Category Archives: Research

Community, Research

Art Practical

My review of Primero la Caja, Pablo Guardiola’s solo show at Galería de la Raza, has been published on ArtPractical.com. The current issue, Work(er), includes an interview with David Ireland, a review of the triennial exhibition at the Int’l Center for Photography, and reviews of local shows.

Art Practical is a much-needed site for Bay Area art criticism. It is forged from three grassroots, artist-led initiatives — Shotgun Review, Happenstand, and Talking Cure quarterly — that emerged as direct responses to the Bay Area’s narrow art reportage. Especially after the folding of Artweek magazine, I think Art Practical’s energy, vision and commitment to excellence will be a meaningful presence in the Bay Area art community.

Art Practical welcomes sponsorships and individual donations.

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Research

The future of the art map

Cheers to the NYTimes’s interactive team again. In “An Isle of Joy, for Art Lovers” (this week’s Special Gallery Issue), their information-dense, intuitive graphics are applied in the service of gallery-going. Maps of key NY gallery neighborhoods are loaded with icons, which, upon rollover, display a photograph and caption of a notable exhibition, along with a link to a blurb.

When there’s hundreds of galleries, each open for a few hours per day, and gallery go-ers must be selective about what shows are worth the trek. Updated, interactive exhibition maps like these would be brilliant on mobile devices — though I’d recommend the inclusion of gallery hours as well.

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Research

Own Art!

Imagine an NEA as more than a funder on a program brochure, one that touched the lives of individual artists and emerging collectors by helping to bring artwork into people’s homes!

Well, the British Arts Council has a program that helps collectors buy low-priced art in installments (Zoe Slater, “Buying art in interest-free instalments,” Telegraph, November 28, 2009).

Set up in 2004 by the Arts Council, Own Art enables people to take home a piece of contemporary art straight way but then pay for it in 10 monthly interest-free instalments, borrowing anything up to £2,000. So far the scheme has made over 14,500 loans to purchase art valued in excess of £11.6 million. “It’s a simple idea that works for artists, buyers and galleries,” says Mary-Alice Stack, development manager for Own Art.

Adorable.

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Research

art and text

art and text

There’s a new art historical survey book out called “Art and Text,” (Aimee Selby ed., London: Black Dog Publishing) and it looks fantastic. Along with the you-guessed-its (Kruger, Nauman, Baldessari), there’s welcome contemporary artists like Bob and Roberta Smith, Simon and Tom Bloor, Martin Creed, and Stefan Brüggemann.

View a gallery of images from the book on the Guardian website. Sweet.

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Art & Development, Research

heart NY

Like: H&FJ, type designers extraordinaire

Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones are lecturing at Cooper Union next Tuesday night. If only I lived in New York…

H&FJ are among the country’s best and most influential living type designers. Years ago, I parlayed my art skills into illustration and graphic design; in the past year or two, I’ve focused my attention on typography — thanks to books by Robert Bringhurst and Ellen Lupton. I think you can see the effect on both my design and art work.

I admire H&FJ for the consistency of the excellence of their output, which is always considered and gimmick-free. Their type families are remarkably thorough and usable; they manage to both timeless and modern. I know my praises sound like platitudes, but you can see their skill with the ubiquity of the typeface Gotham. More recently, Archer has been catching my eye with more regularity. It’s cute, fresh and a little cheeky.

LIKE: Conceptualism and Identity Art, neither compromised

I DON’T WANT TO BRAND something called “Black Conceptual Art.” It’s less a question about who produced the work than of the object’s material history. If you can get to that history, and if that can take you to a very specific place, culturally and racially, then that’s where you locate the blackness. It becomes a secondary discovery rather than a necessary attribute of the work itself.

“30 Seconds Off an Inch” does not look at the conceptualisms that followed Minimalism. Instead, it investigates the kind of art that asks the viewer to think about something beyond the sheer materiality of the object, beyond formalism and formal practice. The works ask you to wonder where the trash originated, for instance, and about the history of a specific cloth and clothing, or whether the work is appropriated. There is a history and a lineage to all the works in the show that lend themselves to conceptual thought beyond the objects.

