Category Archives: Research

Research

a life in three dimensions

Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style is a fantastic treatise on marrying typographic form and content. It’s also a great reference, sort of like a Chicago Manual of Style for graphic designers. Pragmatic, thorough and gorgeously designed, it’s a significant contribution to the field of graphic design.

For most mere mortals, that is enough of an acheivement. I just learned that Bringhurst is also a poet, essayist and linguist, with several published books. I’m giddy with excitement. Language, meaning, cognition, type and form: a nexus of thought that’s concrete enough for me to grasp, and theoretical enough to allow speculative experimentation.

This title sounds lovely: The Solid Form of Language. It explains “a new way of classifying and understanding the relationship between script and meaning. Beginning with the original relationship between a language and its written script, Bringhurst takes us on a history of reading and writing that begins with the interpretation of animal tracks and fast-forwards up to the typographical abundance of more recent times.” (Typotheque)

In my early twenties, I suffered from too many interests, so I decided to let my non-art activities fall to the wayside. This meant accepting that my musical development would slow: I’m never going to shred. It’s OK. I just didn’t have the capacity to be great at everything I was interested in.

Now, in my early thirties, I’m re-thinking this all-or-one-thing model. I think it’s entirely possible to excel and find fulfillment in more than one arena. (Excuse the pun.) Not to be a generalist, but to be a specialist in related realms like art, criticism and design…. Bringhurst provides a neat example.

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Research

Computational Linguistics

Pondering the current research interests of Mark Johnson, who co-authored one of my current obsessions, Metaphors We Live By (U. of Chicago Press, 1980 with George Lakoff. From his page on Brown University’s Cognitive & Linguistic Science department:

Mark Johnson’s research interests

Interdisciplinary research and training:

The things that I’m most excited about currently is research that lies at the intersection of Linguistics, Computer Science, Statistics and Neuroscience. Computational Linguistics and machine learning are good examples of topics that lie at this nexus….

Why computational linguistics?

My area of research is computational linguistics. Linguistic theory focuses primarily on the structures involved in natural language, but in my opinion the structures alone are just a small part of the story. Language is active and dynamic; the processes of language learning, comprehension and production are what really bring language to life. That is, I believe that modern generative linguistic theories of syntax, semantics and phonology are on the right track as far as they go, but that they are missing a large part of the story because they focus on static representations, rather than the processes which create and manipulate these representations. Put rather crassly: representations just sit there, processes actually do something.

There are many different ways to study these processes, but to me one of the fascinating challenges is to develop theories that are consistent with and build on the structures that standard linguistic theory provides. I also think that we want theories of these linguistic processes which are clear and explicit, in much the same way as certain generative approaches to linguistics formulate clear, explicit and precise grammar fragments in order to present and test their hypotheses. Manipulating information-bearing symbols is what computation is all about, so we want to understand the processes of language in computational terms.

Computational linguistics is a truly interdisciplinary subject. It is a scientific discipline with important industrial and engineering applications (just like some areas of physics or chemistry). Intellectually it draws primarily on linguistics and computer science, and these days it draws heavily on statistics. But it also has growing contacts with psycholinguistics (the experimental study of human linguistic behaviour), language acquisition (the experimental study of how humans learn language) and I think it should also have more contact with neurolinguistics (how language is realized in the brain)….

Johnson goes on to talk about the end of the boolean search and the move towards the semantic web, which M has been talking about lately in his pursuit of interaction design…

I once associated language with futility in my work, but I’m now starting to think that art functions like a shared currency—like language. I think this underlies my belief that the work of art mediates a relationship between the artist and viewer; that something (meaning, interaction, interdependence) is being conveyed through something else (images, objects, experiences). The ways that images and phenomenological art experiences unfold in the brain have probably got similarities to the ways in which language is intertwined with cognition. I don’t mean this in a strictly semiotic way. Is it possible that, just as metaphors are not just ways that we speak but are fundamental to how we think, that art-viewing-experiences are not just means of participating in a discourse on art, but unique ways to exercise perceptual cognition?

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Research

Josiah McElheny on Josef Albers

Josiah McElheny is a great contemporary artist and thinker. His latest contribution to Artforum elegantly sums up some of my thoughts about art experiences; that art, too, is a visual as well as cognitive experience.

Surprisingly, though, [Josef Alber’s Interaction of Color] is not really a pedagogical treatise on the modernist use of color. Instead, it is an argument against color systems of all types: It proposes a practice of looking at and working with color that understands it to be constantly in flux. The reader, attentively going back and forth between text and image, is confronted by disturbingly mutable visual and cognitive experience, by the deep instability of color….

[Albers wrote:] “By giving up preference for harmony, we accept dissonance to be as desirable as consonance.”

