Mark Bradford- convert

Been considering Mark Bradford's Merchant Posters lately. He is subtly moving his practice with these works. Instead of inventing via pictorial abstractions he is now attaching himself to forms of concrete communications and their instability.

He purposely culls the posters that are self-help. Their messages are spiritual and practical at the same time. The practical advice is for those that are close to rock bottom. The disenfranchised turn to people who may not have their best interests in mind. Need to do something illegal or what seems illegal? There's a number for that. Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson laid out the list of his subjects in the book about these objects.

My issue is that Jacobson's, and the other essays from the book. relegate Bradford's work to the past. Archaeology, archive, travel document, memory, reclaim, maps, movement, etc. I feel that these works are current. They're not the things of economic bubbles that we've already experienced, they are more present tense than that.

These phrases come from Bradford's voice instead of the invisible con-man.

The stories are about self-motivation and survival on a very basic level. The self-employed, which I consider myself to also be, understand that they have to make their life happen, and that it's up to them to get out there and be heard.

(Huffpo)

He's not making a joke for rich art patrons, or those that hate them (everyone else). He's actually talking to you, not a stand in other.

You.

Do you need help? Call.

He sees the logic in the statements. He see's why they are convincing cons, and wants to use them to get you involved. Dive into these thoughts. Feel them personally. Listen to him. Form a link with him.

His work here is deconstructionist in nature. In this instance, I don't mean that he doesn't want a meaning connected to it but instead there is a disconnect between the thing being shown and the intended meaning. The grammar is indistinct rather than ineffectual. He does not place his faith in the determinacy of context.

Maybe it's more post-structuralist. There is no rigid connection between the sign and the signification. The symbol here has no correct context that unlocks a singular meaning. There is no structural definition to these posters. His usual work invents a format that you have to buy into, here he relies on the unstable meaning of these posters as a form of realism.

Gluing squares to hepcats

Brian O'Doherty's Inside The White Cube has a paragraph that I've always puzzled over:

Happenings were first enacted in indeterminate, non-theatrical spaces -- warehouses, deserted factories, old stores. Happenings mediated a careful stand-off between avant-garde theater and collage. They conceived the spectator as a kind of collage in that he was spread out over the interior -- his attention split by simultaneous events, his senses disorganized and redistributed by firmly transgressed logic.

The formal question of dividing spaces into white cube/black cube/non-cube is simple enough. It fits into the history of high modernism's theatrical explorations as I understand them. Groups like the living theatre "attacked the senses" of the audience and confronted their levels of taste, but they did not do so in accepted venues:

In the 1970's, The Living Theatre began to create The Legacy of Cain, a cycle of plays for non-traditional venues. From the prisons of Brazil to the gates of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and from the slums of Palermo to the schools of New York City, the company offered these plays, which include Six Public Acts, The Money Tower, Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism, Turning the Earth and the Strike Support Oratorium free of charge to the broadest of all possible audiences.

Factually, I'm with it. Happenings happened in non-theatrical spaces, often the very spaces that the artists lived in. Where I start to strain is where the happening is between theater and collage, specifically that the spectator is a collage.

After spending time with Greenberg's essay Collage though I think I understand where he's coming from. Greenberg's essay is a earnest attempt to define a key moment in two specific painter's journeys to understanding how abstraction works. Greenberg has a special relationship to both Picasso and to art writers of the 70's. Someone like O'Doherty would certainly be knowledgeable about his views on collage. Even if he was writing for Art Forum, and he was their rival, he still would have repressed Greenberg orthodoxies floating in his writing.

If Greenberg said it, than everyone read it. If it's about Picasso, than it's about where the members of Greenberg's Abstract Expressionist brand can find their genealogical basis.

So what is he on about, and what is "firmly transgressed logic?"

Braque and Picasso had obtained a new, self-transcending kind of decoration by reconstructing the picture surface with what had once been the means of its denial. Starting from illusion, they had arrived at a transfigured, almost abstract kind of literalness.

I'm shortening an epic to a haiku, but for Greenberg, the moment of collage is one of exiting the flattened extreme of analytical cubisim and entering into synthetic cubism due to the "independence of the planar unit in collage as a shape." They lost their ability to continue the essence of their brand by being too good at painting things in flattened planes, and had to invent a new way of doing things through collage. It became more real when you glued something on a canvas (at least to the rules of the cubist metaphysic), and for Greenberg especially, they needed for their cubist abstractions to be more real than realism could be.

Happenings often are defined by their inclusion of random people. The chance encounters with art in real life (Marjorie Strider's 1969 Street Works, James Collins' 1970 Introduction Piece #5, Adrian Piper's 1970 Catalysis Series for example). The audience's connection to these events is mere happenstance.

Except when happenings were in the galleries or when people were invited. As I understand it, the audience for this kind of art was tiny at the time. I've seen numerous quotes from artists who talk about feeling obligated to show up to exhibitions from this era as they knew that no one would be in the audience if they didn't. It was a revolving form of credit. If you showed up to Philip Glass's music, than he'd show up to your exhibition.