The viewer should have a sense of recognition when walking through the exhibition. There is not a lot of tape around the objects—I want visitors to be able to put their noses up to the works. The objects in the show are not to be seen as metaphors, but very literally, and you don’t need an advanced degree in art history to read them.

—Naomi Beckwith, “500 Words,” Artforum, 11/25/2009

Beckwith is the assistant curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she organized “the exhibition ’30 Seconds Off an Inch,’ which explores the intersection of identity politics and dominant tendencies of the 1960s, from conceptual practices to Arte Povera.”

Wowee. I like this. It’s plain language on how to look at conceptual art, and how material can have content relating to identity. It challenges the ideas that conceptual art is too élite to be easily appreciated or too hermetic to have meaningful content, and that art relates to identity has to be populist/symbolist/representational. Well done.

LIKE: studio

This morning, in my dream, I found myself in a bare room: white walls, unpainted wood floors. I was sitting at cheap melamine dinette table. To my left was a the kind of kitchen you’d find in economy apartments — cream colored, with a small fridge and low fluorescent tubes. A cutout in the wall from which a cook might engage guests while attending the electric stovetop. But ahead of me was an expansive room, maybe 75 feet long. One side was all old industrial windows. The space was empty, unlit and dusty. It was my studio, and the sense of potential surged in me. It was so much space that I could work on a project, walk away from it, start a new project, and so on, for a long time before running out of space. I wouldn’t have to re-organize whenever I changed projects. To the side of the kitchen, I found a walk-in closet: my painting and flat work storage. The place was a bit drafty and quiet, but I was overjoyed. I was in New York. My job was to make art. The studio was mine.

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Research

notes on news

Over Thanksgiving dinner — Filipino food and apple pie — I had the rare pleasure of explaining contemporary art to family members. We talked about postmodernism and how a picture of $400 by Warhol could bring in $43.7M at auction.

I can appreciate how hard it is to make sense of the contemporary art world. I know about how some things work; others, I’m still learning — such as this telling article about why blockbuster museum shows like Tut are such big business (below). It’s because it actually is a big business.

But the Tut show, a product of an alliance between Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian government’s chief archaeologist, and U.S. sports and entertainment giant AEG, is also a global revenue powerhouse that takes over its hosts entirely.

In 2005 Hawass paired with AEG, which owns sports arenas and teams (such as the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings) around the world , for a traveling exhibition that would display a few dozen of Egypt’s thousands of Tutankhamen artifacts. The show was to be put on by an AEG subsidiary, Arts and Exhibitions International.

The deal was simple: The hosts, like the AGO [(Art Gallery of Ontario)], could keep a portion of the gate receipts (the AGO declined to disclose how much, citing a confidentiality pact with AEI), but would surrender all say in how the show was presented and installed. The host would only profit after all of AEI’s costs were covered. AEG also demanded that its own, proprietary gift shop be installed.

At the AGO, the result is a stranger in the house, a hermetically sealed silo hived off from the rest of the gallery. This isn’t how most people expected the gallery to carry its mission of transformation [and inclusion of contemporary art] forward.

—Murray White, “Boy king’s reign at AGO troubles artists” (Toronto Star, November 29, 2009)

I’d had inklings of such tactics (when the Tut show came to the de Young Museum, local preparators were shut out of the installation work), but this is unsettling. Museums are perceived as custodians of historically significant artifacts. For many visitors, this suggests a faith in museum officials — that what’s exhibited is there because it’s edifying and worthy of the public’s attention. The reality is more complicated — in the Tut show, what’s exhibited is there because it’s historical as well as popular and profitable.

To make an entertainment business out of exhibition-making just feels wrong. I’m not so innocent to believe that art and commerce must be kept separate, but I’d hope that museums would be above big-business tactics (media saturation, merchandising, proprietary products) and values fixated on the bottom line. When museum officials legitimize a corporate blockbuster exhibition as an attempt to expand audiences (to their non-profit institutions) at $32.50 a pop (most of which goes to a big business), it seems unscrupulous.

