawing, just as part of what drove Moholy Nagy to experimentation in photography was the alternative it presented to painting. Sculpture drove Thomas Demand to photography. There is a difference between where these artists and others came from, mediatically, and where they arrived; in that very difference and in that election is the specificity of a medium.
Although there are other specificities to contemporary artmaking, not the least of which are responsive attitudes toward site, viewer, or market, medium specificity is necessarily still at play. It is at times liberated from the body of the individual artist—one may not be necessarily a photographer or a painter—but the mediums themselves bear with them as much specificity if not more than ever before. Deregulation of the practice of art has ostensibly meant the removal of critical rules that constrain the operation of individual artists, reducing institutional control of how art is made and shown. This has not necessarily been the case, though; a natural law of each medium guides the election of that medium by individual artists, whose practice is no longer constrained by positive (man-made) law.
• 2 May 2012 • View comments
biology
residency
fusion
FROM THE LABORATORY TO THE STUDIO:
INTERDISCIPLINARY PRACTICES IN BIO ART
May 29 - June 29
4 undergraduate credits; $2,400
From anatomical studies to landscape painting to the biomorphism of surrealism, the biological realm historically provided a significant resource for numerous artists. More recently, bio art has become a term referring to intersecting domains of the biological sciences and their incorporation into the plastic arts. Of particular importance in bio art is to summon awareness of the ways in which biomedical sciences alter social, ethical and cultural values in society.
Coming to the fore in the early 1990s, bio art is neither media specific nor locally bounded. It is an international movement with practitioners in such regions as Europe, the U.S., Russia, Asia, Australia and the Americas. Several sub-genres of bio art exist within this overarching term:
1) Artists who employ the iconography of the 20th- and 21st-century sciences, including molecular and cellular genetics, transgenically altered living matter, reproductive technologies and neurosciences. All traditional media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing are employed to convey novel ways of representing life forms.
2) Artists who utilize computer software, systems theory and simulations to investigate aspects of the biological sciences such as evolution, artificial life and robotics through digital sculpture and new media installations.
3) Artists employing biological matter itself as their medium, including processes such as tissue engineering, plant breeding, transgenics and ecological reclamation.
This interdisciplinary residency will take place in the new Fine Arts Nature and Technology Laboratory located in the heart of New York City’s Chelsea gallery district. Participants will have access to all of the facilities. Each student will be assigned an individual workstation. In addition, the Nature and Technology Lab houses microscopes for photo and video, skeleton collections, specimen collections, slide collections, an herbarium and aquarium as well as a library. Studio hours are: Monday through Thursday, 9:00 am to 10:00 pm; Friday, 9:00 am to 6:00 pm; Saturday 9:00 am to 6:00 pm; Sunday 12:00 noon to 6:00 pm.
Demonstrations include microscopy, plant tissue engineering, molecular cuisine and the production of micro eco-systems. Field trips and visiting speakers will include artists, scientists and museum professionals. Students may work in any media, including the performing arts.
Faculty will include Suzanne Anker and Brandon Ballengée.
NOTE: A portfolio is required for review and acceptance to this program.
For further information or questions regarding SVA’s Summer Residencies contact:
Keren Moscovitch, Assistant Director
Division of Continuing Education
Tel: 212-592-2188
E-mail: kmoscovitch@sva.edu
• 2 April 2012 • 1 note • View comments