So back to the audience as collage. If a patently false realism is the highest form of realism, than an audience who were usually insiders and a few chance viewers, then maybe the collage is that the audience is a form of faked random audience?

I feel O'Doherty's intention was that a group of audience members, transfixed by this random event happening in front of them were in a state of collage of random people stuck against the purity of art. By being at a happening, you were effectively glued onto the idealized avant-garde model as a square of conformity in their non-conformist art world. From the spectator's perspective, being unable to look away at a happening is a moment of collage in their lives too. Interrupting the field of daily life is this glued on happening, it fragments their world, complicating the audience member's relationship to real life.

So, the audience is glued to the art. The art is glued to the audience's normal life. The audience is glued in as a false member of the audience, viewing the happening, but accidental and separate from the pure audience. The invited audience is of course not glued to anything as they are uninterrupted in their connection to the happening. They are made of the same stock as the happening. Lots of glue here.

One last part though: the "firmly transgressed logic." Later, O'Doherty defines the principles that make avant-garde art:

Classic avant-garde hostility expresses itself through physical discomfort (radical theater), excessive noise (music), or by removing perceptual constants (the gallery space). Common to all are transgressions of logic, dissociation of the sense, and boredom. In these arenas order (the audience) assays what quotas of disorder it can stand. Such places are, then, metaphors for consciousness and revolution. The spectator is invited into a space where the act of approach is turned back on itself. Perhaps a perfect avant-garde act would be to invite an audience and shoot it.

Now Renato Poggioli enters our conversation. The happening is part of the avant-garde as it assails the audience, attacking their comfort with ill-founded spaces, unproven methods, objectless art, and confrontational inclusion. The work can't be for a new audience, an experiment that is evolving, or even a new format. It has to fit into the avant-garde model by being against your supposedly monotonous level of taste. Art supposedly has to divide us for it to be new. It just seems so old fashioned today.

False Dichotomies

So I'm always doing art shitz. It apparently means that I'm a happier dude than everyone else.

But lately, I've been visiting very diverse art events. Some might call it high or low culture or maybe some of it is stuffy or relaxed. I don't know what it is, but I think that these two types of events just have different audiences. Two photos as examples:




The top is the 4th floor of the Harvard Art museum. Wonderfully filled installation with a solid showing of art from around 1870/1880. Historically important and vital to understanding art history.
The bottom is from the final party/performances at MEME in Cambridge. A bunch of drunken fools playing kazoos and laughing as they improvise music at the behest of the conductor (the blur in the middle).

Are these the poles that people in universities use as high and low? No. They would certainly define a painting from Harvard's collection as high, sure, but they would likely use lady gaga or some advertising spread as the painting's opposite. This low-brow-as-advertising crap has been encouraged deeply by Roland Barthes (pdf). Barthes is an inescapable corner stone of art theory eduction (with Sculpture in the Expanded Field and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as at least two of the other corners).

Low-art is usually described as advertising partially because of Barthes' analysis of static advertising images. It becomes most clear when you consider this: if you asked the supposed commoner who decides such things, is The Hangover from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or is MEME's improv "real art?"

My assumption is that your average person would say that T-L is real art and the improvised music is not real art.

The T-L is easier to read as art, like the advertising spread. From the content to the handling of the paint, this is a great example of how we have been taught that hand-made abstractions are the definition of art. It's also easier to "skim off" the semiotics of what the painting is trying to do. The white wall, the silence, the paying money to get in, the frame, the guards, the space around each work, the wall text announcing the provenance and the official statistics. These are as clear as the pasta advertising's attempt at reading Italian. The culture of high art museums is showing how cultured each work is through the semiotics of the presentation.

This is not evident in MEME's event. Instead the linguistic, coded and non-coded iconic messages are ambiguous. What are we being directed to think in this situation? Is this just a good party? Are nerds like me supposed to remember this event and write about it to anchor it in art history? To use Barthes' ideas for a moment, there is an arbitrariness here that is absent from a museum presentation. The frankness of the image is incomplete at MEME. The "what it is" non-coded message is just a bunch of people having fun. Is that art now?

So Barthes' brand of decoding static images is a bad method to explore what was happening at MEME that night. I think that the "message in the medium" is that performance is something that is not static and functions outside the rules of advertising. I think that low-art, low-brow, whatever you want to call it is best used to look at things like advertising, pop art, graffiti, comic books, or graphic design. Barthes' brand of semiotics is not a universally applicable tool in art.

If people want to continue arguing about the cultured qualities of The Hangover and The Hangover, let them, but if you tell me that a party atmosphere can't be art, then we are going to have to find another reason why besides it's "lowbrow."

I'm sure that someone wants to argue that it's neither: it's avant-garde. Can relaxed performance be ahead of the curve in 2011? Nope. In the 1960's, maybe. Why can't the two just have different audiences that are social equals? Why does everything in art theory have to encourage political divisions?

Rain. Hate it.