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Before traveling to the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Tut exhibition was at LACMA. That sort of makes sense. LACMA’s a county museum, so its emphasis is not on contemporary art or risk-taking; it can be forgiven for erring on the side of populism. Plus, everybody knows it’s strapped for cash. Now, Koon’s hanging locomotive sculpture needs a helping hand. At “an estimated cost of $25 million, making it one of the most expensive public art projects ever undertaken” (Katya Kazakina, “Koons’s $25 Million Dangling Train Derailed by Lacma Shortfall,” Bloomberg.com, November 29, 2009), no wonder. I’m all for ambitious public art (love Chris Burden’s lampposts at LACMA), but you don’t have to be a cynic of fine art to think that $25M is an outrageous sum. Imagine how many new works of contemporary art that could fund. You could award 100 artists a quarter of a million dollars each!

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Last, Randy Kennedy sums up a massive study of how artists are faring in the recession (“A Survey Shows Pain of Recession for Artists,” NYTimes.com, November 23, 2009). Of 5,300 respondents spanning painting, film and architecture,

  • “more than a third don’t have adequate health insurance”
  • “While the majority of artists have college degrees, only 6 percent said they earned $80,000 or more.”
  • The artists surveyed tended to earn either very little of their overall income from their artwork or almost all of it.”

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I’m biased towards indie stuff: art and commerce can mix well. If you’re feeling the gift-giving spirit this month, don’t forget your local artists and galleries:

SHOP SHOW @ Swarm Gallery, Oakland, CA
Opening Friday, December 11, 2009, 6-9 pm and continuing through January 24, 2010

HOLIDAYLAND GIFT SALE @ Blankspace, Oakland, CA
On now thru December 20, 2009, with a First Friday Reception on December 4th from 6-10pm

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Art & Development, Research

Optimism the public art project, metaphors, gratitude, the identity of art

Reed Seifer, “a graphic artist and designer,” partnered up with Creative Time to put optimism—at least, the printed word—into the public’s pockets. See a photo and write-up: Michael M. Grynbaum’s article, “The Days May Be Grim, but Here’s a Good Word to Put in Your Pocket” (NYTimes, Nov. 19, 2009).

I’m all for optimism and public art in mundane settings. To be a bit critical, though, I think the ambiguity of a single word—any single word—seems very apparent in this project, maybe too much for my liking. That’s because the work appears in reproduction in an advertising space, and uses the tools of advertising (copywriting, concision, graphic design, mass production). It seems to be simultaneously a bit of marketing for optimism as well as marketing for itself as a single author’s project. If it is a work of conceptual art, I think it’s about as sticky as a chance procedure, as temporal as an incidental “piece.” While I’m interested in conceptual art, and I make idea-driven art, I’m pretty attached to how an art object embodies its idea.

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While at times I’m acutely aware of the distance I feel from material reality / meatspace, I’m also accepting that our embodied selves inform how we understand the world. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1978) is proving to be a useful text for me. It outlines the orientational and ontological means of cognition that are rooted in our physical and phenomenological experiences.

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I have been thinking about gratitude and generosity a lot lately. Some of this has to do with art practice; some of it concerns life.

I’ve maintained a gratitude journal—to record that which I am grateful for—for half a year now. I first learned of the practice during my residency in Manchester this Spring, when I researched positive psychology. I started it as much to satisfy my therapeutic curiosity (to see if gratitude journals would work and make me a happier person) and as part of my commitment, as an artist, to exploring optimism.

One thing I have learned, so far, is that gratitude begets generosity. I’m reminded that I’m a lucky person; that makes me feel happy, and I’m motivated to share that lightness of spirit. These small gestures—among friends, loved ones, co-workers—are nothing; merely the stuff of everyday life; utterly forgettable and yet, for the brief times they last, thoroughly pleasurable. These are truly modest pleasures.