…”[P]references and dislikes—as in life so with color—usually result from prejudices, from lack of experience and insight.”

…[Albers] argues that perception is contextual; he wants to encourage ‘thinking in situations.’ When he says that ‘interaction’ can be restated as ‘interdependence,’ he implies that what color is is defined by where, when, and how it is—otherwise it is relegated to the abstract, symbolic, theoretical….

In our active, physical engagement with [Alber’s color] tests, we are made aware of the slippery nature of looking—even identifying simple difference is fraught—an experience recalling Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games.

—Josiah McElheny, “The Spectrum of Possibility.” Book review of Josef Alber’s Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Artforum. April 2010. p. 55.

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Research

Points of Reference

Lars Tunbjörk

LARS TUNBJÖRK, LAWYER'S OFFICE, NEW YORK, 1997, 20 X 24 inches, Edition of 12, C Print. Source: amadorgallery.com

This 1997 photo by Lars Tunbjörk is pretty great. It’s from his series on corporate offices. He’s got a great eye for narrative — the feeling you get is one of hygenic oppression, like Robert Longo’s indicting drawings of white collar workers. I really like the abstraction and sense of space in this picture, and the cheeky realization that it’s the most mundane of mundane things, a garbage bin.

I’m also pretty happy to discover invisible thread. It’s not really invisible, and it’s not really thread, if you think of finely wound fibers, because it’s thin monofilament. It worked great in hand-sewing and in my sewing machine. Brush up on your knot-tying skills with animated demos by Grog.

Small victories in procurement, the art activity I love to hate: For my recent sewing/craft projects, the fabric department at the big CVS (formerly Longs/Payless) in North Oakland has been great. A $4 Fiskers portable scissor sharpener (a sharpening stone in two blade guides at the perfect angle) proved its worth within a few minutes. For more specialist items, visit Discount Fabrics in West Berkeley.

Did I mention Calvin Tompkins yet? His profiles of contemporary artists in the New Yorker have been fascinating. Recent subjects include Julie Mehretu (read the abstract), Urs Fischer (read the abstract) and Bruce Nauman (read the abstract). I found the profile of Nauman most interesting, maybe because his career and work is so unconventional, and the expressions of his psyche so singular. The Fischer and Mehretu profiles operate on surface levels more often, but readers interested in the mechanics of art star careers will find them fascinating.

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Research

Why Not Blog About Art?

Do bloggers have the right to have opinions about art?

On March 28, as reported by Lisa Radon on Hyperallergic.com on March 29, Richard Flood, chief curator at the New Museum, said

I just found out about blogs three months ago…

The internet is still a ghetto.

[Does Flood really only research artists in person or via 35 mm slide?]

Blogs … are not communicating with each other. They have no idea. History means nothing to them. Truth means nothing to them. They have no mechanism in place for checking [facts].

Flood then called out New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz, who wrote a response entitled, “How the New Museum Might Stop Annoying People” in which he advised Flood

Don’t hate the Internet.

A few days before that, on March 23, James Foumberg posted “The State of the (Visual) Art” on New City:

…information tailored to a digital audience promotes emotionally reactive and flippant responses, and somehow seems unserious. This is not, traditionally, how critics like to proceed.

As the Internet is all about audience,… the voice of the critic fades. For some types of art, … it’s an unwelcome flood of amateurs, hobbyists and Sunday critics. …the need for expertise, and good writing, will resurface….

Foumberg’s remarks strike me as rather tired re-hash of the blogger-vs-journalist debate. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend following how critics traditionally “like to proceed.” For example, I once read two reviews by Clement Greenberg in a writing course. In the first, he slams a painting by Piet Mondrian. In the follow-up, he decided that he liked it—a lot. He also recanted his initial observation about the color (something along the lines of mistaking yellow for lavender). This demonstrates two ideas. First, just because Greenberg, the critic of critics, published his ideas in print, it doesn’t mean that he enjoyed what Flood holds so dearly, “a mechanism in place for checking [facts].” Second, the appeal of tradition for its own sake is conservative, and its place in contemporary art ought not be so sacrosanct.

It’s also interesting that Foumberg appropriates the term Sunday painter in the service of maligning recreational critics. I hardly think sanctioned art critics will gain sympathy from the artist-bloggers who Foumberg sees as infringing on their turf, because just as any yahoo can open a WordPress account and call themselves an art critic (myself included), so too can amateurs set up online portfolios and call themselves artists. While I also chafe at being lumped together with hobbyists — it disregards the years of education, work and sacrifice I’ve invested into my practice — I wouldn’t make the mistakes of blaming the Internet and finding fault in other people’s right to share their hobbies online.