It's Museum day e'reybody! It's also another rainy day! oh boy!

I'm about to move house, so that's fun! Went to the PEM yesterday to see Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, which proves that a rich couple with a singular interest can bring together a collection of pretty great works. There are a few stand-outs and a bunch of filler, but it's a pretty good selection of work.

Worth the price of admission: Isaack Koedijck's Barber-Surgeon Tending a Peasant's Foot, van der Heyden's View of the Westerkerk Amsterdam, Ruisdael's View of Haarlem, Cuyp's Orpheus Charming the Animals and the one Rembrandt, a portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh (scrabble won't accept that spelling).

The PEM's Freeport exhibitions continue to be great. #2 from Marianne Mueller is a collection/installation. The overall feeling you get is confrontation. Things from the PEM's collections are held in opposition--two objects are kept in tension over and over again. The walls are covered with very specific pantone colors. Mueller included some of her photographs in the installation too. There are three videos of women standing facing the camera. They are, again, confrontational. I do want to know why women as video subject, are they to be gazed at, or are they gazing at us, or both? It seems deliberately gendered either way.

Freeport #3 is up at currently too, Susan Philipsz has an 8 channel sound piece installed. It's her singing the same song 8 different times exposing the differences in song. It comes in and out of focus over and over again. I assume it considers the change in oral histories over time, as it's a multi-version layering of a traditional song.

The NGC And MFA Acquired Christian Marclay’s 24-Hour Video, The Clock recently. I've been thinking about it and its place in art right now. It's a hit. I don't know how long it will last, if it's an instant classic or if it's going to change over time to a dated work. One of the reasons why I think it's popular outside of hardcore contemporary art circles is that it is a collage of popular movies. It has the same connection to popular culture as the new Beastie Boys video. Not that interesting, unless you care about seeing celebrities when you don't expect them. I personally can't wait to experience the sharpening of time in it. But I'm an insomniac, so it might just feel like another day...

Installations from Ai WeiWei, Olafur Eliasson, and Tomás Saraceno were exhibited at Harvard. I think that you can experience 2/3 of it via video the same way that you would have in person. The Eliasson was more intimate and wider in scope at the same time. He put more into his work.

The cyberarts festival is done. I almost agree with Greg Cook's review, which is a rare. There was something disjointed about this year's festival. There seemed to be fewer cyber artists and more +1's who wanted the publicity. The stand outs are Jim Campbell at Howie's gallery, the German videos at Goethe Institute (my writing about that- symposium and works), and the Drawing with Code exhibition at DeCordova (review is in draft form at Printeresting.org).

Anyway, off to the Harvard Museum to make more museum memories. But before I go, if you are in Boston area, go to meme's closing this weekend, a sad/happy event.

photo dump, contained

So Greg Cook published a review of Contained today and I got some photos of the exhibition in order, so it's time for a photo dump. The exhibition comes down after this week, so if you've been sleeping Boston, go see it now.

Another gap

More accounting for myself after a long absence. I do have plans to get back to blogging soon, so if you are paying attention, now is the time.

Since my last mea culpa post, I finished traveling too much (Oct-2nd week of Jan, I was home about 1 week a month), wrote quite a few reviews for the Daily Serving, wrote a review for artsfuse about the new Americas wing, applied and was rejected from CMS at MIT, became a contributor for Art Writ and printeresting, and finalized/installed/feted my show at the BCA.

I plan on laying out a curator's thingy for that show soon-- including pictures etc. Briefly, knowing that I am biased, I love this show and I love all the artists in it. It seems to have been beneficial to the space, artists, and me, so I think we all win.

I'm writing some thoughts on internet nerdery, social media in the arts. I will likely post something about that soon.


Things you should see if you are near Boston-
Drawing with Code and Rachel Perry Welty at DeCordova
Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection at the PEM and Mirror of Holland: Drawings from the George and Maida Abrams Collection at the MFA.
All of the upcoming ICA exhibitions including the AR works (that the ICA approved, but doesn't seem to know how to advertise for or have even mentioned yet) during the Cyber Arts Festival.
Nathalie Miebach at Fuller Craft

If you are in NY, go see the amazing Lucy Lippard talk about Ghosts, the Daily News, and Prophecy: Critical Landscape Photography Thursday, April 7, 2011, 7 pm. She's the smartest art nerd I know and is we should all wish to be half as smart as her.
Feel free to ignore my dear friend the Museum Nerd who didn't like Mark Morisoe at the Artists Space. I wanted to see this show as it is an important part of the Boston School that the ICA cemented as a thing. (Also go to the Shellburne Thurber show at Bab's Gallery)

If you are in NJ, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage at Princeton should be worth your attention.

In bad news, 57 Delle is closed, MEME is closing (but has a great schedule over the next few months), Walker Contemporary/Anthony Greaney/Carroll and Sons are all moving. We have so few contemporary spaces, this is a big deal to me. Boston seems to always seems to be on the edge of slipping into a dark ages, now is no different.