26 April 2010
A new low?
This one is a no-brainer. You don't fire someone and hire them back at 60% of their old salary unless you are desperate to the nth degree. Good luck Euphrat Museum. You're going to need it.
Extra-Visual art
Robert Morris. He may be the poster child for (capital C) Conceptual Art. His output transitioned the from the 50's Greenberg/Abstract Expressionism era to the John Cage/anti-commodification era of high concept driven art. From Sorting Cows in an art magazine to Bodyspacemotionthings. He seemed for years, to be able to upturn the art world on a single publication or new work. Now it seems that no one wants to see his recent work or ask him to make anything else. Try to find new work online. Good luck.
My interest in him is, like others, his work from 1960 through the mid 70's. There is a promising (haven't seen it in person yet) collection of his writings, but I can't seem to find a single website, catalogue raisonné, or other new media collecting the works (is there a raisonné? I found one for prints by Christophe Cherix, but not anything else). There was a meeting of scholars in France in 08. But that's not nearly the amount of research I assumed I'd find on him.
It's a symptom of conceptual art as a historical subject. We've heard from the people who lived it, but it's about time to start digging in deep and sorting some things out. What is conceptual art and when did it happen was explored by a few books published after about 1999, but those mostly laid the groundwork for our new task, which is to explore the after effects of this era and to explain what is being made now as a reaction to that era. Although through the lens of Morris, maybe we need to do some basic work first.
The late condition of conceptual art. We don't even have a vocabulary for the separation between conceptual and contemporary. People still think that the YBA were conceptualists. They're wrong, but we don't have a developed lexicon to explain why yet. They didn't even have non-objective art. Their intentions were often (mostly I'd say) based on emotive ends rather than concept or infinitesimal thought.
That's a career right there. Being that guy that explains how and why concept gave way to intention. How we will never go back to solid Greenbergian objective art.
Edited to add this from the stuff I should have finished reading before writing this:
My interest in him is, like others, his work from 1960 through the mid 70's. There is a promising (haven't seen it in person yet) collection of his writings, but I can't seem to find a single website, catalogue raisonné, or other new media collecting the works (is there a raisonné? I found one for prints by Christophe Cherix, but not anything else). There was a meeting of scholars in France in 08. But that's not nearly the amount of research I assumed I'd find on him.
It's a symptom of conceptual art as a historical subject. We've heard from the people who lived it, but it's about time to start digging in deep and sorting some things out. What is conceptual art and when did it happen was explored by a few books published after about 1999, but those mostly laid the groundwork for our new task, which is to explore the after effects of this era and to explain what is being made now as a reaction to that era. Although through the lens of Morris, maybe we need to do some basic work first.
The late condition of conceptual art. We don't even have a vocabulary for the separation between conceptual and contemporary. People still think that the YBA were conceptualists. They're wrong, but we don't have a developed lexicon to explain why yet. They didn't even have non-objective art. Their intentions were often (mostly I'd say) based on emotive ends rather than concept or infinitesimal thought.
That's a career right there. Being that guy that explains how and why concept gave way to intention. How we will never go back to solid Greenbergian objective art.
Edited to add this from the stuff I should have finished reading before writing this:
Has abstract and conceptual art had its day? Does figurative and representational art have a better future?
What happened in the late Sixties was equivalent to what happened with cubism. It was a new way of describing the world that looked dry and impenetrable to many people for many years, but underpinned a great deal of the art we now admire in the 20th century. The same is true of conceptual art. People describe as "conceptual" almost any work of art that has deep thought embodied in it, rather than simply the representation of an object on a canvas. By those standards, almost all the great art of the last 10 or 15 years has been conceptual because it has dealt with ideas as well as images.
20 April 2010
More hybridity
Printresting's take on this video exhibits the printerly laws. It can't be printing, it has to be sculpture. If it were printing, we could control it. If 3-d printing were not printing, we'd be sculptors. Oh no! What to do!
Relax and let it be. Maybe it's an installation. Or a 3-d painting... oh my!
Printers can't be painters!
cultural baggage.
More examples of hybrid forms. Haven't seen these shows, but they sound and talk about not needing to follow the rules of genre. Musik für Barbaren und Klassiker breaks the traditional boundaries between concerts, sound installations, sculpture and music. Did you say:
Cuz I like the sound of that. I don't think I know how I'd react to that exhibit, and how I'd shoehorn the work into a single definitive genre.
Also Paola Pivi's work in Rotterdam. A free animals concert? With a democratic recording studio for anyone to record in? Did I mention the animals will be in the studio too. They will make noise while you record.
Neither of these have issues with being too familiar. Instead, they are new forms. I think of them through the lens of Sculpture in the Expanded Field (link is PDF). I can't help it, but the klein group that Krauss talks about has been hanging over my head informing how I look at art since I read that article circa 2003. It was probably the moment where art went from something that we react at to something that I considered in a historical and conceptual construct. I was already familiar with most of the works mentioned in the article, but no one had presented such a clear and useful argument to me about the meta-data involved or enumerated the complicated relationship between the work and genre. Art work was either good or bad. I didn't even consider if it fit into sculpture comfortably.
That article is my cultural baggage.
The Ultrasound of Therapy from Staalplaat Soundsystem is an installation-as-a-whole, built up as an infirmary. In each of the beds the visitor undergoes an individualised sensory processing. Highlights are the meditation videos, the beds connected to bass amplifiers (which intensify the physical experience of sound), or the treatment with sine waves, based on the Indo-Tibetan vadacakra theory.
Cuz I like the sound of that. I don't think I know how I'd react to that exhibit, and how I'd shoehorn the work into a single definitive genre.
Also Paola Pivi's work in Rotterdam. A free animals concert? With a democratic recording studio for anyone to record in? Did I mention the animals will be in the studio too. They will make noise while you record.
Neither of these have issues with being too familiar. Instead, they are new forms. I think of them through the lens of Sculpture in the Expanded Field (link is PDF). I can't help it, but the klein group that Krauss talks about has been hanging over my head informing how I look at art since I read that article circa 2003. It was probably the moment where art went from something that we react at to something that I considered in a historical and conceptual construct. I was already familiar with most of the works mentioned in the article, but no one had presented such a clear and useful argument to me about the meta-data involved or enumerated the complicated relationship between the work and genre. Art work was either good or bad. I didn't even consider if it fit into sculpture comfortably.
That article is my cultural baggage.
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