On March 26, Bad at Sports contributor Claudine Ise posted “Hot (okay maybe only lukewarm at the moment) Topic Alert: the Crisis in Art Criticism” in response to Foumberg and more chatter on another blog post about art criticism. She helpfully points out that

…ALL writers need editors. …writing for a publication that actually employs an editor … has become a luxury that only the luckiest of us is afforded from time to time….

From their inception blogs have always been about commentary derived from a personal standpoint…. It’s not really fair to criticize art bloggers for their lack of objectivity, or for not holding to certain journalistic or critical standards.

I stand with Ise’s points here. Most bloggers aren’t purporting to be journalists or vying to usurp seasoned art critics from their dwindling numbers of staff positions.

Readers of art blogs are fairly intelligent. We’ve got critical faculties of our own. We read, dissect and disagree with opinionated blogs and critical publishing alike.

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Research

Post-Minimalism for All

In yesterday’s New York Times, Roberta Smith champions painting, and states a formal history of–and argument against–the idea that painting is dead (“It’s Not Dry Yet,” March 26, 2010).

This is a positive follow up to her negative opinion, “Post-Minimal to the Max,” (NYTimes.com, February 2, 2010), in which Smith takes aim at the current slate of exhibitions at NYC’s major museums. Exhibitions of the work of Gabriel Orozco, Roni Horn, Urs Fischer, and Tino Seghal

…share a visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly one-note. After encountering so many bare walls and open spaces, after examining so many amalgams of photography, altered objects, seductive materials and Conceptual puzzles awaiting deciphering, I started to feel as if it were all part of a big-box chain featuring only one brand.

…Instead [of individuation and difference] we’re getting example after example of squeaky-clean, well-made, intellectually decorous takes on that unruly early ’70s mix of Conceptual, Process, Performance, installation and language-based art that is most associated with the label Post-Minimalism. Either that or we’re getting exhibitions of the movement’s most revered founding fathers: since 2005, for example, the Whitney has mounted exhibitions of Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark and Dan Graham. I liked these shows, but that’s not the point. We cannot live by the de-materialization — or the slick re-materialization — of the art object alone.

Smith put it rather bluntly (I don’t think we could live by expressionistic painting alone, either), and I relate to feeling bored by monotony in exhibitions. At the same time, however, I take issue with her points, and my reaction is grounded in my identities and environment.

First, if the post-Minimal programming of New York’s art institutions sync up, who cares? In the end you still got to see the Tino Seghal show at the Guggenheim, and the Urs Fischer show at the New Museum. The phrase “embarrassment of riches” comes to mind.

Second, this is a generational and coastal difference, but I never really perceived any serious threat to painting. San Francisco’s unique history in conceptual and performance art is known amongst specialists, but many more know about Barry McGee, and the San Francisco Mission School of painting that he helped to popularize. I found the arguments against the death of painting fatiguing in my studies–along the same lines as eye-rollers like “So what is art?”–so I find it perplexing that Smith would take up arms for painting now.

To state the obvious, painting’s not going anywhere. The Everyman still considers “painting” and “art” synonymous, to the exasperation of non-painters everywhere. Most art museums house room after room of paintings. Most art stores feature a prominent aisle of paints and brushes. Ask people to draw the idea “art” and I guarantee that three of the top 10 responses you get will be: a palette with paints (you know, the round one with a hole for your thumb), gilt picture frame and canvas on an easel. Extending “pictorial history” is just not my priority, nor should it necessarily be curators’.

Third, I’m reminded of something the artist Paul Chan enigmatically said in his SFAI lecture, about “those who’ve been left behind by Modernism” — subcultures who are developing their own Modernisms, not to speak of tackling Post-Modernism (or Post-Minimalism, for that matter). I think that if thousands of tourists and students get to see the retrospectives by Roni Horn (the only female artist on Smith’s lists) or Gabriel Orozco (the only artist of color and person from the Global South; not splitting hairs about Gordon Matta-Clark, OK?), good for all of them.

Smithson, Matta-Clark, Graham and Weiner form like a board of directors of Post-Minimalism, and though I’d wonder what makes a Weiner show urgent or necessary, I’d guess that scores of art students and artists are grateful for the chances to see Smithson’s, Matta-Clark’s and Graham’s work in person, a small ameliorative for the feeling of being born too late to see Earth works and site-specific interventions of the 1960s and 70s. Smithson and Graham are significant influences for young contemporary artists, especially when you look at the resurgence of cheeky Romanticism in the curatorial work of Lawrence Rinder, the earthy Transcendentalism of shows like Alchemy at Southern Exposure and the emphasis on viewers in social/relational art.

