The Beginning of a Thought on Installation Art

In an attempt to re-compress some of the art and literature I’ve gathered in the past few years, I’ve been slowly pinning down corners of a subject I want to pursue in my graduate work. The recurring themes in my undergraduate studies circle around the art institutional space, how it can be transformative and plastic, validating and self-critical. Within the discourses on artistic space, I find myself returning to the idea of Installation Art, which cannot be called a medium by art historical tradition, but has in the past 40 years acquired the valence of a coagulated genre, and thus slipped into art world’s vocabulary. I have noticed a discrepancy in documentation and critical perspectives on installation art relative to its high visibility in contemporary exhibitions. While museum attention implies a certain validation in artistic and cultural currency, installation art has yet to move into the discourse of art history. This might be because the genre is perceived to be relatively young, but I would guess that this is more because installation is part performative, part conceptual, and incredibly fragile.

In the handful of survey books I’ve come in contact with, I frequently return to two prominent volumes: MOCA San Diego’s Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996 (1997), and Phaidon’s Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (2009). They offer competing methodologies by way of introduction to their subject. Continue reading…

Taken 3/26/11

notes transcribed from a talk the artist Carolee Schneemann gave at the Nasher Museum at Duke University; she came in honor of an epistolary book our Kristine Stiles published on her, titled Correspondence Course.

–who saw the body as sculpture and as painting, and video as response to writing (for Carolee)

Continue reading…

(Re)Distributing Gawker Artists

I recently got news from Liz Dimmitt, a co-curator of Gawker Artists, that it is again expanding its already multi-faceted role in the art scene. GA recently has begun to collaborate with the art print organization society6 to make its artists’ work available to purchase in a variety of forms. Society6 is a group that shares GA’s principles and function, and this joint venture makes sense. Both are groups helping artist communities gain presence and support in the too-vast art world, by giving them a forum to display their work, and means of distributing it. Both are open for anyone to join.

GA’s most recent project is their Limited Editions, a curated selection of pieces limited to 100 printings each. It stands apart from the other shops on the site to which all artists can submit their work. GA has always been deft at operating in multiple levels of inclusion, of offering the prestige of being curatorially selected alongside a membership to an ungated network of artists. It is what gives GA’s actions a different valence than those of a now-competitor, 20×200.

Though skeptical of GA’s step towards market participation, I realize that art prints have a legacy of benefitting artists, dating back before the art market boom in the 15th century Netherlands. Prints then were a way of circulating visual ideas, of increasing the visibility of genius. It could be read in the same way now. Prints then also necessarily came in limited number, because the plates would break with repeated use. Thus the Limited Editions finds a relevance and precedence in tradition.

Take a look. If nothing else, the artists are fantastic and deserving of support.

For more information on Gawker Artists, please see my earlier piece.

In Talking about Art, Pt. 1

Monday nights, I get the pleasure of sitting down with my highly intelligent peers and talk as if we had no obligations to the art. As we utopically expunge art jargon from the realm of relevance, we unpack how art and its value are postured.

Two months ago in our first meeting, we invoked the name of the class and looked at the lingual validation of art via a certain vocabulary and those who we authorize to use it. We began with a clip from Work of Art (starting around 7:50 in this), and the art world episode of the Colbert Report. In both cases, a jargon and an expertise were invoked to validate the artistic merit of objects. It was not as Frank Stella told Colbert, that art is where you want to find it. The tone of the class was generally skeptical that artistic value could be thus thinly constructed.

The reason for this is because “art” has become a charged term with certain self-exclusiveness. Someone said that the word “art” self-inscribes its qualifier, that “art” implies “good art,” whereas “bad art” needs to be explicitly identified. Furthermore, there are categories of objects that gain membership to the category based on their relative level of acceptance in the canon, (something as internalized as painting versus objects outside the realm of sculpture).

Though I had hoped to avoid the question, the class answered with surprising ease what constituted art: intentional construction then validated by an establishment. I am still mulling this one over but the simplicity of this articulation was personally mind-blowing.

I will do my best to catch up and summarize the next few class discussions by next week. This has been an incredibly fun endeavor so far.