These gestures aren’t art. Yes, they originated in, and feed, my art practice. There’s certainly art theory and practice about generosity. And I’m still interested in Lewis Hyde‘s notions of the gift as a tool for forming or reifying social bonds. So it had occurred to me that I could make art out of these gestures—shoot some photos, name them as pieces—but that needlessly complicates them. Without a name the gesture is not a Work. But as a not-Work the gesture remains as a gesture—temporal, simple, modest. I’m appreciative of these qualities. I had come to appreciate works that are nervily barely works; in this case I like gestures that are so slight they aren’t even works. So it seems like I’m—for the moment—interested in the practice of art practice, or maybe as Barthes might put it, the Text over the Work. Indeed, Barthes’ joissance—pleasure without separation, or the pleasurable loss of awareness of self—seems to correlate with Zimbardo’s keen interest on the loss of self in instances of “finding the flow” of activities (a modest pleasure itself).

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One surefire way you could have made my eyes roll in art school is to pose the question, “Is this art?” This is a worthy discussion for young artists, but it’s can also be a tedious riddle, with no definitive answers and an overabundance of circular logic. Curiously, I’ve found myself uttering this same question in my work as a preparator. There are times you unpack a crate of art, and where the Art Object begins and ends is not always apparent. It’s funny to handle stray materials with white gloves, focus and care, until their identities are determined, and it becomes “safe” to handle them with bare hands, reintegrated as parts of the mundane material reality of everyday life.

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Research

recommended: Eric Gill, Iconographer, at USF

Eric Gill is the man behind the sublimely timeless Gill Sans. He’s also one of the 20th century’s notable wood-engraving artists, handling line and form in geometrically-stylized, gorgeous English Arts and Crafts way. He was a bit of a fanatic and nutter (what the gracious might call an eccentric, or what the unpretentious might call a freak).

The University of San Francisco (where I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in for E., a faculty member) holds a broad collection of Gill’s prints, books, bookplates, blocks and even a little sculpture. They’re on display in the Thatcher Gallery in the USF library through December 20. If you can make it through the imposing swipe-card turnstiles (hope the desk aides look your way, so you can inform them that you’d like to see the exhibition), you’ll find dozens of fine, detailed prints to peruse.

It’s a pleasure. I’m not one to warm to religious art easily — like Howard Belsey in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, my tastes in art are secular — but Gill’s prints are winsome. He employs the Arts and Craft’s simplicity and elegance of line with a rudimentary, stylized geometry echoing Byzantine icons, yet Gill’s resolutely-embodied figures are lithe, muscular, and slightly Medieval in appearance. The result is a mythological aura, suiting fables, moralism, the life of someone seeking transcendence.

The artwork veers between deeply religious to sensual to erotic. I found the bookplates and illuminated letterpress blocks to be the most delicate, whimsical and endearing. These, according to a didactic banner, were considered by the artist to be mere decorations, “flowers of the graphic designer” or some such utterance of regret. Yes, they are illustrative, but one in particular, with a large, well-balanced drop-cap “O,” featured a captivating illustration of a subterranean skeleton pulling at roots while a man tugged at leaves of the same plant. Free of its movable body text, the image perplexes, and its message, however unspoken, is still communicated confidently and clearly.

I also enjoyed two prints, with the texts, “THEN” and “JESUS,” in which figures populate a landscape formed by the handsome roman capitals (his Perpetua typeface, perhaps). After leading a typography crash-course in my Sketchbook class at ASUC last night, it was a treat to see top-notch text and image compositions.

On view are also a number of intaglio prints, as well as Gill’s carved blocks. These are finely detailed, and bring, even in their reversed, inky pitch-blackness, Gill’s precision and craftsmanship to life.

The exhibition was produced with the help of a number of USF departments. Upon exit, do browse the interactive design on a computer near the entrance — it’s thorough and nicely designed (and unfortunately, it’s not online). In contrast, I found the installation — even accounting for the architectural limitations — to be wanting; I’m just tall enough to study the tiny prints hanging on what seemed to be 59″ or 60″ centers. Still, it’s too high for such modestly scaled works. Yet Iconographer creates a great dialogue with the papercuts of Nikki McClure, and, across town at the Wattis Institute, the wood-engravings by Gill’s coeval, the American Rockwell Kent.

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