Archived entries for My Studies
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…
The Cloisters, between Pilgrimage and Tourism
This was a miniature conference paper I gave this week. I was trying to locate the Cloisters, as both a museum and a medieval (contemporary) construction, relative to traditions of pilgrimage and tourism.
In the modern age of tourism, museums have achieved landmark status. For one who sees “everything as a sign of itself,” [1] museums are convenient concentrations of cultural artifacts employed to typify the conditions under which they were made. Fortunately for New York tourists and tour organizations, the majority of these museums are concentrated in upper-middle Manhattan. City Sites NY, a popular tour bus franchise, advertises that both their “All Around Town” and “Uptown Tour Bus” tours include visits to the Museum Mile [2], and is therefore a must. The visibility of these museums contributes to their high visitor traffic, and perpetuates their canonization in the New York tourist experience.
Excluded from these franchised museum loops is the Cloisters. This is in part due to its distance from central Manhattan: it is 5.6 miles north of its parent museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose inclusion on bus tours is almost guaranteed. The Cloisters’ absence from the museum canon may also have to do with its specialization in medieval art: its narrow focus appeals to a necessarily smaller audience. Thus, obscure enough in location and content to have eluded the double-decker’s radius of interest, the Cloisters occupies a different category of destinations working along and at odds with touristic practice. Continue reading…
Vogue, Vogue, Gender, Repetition, Erasure
I wrote this piece recently on Madonna’s music video “Vogue.” It was fun to write, so I thought I’d edit it and include it here.
Feathers part like curtains to announce the beginning of a performance. Figures impeccably dressed strike poses and are interspersed at intervals between objects of art. In participating in the same space as paintings and sculpture, they acquire the attributes of being visually constructed and topically determined. But, beneath surfaces, there are only more surfaces denying interiority. The figures are thus postured to be apprehended through their presentations. Their personae and their appearances inscribe themselves in each other as they are being simultaneously determined.
Tourism, and its Semiotics in Museums
I recently reread “Semiotics of Tourism” by Jonathan Culler and was reminded of its usefulness in examining museums.
In it, Culler makes a nuanced reading of touristic habits and its significance for contemporary semiotics. His Tourist is one who deals in the currency of signs and signifiers, who reads “cities, landscapes, and cultures as sign systems.” (155) This means also that what registers is only what is apparent; the Tourist’s understanding is apprehended through surfaces. His world is only what the Tourist can Structurally infer. His are [sites/sights].
A topically oriented being, the Tourist is also exempt from the criticism of his counterpart, the so-called Traveler, who seeks the truth via pure essence and the authentic. Culler astutely points out that the notion of authenticity is constructed, recognized as such only when given the markers of its own authentic-ness. (161) In other words, authenticity is conferred when affirmed by an authority figure, a cultural construction. Authenticity as that which opposes superficiality is thus destabilized, if not entirely denied. Semiotic participation vis-à-vis the Tourist is thus inevitable and ubiquitous.
The idea of constructing [site/sight] is particularly relevant to the museum. The [site/sight] is denoted with what Culler calls “markers,” which operates triply: representing it, giving information on its significance, and making it recognizable. (159) Markers construct [sites/sights] in reverse; they precede the existence of a significant object.
Is this not what museums do? Perhaps their markers are quadruple: they also collect the [sites/sights] (here, objects) into one space where the importance of one confirms the importance of another and visa versa. Museums are vehicles of semiotic presumptions.
Yet the constructive power of museums thus reveals the shortcomings of Culler’s argument. Like the museum, he is limited because he assumes the tourist’s unconflicted subjectivity, assumes a universality to touristic practice, and in groups signs into distinct cultural systems. The institution, the participants, and their exchange, are more opaque than they are rendered here.*
* I was told that this criticism was too hasty, please drop me a line if anyone is interested in talking about Culler in greater depth. I would love to keep the conversation going.
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.