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.

The museum is supporting

Marina Abramović. Up till this year, I knew of her, but after the MoMA started hosting her show The Artist is Present, I think I know her. No, I haven't been taking part in the performance, crying in front of the artist. I've been getting to know her work and her career in a way that I think many people have and I hold the MoMA responsible for it.

It's a good thing. So much of her work and the work that the MoMA did not choose to support at this time has been in discussion, that I think that a dent is being made in the historicization of her era has begun in earnest. From today's opinion piece by Danto, to Laurie Anderson sitting down to interview Ambamović we have been treated to numerous resources that we should not take for granted.

But, as I've not experienced the work, I'd like to explore what it means that this is going on inside one of the NY'iest of NY institutions. Instead of being merely a review of other work, allowing a window into an era this is a show of surviving documents and new experiences for both the artist and the museum. The revival of Imponderabilia is not just a redo, a rehash, but brings up new problems that are unavoidable in a 3 month show that wasn't an issue in a one evening performance. This work has no heuristic issues when simulated on the interweb, but when actually planned for by an institution there are numerous legal, ethical, and ridiculous issues that will "arise."

Dick jokes aside, the twitterverse was a tweeting about a catheter, astronaut's diapers, and holding it. However this is dealt with, it's just the tip of the iceberg. She needed an army of performers to be able to pull of a fresh large scale attempt at these works. They cost money, and the MoMA supported her and her process. There is a bevy of naked people in the galleries that the audience is asked to touch in a polite manner. Imagine the lawyers at the MoMA when they were told about this performance?

By lending their venue to this type of work, the MoMA is saying that this work is equal to their physically present works like sculptures and paintings. This allows for their curators and historians to explore an area that they are often not, expanding the institutional knowledge and allowing for people like Danto to engage with the work on a historical level. The hybridity inherent in these performances (other people standing in for Abramović, the non-physical location of the work, the shift changes for the performers) increases the chances that newer artists will be allowed a space in the MoMA in the future, and the institution will be a comfortable with these questions.

It also cements her career in a way that probably everyone from her generation is jealous of. From the photographs, to her and Ulay breaking up during the Great Wall Walk I've seen people talking about her work like no other performance artist. For now, this show is the biggest thing going on. Explore her work. Find out what you do and don't like. There is more here than an empty chair.

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:

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.

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:

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.