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Research

Yes No Language

In “No,” Ben Zimmer’s latest contribution to his On Language column (NYTimes.com, March 15, 2010), yes and no are examined through the lens of Congressional discourse and pop culture. Zimmer lists some associations:

yes no, agreement opposition, positivity negativity, acceptance denial, getting to yes, party of no

From my personal collection, here are a few greatest hits of yes and no memorabilia:

A (lost) sticker bearing the phrase, “The Land of Yes.” It was produced by Trillium Press, which is now SF Electric Works. The motto conveyed a commitment to helping artists realize their projects.

Ugo Rodinone’s “Hell Yes!” architectural signage for the New Museum. Rounded text + rainbow stripes + in an arc = unabashed enthusiasm.

My first word was “no”—a troubling fact for an aspiring optimist—but it turns out, I’m not alone. Zimmer informs:

…the power of no is even more primal, perhaps because it is so often among the first words that English speakers learn as children.

Zimmer also discusses yes and no in terms of the “up/down” vote, an orientational metaphor with its own set of associations, as examined by linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (U. of Chicago Press, 1980):

happy sad and other dyads

Some of these orientational metaphors cohere. For example, a person with high status might expect being in positions of control more often. Good, virtue and life/health are obviously linked. But it would be a mistake to assume that all of the concepts associated with up or down are necessarily coherent. Lakoff and Johnson describe a discrepancy between two metaphors associated with up and down, unknown (up) and known (down) does not cohere with finished (up, as in “the crate’s buttoned up” or “the shoot’s wrapped up”) and unfinished (down).

To this I might add:

transcendent mundane, concept material, ephemeral quotidian

Visual Thesaurus

I love this thesaurus for the visually inclined. The concept map is a brilliant way to group similar meanings and identify specific words.

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Community, Research

Sign/Design

DON’T MISS:

Museo-rama: Joint Member Day, SF, CA

Tomorrow, Saturday, March 20 is Joint Member Day. If you’re a member the Asian Art Museum, Cartoon Art Museum, Contemporary Jewish Musuem, Museum of the African Diaspora, Museum of Craft and Folk Art, SF Camerawork, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, you and a friend can visit participating museums for FREE admission, special events and exclusive discounts.

I’m curious about Dispatches from the Archives and The View From Here photography exhibition at SFMOMA. I’m all for exhibitions that help Americans understand China’s pluralism, and the Shanghai exhibition at the Asian Art Museum introduces the cosmopolitan city through its Western-influenced hybridized modern art and design (with a few pieces of contemporary art). Still, I thought the didactic texts shied from the mention of colonialism; this westernization seems possible because cities were forced open to British trade by the Treaty of Nanking after China lost the First Opium War. Also, pop culture afficionados: don’t expect to see lots of vintage-kitsch Shanghai lady adverts; those make up only a small fraction of the exhibition.

It’s A Sign: New Bohemia Signs at Adobe Books’ Backroom Gallery, SF, CA

Design nerds ho! The immaculate hand-painted stylizations of New Bohemia Signs, San Francisco’s own anachronistic, fedora-donning, sign painting shop, are on view at Adobe Books’ Backroom Gallery through April 3. It’s like Steven Heller’s New Vintage Type came to life in shiny, seductive enamel paint. You can purchase individual functional signs for your indie mart or design tchotchke shelves, or larger aggregations for the aesthetics, and to make an undeniable statement about your good taste.

The signs are really cute. They are examples of great graphic design, but ultimately, just signs. I had hoped to make some smart-sounding statement about semiotics or wayfinding (especially in relation to “The Secret Language of Signs,” Slate’s recent series on signs), but really, style and legibility seem to be the main point of the work. If there is something more interesting to tease out, it’s probably in regards to context: A shop selling books (so antiquated!) exhibiting hand-painted signs produced by another independently-owned, brick-and-mortar small business, and the printed/painted letters they love.

Rockin’ Paper, Swingin’ Scissors at Rowan Morrison Gallery, Oakland, CA

Sort of in the same vein of totally adorable/collectible is Ryohei Tanaka’s show of papercuts at Rowan Morrison Gallery through April 3. Ryohei’s based in Tokyo now; I went to CCA with him in the late 1990s. Back then, he was a total drawing maniac, whose work was characterized by density and a cuteness that was simultaneously attractive and appalling. Now, his explosive prolificness has resulted in figures, monsters and robots in cheery colors and a traditional Asian folk art/paper craft. Small cuts start under $100; if that sinks your battleship you can walk away, as I did, with a navy screenprint of assorted figures on a white cotton rectangle (I think it’s a Japanese work scarf or tea towel) for $8.

WINSOME:

The website for Scott Oliver’s Lake Merritt project is up!

COMING SOON, to New York:

Gormley fatigue.

FASCINATING:

“Everybody Have Fun,” Elizabeth Kolbert’s round-up of recent books on the problematic intersection of happiness research and policy in the current New Yorker Magazine (March 22, 2010).

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