I completely agree with the National Endowment for the Art’s sentiment that

…arts workers are real workers who are part of this country’s real economy. They earn salaries, support families, pay taxes. Artists are also entrepreneurs and placemakers, who revitalize towns, cities, and neighborhoods – both the economies and the ethos of them.

–“Art Works” Logo RFQ

Unfortunately, this principle isn’t put into action. The NEA is showing no scruples about asking RFQ respondents to submit a proposed design in black and white, and color, with no compensation. They are operating on work on speculation, what the AIGA defines as

work done for free, in hopes of getting paid for it

–AIGA position on spec work, AIGA.com

The NEA justifies their position with the sentiment

We wanted a process that was open to students, designers, artists, companies, private citizens, and pretty much anyone who agrees that “art works.”

—“Art Works Logo” blog post, NEA’s Art Works blog

But that just means that the NEA is willing to exploit and waste the time, talent, and work of all but one of the “designers, artists, companies, private citizens, and pretty much anyone” who responds to their call.

This is really one opportunity that should be missed.

For more information on why spec is bad for artists, designers and clients, visit:
NO!SPEC
AIGA position on spec work

Christian L. Frock presents
INVISIBLE VENUE

“Hello! My Name is…” a site-specific intervention with contributions from Chris Basmajian, Michael Damm, Anthony Discenza, Charles Gute, Jamie Hilder, Scott Oliver, Susan O’Malley, Zachary Royer Scholz, Zefrey Throwell, Christine Wong Yap

College Art Association 98th Annual Conference
February 10 – 13, 2010
Hyatt Regency Chicago
151 East Wacker Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60601

Public Art Dialogue Session:
Site Variations: The Shifting Grounds of Public Art
Featuring “Invisible Venue(s): Alternatives to the Institution” an overview of Invisible Venue by Christian L. Frock
Friday, February 12, 9:30am – Noon
Regency D, Gold Level, West Tower, Hyatt Regency Chicago
Chaired by Dr Harriet F. Senie and Dr Cher Krause Knight

“Hello! My Name is…” is a site-specific intervention of artist-created conference badges designed for anonymous distribution during the College Art Association 98th Annual conference in Chicago. Drawing on the required reading of the ubiquitous name badge in conference settings, contributing artists have created messages in response to the context of this academic and social networking event for art professionals. Badges will be anonymously distributed within the conference and arranged on tables in the standard grid fashion typical of a reception area. Each badge will be printed on the back with “This is public art. www.invisiblevenue.com” to direct attention to complete project details, documentation and a full suite of contributions online.

“Invisible Venue(s): Alternatives to the Institution” is a paper presented by Christian L. Frock in the conference session “Site Variations: The Shifting Grounds of Public Art.” The paper will be published in digital format by the College Art Association and will be republished in Issue 9 of Art Practical on February 25. A full length version of the paper, with images, will be accessible on www.invisiblevenue.com and available for distribution upon request.

The College Art Association Conference is the world’s largest international forum for professionals in the visual arts, with an anticipated attendance of more than 4,000 artists, art historians, curators, critics, and arts professionals. This is a ticketed event.

For more information, please visit christian

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Invisible Venue collaborates with artists to present art in unexpected settings. www.invisiblevenue.com

There’s so much to like about Bright Light, Vancouver’s Public Art Festival:

A light in winter.

Its economy.

The simplicity of black white and yellow. The design is elegant, understated, progressive, with charming touches.

The map is functional and cute. It’s not overburdened with text.

The programming: great art, community engagement, conceptualism, sophistication, accessibility, site-specificity, public interaction….

One of the predominant tropes of the artists in Il Tempo del Postino is their assertion of the socialising and empowering agency of art, which has long been an aim of theatre of the left, from Brecht to Invisible Theatre, developed by Augusto Boal in the 1970s, when social-issue plays were staged in public places, such as shopping centres, often drawing nonperformers, or ’spect-actors’, into the debate….

The efforts of a number of these artists to orchestrate socialising contexts have been criticised in recent years for being patronising or for actually stultifying exchange.

[Stultifying? See Ranciere.]

