Category Archives: Research

Sights

Moby-Dick is coming!

Moby-Dick, the forthcoming exhibition at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, is gonna be a great show. It’s formed around Melvillian motifs and features new and recent contemporary art alongside historical works. The list of artists follows.

Kenneth Anger, Matthew Benedict, Mark Bradford, Marcel Broodthaers, Angela Bulloch, Tom Burr, Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, Tacita Dean, Marcel Dzama, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, John Gutmann, Susan Hiller, Evan Holloway, Peter Hutton, Colter Jacobsen, Brian Jungen, Buster Keaton, Rockwell Kent, Mateo Lopez, Jorge Macchi, Kris Martin, Henrik Olesen, Paulina Olowska, Damián Ortega, Jean Painlevé, Kirsten Pieroth, Adrián Villar Rojas, Richard Serra, Andreas Slominski, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Orson Welles

Pretty much all these artists are amazing, but there are a few that are outstanding for personal reasons. I saw Mark Bradford speak at SFAI a few years back; he’s the kind of bright and sensitive artist I aspire to be. I was greatly impressed by Angela Bulloch‘s highly refined LED-based work in the Leeds Art Gallery. And as a one-time woodcut artist, I was also delighted (in my role as a preparator) to see the inclusion of some beautiful old Rockwell Kent prints.

Moby-Dick will be on view at the Wattis from September 22 to December 12, 2009. The gallery is open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11–7, and Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 11–6. There will be an opening reception on Tuesday, September 22, from 6:30–8:30. For more info please visit wattis.org.

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Research

Saatchi’s all right

…let’s have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

Charles Saatchi, the British advertising mogul turned hugely influential art collector, is releasing a book, and he’s contributed a great interview to the Guardian.

Like Hirst, Saatchi’s name is often mentioned in diatribes as a symbol of everything wrong with art and the market, but Saatchi’s interview reveals himself to be rather plainspoken and unpretentious about his projects, influence and intuition.

I especially enjoyed the last segment on artists, curators, dealers, collectors or critics, in which he both ruthlessly critiques shady characters and pleasantly praises talent and ethical standard-bearers. Everyone gets their dues.

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Research, Values

CCA / Studio Masters

[A foreword: CCA: OK.
For some, the mere mention of the acronym “CCA” is met with the mental image of “trust fund babies.” I won’t deny that my alma mater projects an image and (deserved) reputation of wealth and privilege, but to assume that its students are all rich is terribly naive. Speaking for myself, I went to public school most of my life, and it sucked! That’s why I went to CCA’s high school summer program, which I paid for with an after-school job paying minimum wage ($4.75, no joke!). Plus, I will literally pay for my decision to attend CCA for years to come, so you can understand why it’s irritating to be confronted with the perception that CCA students are spoiled, rich or lazy. Besides, in my experience, more often than not, the faculty, staff and students at CCA work crazy hard and strive for excellence and experimentation. It’s a good school — that’s why I went there. And I’m also proud to be helping out with preparator work at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, which brings the work of some of the most interesting international contemporary artists to the Bay Area. What’s more, my partner is teaching in CCA’s esteemed Graphic Design program. He’s a demanding instructor with lots of energy and real-world experience to offer. So if you have critiques of CCA to share with me, please let it be based on firsthand experience, because I’ve got loads.]

I’ve been enjoying Brindalyn Webster’s Studio Masters’ website. The recent CCA MFA conducted a multi-layered examination of her classmates, and it’s presented in this beautiful site featuring b/w photos, enigmatic phrases, and original two-minute compositions. It packages precise slivers of her classmates’ diverse practices, and while the cynic in me initially reacted to the grid of portraits with a desperate sense of radical opposition (the faces are so White, indeed!), the more I poked around the site, the more I became engrossed in the content — choice phrases and tangential abstractions through instrumentals and sound. Webster’s procedure is so specific and subjective that the context — her immediate CCA MFA class — becomes just background info. What’s more interesting to me is how Webster and her collaborator Alexander Chen created entirely new, coherent works out of ideas that are in development, a nice surprise ingrained in the experimental nature of an MFA course.

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Research

Highly recommended: Jeremy Deller’s podcast lecture

I first heard UK public/conceptual artist Jeremy Deller on an interview on NPR. He was discussing It Is What It Is, a project commissioned by the New Museum, in which he set up a tour of a blown-up vehicle from Iraq as a conversation piece around the US. As you can imagine, it’s a project that takes guts, and I was impressed with Deller’s thoughtfulness and integrity. His approach just seemed right — political sentiment balanced with an urge to connect with average citizens and the absence of ideological rhetoric.

His well-known projects also include a re-enactment of a miner strike and the commissioning of an acid-house brass band. I also loved the site-specificity and public nature of the Procession he organized for the recent Manchester International Festival.

In his podcast lecture at the University of Michigan, Deller delivered a chronology of his background and the development of his approach, and an overview of his major projects and inspirations. If you’re interested in his work, and seek context for his idiosyncratic ouvre, I highly recommend it.

Deller is very British — unfailingly polite, serious, a tad self-deprecating, thoroughly appreciative of British folk culture, and concerned with overcoming the UK’s North-South divide. In contrast with the stereotype of English reserve, I’ve found that many Brits can be forthcoming, and Deller talks unapologetically (and also, without the American tendency for dramatized moral indignation) about his focus on working with people, rather than making art. Exhibition-making is merely coincidental to the culture industry that supports his public projects.