Anticipating Studios (Yoshimoto Nara)

Months ago in August, the Asia Society had a five-day open studio in which visitors could go watch the famed Yoshimoto Nara construct his installation for their upcoming show. I managed to go during the middle of the construction process, at a time when the artist was not present and did not make himself present for the duration of my visit. The visit was uncanny and slightly uncomfortable for me. Really, it took me until now to locate the source of this affect in the misalignment of the expectations inscribed in a studio visit, and what might actually (not) occur there.

The studio visit(or) expects to be witness to an authentic creativity. In this one expectation are pack several individually problematic assumptions. It assumes that the moment of the visit(or) will intersect with something worth seeing. It assumes that the visit(or) is neutral. It assumes that productivity is visible. It assumes the artist is a demonstrable being. The visit(or) then is affected by pressurized anticipation, not entirely unlike the touristic mentality.*

What people don’t anticipate is the artist not presenting himself, or rather, the artist’s agency in non-compliance with the nature of the visit. The visit(or) may be founded on the acknowledgement of an abstract creative agency, but lacking in an understanding of a subjective agency closely tied to the individual body (to take bathroom breaks, to be in a bad mood, to be unproductive). The show title, “Nobody’s Fool,” is a worthwhile consideration here. I felt sheepish after I realized I was standing around and waiting.

*For more on what I mean by tourism, please see what I wrote on “the Semiotics of Tourism,” in Framing the Sign by Jonathan Culler.

What “Work of Art” has Done

Abdi Farah

This week, the season finale of Bravo’s art-related reality TV show aired, knighting the 23-year-old Abdi Farah as what the tagline calls “the Next Great Artist,” which comes with the benefits of a solo show in the Brooklyn Museum, and a piece to be auctioned at Philips de Pury. Also, every inch of that sentence has been violently protested by a surprising hoard of passionate dissidents, many of whom preface their comments with “I don’t call myself an art person, but–.” That in itself has proved the show to be successful to me.

I mentioned after the show’s premier that I foresaw this as a valuable experience in showing a larger public more emerging art while demystifying the exclusivity of art insiders. I’d like to add now that the show has done something I didn’t fully expect, and that was only possible through the medium of a tv show: it given people a space and greater comfortability to discuss art.

To understand the magnitude of this, we have to start in the museum and gallery. These two institutions need to have a sheen of completion and some incontestability to survive; their very exhibitions defend that which they are displaying. This defensiveness on behalf of the institution becomes another barrier between the non-frequenters and their ability to feel confident about their individual aesthetic judgement. I do not mean to exaggerate the strength of this barrier or diminish the will of the individual, I simply mean to comment on the feeling of awe and intimidation, however slight, that is built into our museum and gallery spaces.

What this show has done, therefore, is to remove that barrier of intimidation by taking the viewing process out of its usual institutionality (albeit by putting it into another one). It takes works that are decently representative of some emerging art now, and brings them to the viewer in his own space, in which he is comfortable making and defending his judgment. And because thew viewer sees the artists talk, and watch these pieces come into being with no previous scholarship or criticism attached, he participates as an equal in an open forum. Jerry Saltz, famed art critic and regular judge on the show, wrote in his final of many blog posts throughout the season that the show has given birth to a different kind of art criticism. I’ve pulled an excerpt below:

“I wanted to see if art criticism was porous and supple enough to actually exist on a different stage….[and] It happened in the tens of thousands of words that all of you wrote in the comment sections at the bottom of the recaps. An accidental art criticism sprang up, practiced in a new place, in a new way, on a fairly high level. Together we were crumbs and butter of a mysterious madeleine. The delivery mechanism of art criticism seemed to turn itself inside out; instead of one voice speaking to many, there were many voices speaking to one another. Coherently. All these voices became ghosts in criticism’s machine. It was a criticism of unfolding process, not dictums and law – a criticism of intimacy that pulsed with a kind of phosphorescent grandeur.”

Mr. Saltz has my utmost respect for recognizing the potential of this new kind of viewing process, and honoring the reactions it can elicit. He and his fellow judges, all of whom blog regularly on the show, have called this an experiment, and rightly so. It was an experiment in diffusing artistic knowledge and authority through an atypical medium, and for that it was immensely satisfying to witness. I will be curious to see how an institution like the Brooklyn Museum further engages with this, when Farah’s show goes up.