A distinguishing factor of Eliasson’s work, though, is that he doesn’t consider language the primary socialising agent. His installations and events operate on the audience’s sensory perception, prompting not a conversational exchange but a subjective psychophysical experience. Although, as Eliasson points out, there is no unmediated neutral state of perception in a gallery, as by definition any aesthetic proposition demands sensory manipulation, he tends to expand effect beyond optical or linguistic cognition. Utopian claims for art creating solidarity through authentic communal discourse become redundant when the subjectivity of perception becomes the means as well as the subject of an artwork. Collectivity, suggests Eliasson, is more about the production of difference, and yet there remains a misperception that representation in the form of language creates a productive space, when in fact it simply describes a space that remains uninhabited. As it was for eighteenth-century romantic ironists, such as August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, for Eliasson it is the employment of the gap between representation and the actual world, between the sun and the evocation of a sun or an audience and their reconstruction, that generates poetic effect.

—Sally O’Reilly, “Olafur Eliasson: Time is on his side,” Art Review, September 14, 2007

A COMMON CRITICAL READING of the grid casts it as the essential symbol of technology and human contrivance—the signal structure of modernism—cold, impersonal, and famously called “anti-natural” by Rosalind Krauss in her 1978 essay “Grids.” In my view, however, the grid could not be closer to nature; it is the direct and rebellious offspring of gravity. The first relationship between the grid and gravity is one of accordance. By pulling perpendicular to the surface of the earth, gravity installs the right angle as a cardinal feature of our physical world. Perpendicular relationships are naturally recurrent and omnipresent. A basic grid is an accretion of these relationships, intersections of horizontal and vertical lines—like those formed by a liquid’s surface drawn level by gravity and the path of a falling object, respectively: Materials succumbing to the force create x- and y-axes.

The second relationship is one that weds rebellion and submission, a fleeting union, as the rebellions are only ever temporarily successful. A tree most efficiently resists the force of gravity by growing straight upward—at a ninety-degree angle to the horizon. The vertical charge of life is in fact the act of fleeing an inevitable state of horizontality, death. The leveling force of gravity literally ages us, drawing us down until we cannot go down any farther. Here gravity and its opposition trace the axes.

The third relationship is one in which the grid itself is the opposition to gravity. In this broader case, the definition of grid should be expanded, as it is in Grid Index, to include tilings—coverings of the plane in which there is no excess of space or overlap between constituent shapes. The entropic event of ice melting, for instance, sets geometric tiling against gravity’s pull toward decay and disorder, taking the gridded (albeit inconsistent) crystalline structure and rendering it an amorphous molecular soup. Similarly, but in the reverse order, crystal structures grow more consistently and easily in zero gravity—even forming in unlikely substances like plasmas—without their entropic enemy. If gravity is a protagonist in the plot of entropy, then the order of the grid is its natural and valiant, although doomed, antagonist.

—Tauba Auerbach, “Out of Order” Book review of Grid Index by Cartsen Nicolai (Berlin: Gestalten, 2009), Artforum, 2010
[To see the article, visit Artforum.com, register or log-in, and search for Auerbach.]

Cultivate: setting goals, taking risks, being organized, self-actualizing
De-emphasize: worrying about regrets and how you are perceived
Takeaway: Build self-regard and internal measures of achievement

[Psychologist Robert W. Hill of Appalachian State University] argues that perfectionistic traits can be either adaptive or maladaptive. It depends upon whether they are forward- or backward-looking, emotionally positive or negative, and motivated from an inner urge or an outside push.

In a paper just published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Hill and two colleagues describe an experiment that illustrates the importance of distinguishing between types of perfectionism. They surveyed 216 psychology students to assess their perfectionistic tendencies, as well as their psychological well-being and satisfaction with life.

Adaptive perfectionism was determined by combining the students’ self-reported scores in four areas: striving for excellence, organizational skills, tendency to plan ahead and holding others to high standards. Maladaptive perfectionism was measured by the sum of four other scores: concern over mistakes, need for approval, tendency to ruminate over past performances and perceived parental pressure.

“We found that adaptive perfectionism was associated with indicators of positive psychological outcomes,” Hill reports. “The more an individual was prone to striving for excellence, planning ahead, being organized, they typically had a high level of psychological well-being, life satisfaction and positive mood. The inverse was true for maladaptive perfectionism.”

Hill found a “wide distribution” of these traits in the test subjects, suggesting that most people have some combination of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism….

“Adaptive perfectionism is an internal standard for achievement,” he notes. “Maladaptive perfectionism is an external concern – wondering what other people are going to think. It’s kind of a thinking habit: ‘I made a mistake there.’ ‘Someone will notice I didn’t do that right.’ We know from a number of studies that cognitive behavioral therapy can change or reduce those kinds of thoughts.”

—Tom Jacobs, “The Two Faces of Perfectionism,” Miller-McCune, January 28, 2010