This got me thinking about how the work of exceptionally visionary people like Jeremy Deller don’t fit in other modes of production, and somehow, the culture industry (in this case, art institutions and networks) is able to make room for them. I am interested in this expansive, fungible realm of art practice, in which the forms are not conventional (pictures/sculptures/environments), and the sites outside of white cubes/black boxes. Furthermore, Deller didn’t once mention “relational aesthetics” or “Bourriard” in his talk. The work is valid on its own terms. It’s not “Art” as your grandparents understood it, yet the phrase, “art,” is useful for creating an exceptional space for social, experiential, participatory play.

Here are iTunes URLs for Jeremy Deller’s lecture at the University of Michigan:
Audio podcast
Video podcast

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Research

The Object of Art and the Art

This sounds like an AMAZING class — the use of the phrases “symbolic capital” and “artifactual production” suggest the influence of Johanna Drucker’s writings on complicity in contemporary art. I heard Ken Lum speak at CCA a few years back — really bright thinker and artist.

Master Class: The Object of Art and the Art as Object with Ken Lum
The Banff Centre

The relationship between art and life (in terms of the potential collapse of one term into the other or the discursive separation between the terms) has underlined the primary function of the avant-garde in art. The dialectical tension between those objects deemed art or non-art is itself an institutional function of the cultural (social) category of art. How is artistic discourse produced to transform an object into art? In what ways does artistic discourse negotiate the question of the art object as commodity? What role does the artist play in this negotiation?

This Banff Master Class will study the operational functioning of the work of art within the constitution of the art world and in relation to different institutional frames. The relationship of art to the concept of “symbolic capital” and “artifactual production” will also be explored. As interest in art continues to accelerate and spread globally, the aim of this class will be to revisit the most fundamental questions about the status and function of art.

The class will take the form of a bi-weekly seminar. The first class of the week will critically examine an assigned reading. The final class of the week will be an open session moderated by the Master Class leader.

Now if only I had $5k for the class/room/lodging fee and the means to take 6 weeks off of work… Back in my twenties, my roommate would visualize finding a paper bag full of cash, and I think she did eventually did find a bag with like $40 on the street, once — maybe if I start visualizing a grocery bag or garbage bag or sofa stuffed with cash (Would walking distance to my house be too much to ask? OK.), it’ll magically appear.

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Research

Happiness: can do / can’t do

In “Averted Vision” (NYTimes.com, August 2, 2009), Tim Kreider proposes that happiness is a something like a state of nostalgia for times past — that some of his happiest memories were in fact miserable as he experienced them. He says when he’s lost himself drawing cartoons, he’s happy, though he’s not aware of his happiness or self-consciously searching for it.

This is what Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd called “finding the flow of the activity” in their book, “The Time Paradox.” The psychologists might also gently suggest that Kreider, who already acknowledges the past as a source of happiness, see the present and future in the same light.

Kreider writes:

I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness.

But Zimbardo and Boyd urge readers to shape their present and future to lend themselves to finding happiness. In fact, feeling a sense of control in one’s life — feeling efficacious, and able to actualize one’s plans — is fundamental to having a good attitude and feeling happy. They acknowledge, too, that happiness is too fleeting to be merely achieved, but it can be cultivated.

Kreider continues:

Maybe we mistakenly think we want “happiness,” which we tend to picture in very vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harder-edged intensity of experience.

In “Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Happiness,” Paul Martin delves into the importance of the phenomena of pain in evolutionary psychology. Humans weren’t designed to be happy; they were designed to survive. Creatures living in anxiety and fear tended to ensure higher rates of survival. In this sense, Kreider is right — humans are hardwired to pay attention to that which works against us in life. Yet, our base natures need not dictate our potentials for leading lives rich with meaning and purpose.

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Research

MIFfed

In “Manchester United,” Kate Sutton writes up the big-name art events in the Manchester International Festival on Artforum.com. Unfortunately it was in Scene and Herd, the mag’s gossip column/photos-of-beautiful-people section.

MIF sounds phenomenal — few cities are brave enough to host a festival of new visual arts and performance commissions of that scale. It’s nice to see coverage of the Marina Abramovich-curated exhibition at the Whitworth and Jeremy Deller’s populist-meets-conceptualist Procession, though Sutton overlooked local and emerging artists, and their varied and experimental MIF initiative, Contemporary Art Manchester.

I could have done without the author’s dishy commentary. She punctuates her reportage with snarky asides, as well as needless and predictable snooty (and classist) jabs at Mancunians at large. The “unity” conjured in the title contrasts sharply with her cynical dismissal of the very publics who host these events–and her as an art-tourist.

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Research

Holland Cotter on Song Dong’s Waste Not

In “The Collected Ingredients of a Beijing Life,” (NYTimes, July 14) critic Holland Cotter reviews Song Dong’s exhibition, Waste Not, currently at MOMA. In only a few hundred words, Cotter manages to:
– introduce readers to conceptualism,
– familiarize readers with the artist’s ouvre, political context and spiritual influences,
– describe the work on display, its back story and the viewing experience.

Economical, clear, effective for general audiences and informative for specialists. Brilliant!

In addition to the quality of the writing, I also appreciated the description of extreme frugality, a tendency I’m quite familiar with.

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