Andrew Venell » regarding art

Tying off threads

Andrew — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:21:37 +0000

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We are engaging in a week-long media diet. Or “media fast” is maybe more accurate. An information diet. It is exactly as hard as I imagined not to fill every dead minute with pointless web surfing.

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The rise of “image sharing” (is this what they are called?) and group-surf blogs in the past three years seems to have exponentially increased the already sickening pace of image proliferation. Things Magazine references this quite often. Images have never been so disposable, so fleeting, and so easily forgotten. Blank spots in my schedule invariably see me following threads from Ffffound or Image Spark deep into nested rebloggery, never actually reaching the point of origin. Eventually these blogs will be the end of all attribution, as the Tumblr-style breadcrumb trail will never make it back far enough. All of these endless pages of decontextualized imagery. The most ridiculous experience is watching a single image bounce back and forth for a day between Ffffound and Image Spark as one group of the world (one set of users) goes to sleep and another wakes up and discovers it anew…on Ffffound or Image Spark. But after another day or two’s worth of images has buried it alive, it’s so quickly forgotten. Fffforgotten.

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I think of my own complicity in this. It’s apparent that what I’m doing in “making something every day” is filling the world with more under-conceived images, as opposed to telling new stories, inventing new realities, moving a thoughtful audience, etc. (anything that would require some sustained and quiet effort in myself or you, my audience). More fodder for the infinite click trance of images unmoored from context or history, scanned and forgotten too quickly to have effect. Is this the downside to art on the Internet that I’ve been neglecting to acknowledge? All images are reduced to the flat plane of advertising, visual and mental pollution.

What is the (non-jokey) Internet version of a blank white canvas? I think of the tendency in Buddhist art for the Buddha to be represented by an empty space. How can we create a powerfully affecting aesthetics of subtraction for the Internet? A greasemonkey script that sucks all the images off of Ffffound, leaving only captions behind?

Edit: This turned into something.

Resistances

Andrew — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:09:12 +0000

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“To say that you are resisting something means that you have to spend a lot of time and energy saying what that something is, in order for your resistance to make sense. Too much energy flows in the wrong direction, and you usually end up strengthening the thing you want to resist.“

“It seems to me that if architects really want to resist, then neither the idea nor the rhetoric of resistance has a place in it. These architects must take the initiative, beginning from a point of origin that precedes anything to be resisted, one deep within an idea of architecture itself. They can never think of themselves as resisters, or join resistance movements, or preach resistance. Rather…they must create an independent idea…“

Lebbeus Woods

Immediately I was reminded of something a favorite professor once said, which I dutifully wrote down and have kept posted on the bulletin board for 5 years (and here I think I’m roughly paraphrasing):

“What would it take to be working toward a world where affirmation (as opposed to questioning or critique) is possible?”

As I understood it–and to put it in Woods’ terms–she meant to posit an alternative to the default mode of “resistance,” which is to critique existing conditions, to use your work to question (or, worse, to “raise awareness of“) problematic assumptions. Certainly as an artist coming straight out of a critical studies background, this was my default mode, and I was quite seduced by the clever ways one could use satire to reflect dominant culture back to itself. But she suggested a much more terrifying alternative, which was to ignore what is wrong and simply use your energy to create something better. Or more specifically, she asked us what would make such a practice even possible, which is something I’ve been thinking about ever since.

I am just as seduced today by the clever ways one can use satire to reflect dominant culture back to itself. But I also have a nagging desire to work more positively, outwardly facing–to create something that is not an opposition or act of resistance but rather an improved alternative. I return again to the example of Ze Frank as someone working outside a traditional art practice to directly create the type of world he would like to live in. J.S.G. Boggs is another classic example: someone who has simply carved out an alternative reality for himself, in his case an alternative economy.

As someone not overly inclined to make my work social–as someone not overly inclined to be social–I wonder what form(s) a more affirmative art would take. So much of art already involves constructing alternate realities, is it just the pernicious effects of critical studies programs and overly theoretical art classrooms (I barely accept the possibility that there could be an overly theoretical art classroom) that affirmative (non-hokey) art is hard to conceptualize? Is Woods correct that a true act of resistance involves ignoring that which is and attempting to (heroically?) construct that which should be?

Art Is Dumb. Do Something Else.

Andrew — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:29:40 +0000

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A new feature: I answer your letters.

I’ve been interested for a long time in the “art of everyday life,” situationism, relational aesthetics, etc.: the various movements that attempt to bridge–usually for quasi-political reasons–some of the cultural space between “art” and “normal, everyday life” (i.e., as lived by poor people). And I remember in a class in graduate school writing about how maybe making “art” as quotidian and banal as the materials of everyday life (a common approach) isn’t as interesting an aim as attempting to elevate everyday life to the level of art (the same work with a subtle shift in perspective.) But the common approach to “elevating” the quotidian to the level of art usually consists of taking an everyday object–a chair–and putting it into a gallery (the space of art!). Then we contemplate this chair, in the gallery: the chair-as-object, the gesture of placing it here (in the domain of art!). Etc. We haven’t elevated the act of sitting by making a much better chair (that would be design!) or by focusing intently and mindfully on the practice of sitting, of being-in-a-chair. Instead we’ve taken an object out of its normal environment and placed it in a new environment that was already imbued with the aura and essence of fine art: of important thoughts, sacred artifacts, and commerce. Now we are celebrating the common chair by allowing some of this residual aura of fine art to maybe rub off on it. And we stand and look at the chair like an animal in a zoo.

And in the period in which Duchamp did this with readymades, this was very interesting and useful–I would never say otherwise. Because at the very least the idea of “what is art” needed to be opened up to conversation. What I am tired of, though, is that there can be–and always is–a conservative backlash against these kinds of gestures, that comes from the need to separate and reify art objects, and to retain the power and prestige that are wrapped up in the idea of “fine art.” And that never seems to end, since the conversation of “what is art” continues with each new technology, and since we’ve reached a point now in our understanding of art that on one side you have artists who are marginally comfortable with the idea that anything can be art as long as someone is around to call it “art” (and that person is an “artist”) and on the other side you have an audience that says, “well, if everything is art, then why should I care?” (as though its importance in the first place comes from its status as “art”). This is the position within culture that fine art has relegated itself to: occasionally it provokes the larger culture with a scandalous work (see art troll) that only serves to give the conservatizing forces more ammunition, and the rest of the time it stays quietly in its ghetto, in museums and galleries, where most people are either disinterested or put off and slightly shamed that they “don’t get it.”

The part about art as “a barnacle clinging to the cruise ship of popular culture.”

And they “don’t get it” because art has fallen into an endless conversation with itself, commenting incessantly on its own history as “art,” as something-other-than-mass-culture: because when it’s not appropriating the materials of popular culture it’s appropriating the symbols of its own faded glory. And it has all become very boring. Part of what makes it so boring is that so much of the conversation tends to be about not the experience of the work but the work and its environment: what does it mean that this is in a gallery? Or what does it mean that it was made today, in 2009? The context becomes the experience rather than simply illuminating it. The gallery or museum is itself a kind of readymade experience, all of these art objects concentrated in one place where if nothing else we can rest safe in the knowledge that yes, they are art and no, we will not encounter them in our everyday life.

Meanwhile outside of galleries and museums people are doing many interesting things and creating beautiful experiences with each other, and sometimes they call them art and sometimes they do not. And when they do, a lot of baggage gets imposed on the work, baggage that logs it into a history and defines its role within the culture as not very significant but potentially VERY SIGNIFICANT, and gives you an easy out if you “don’t get it.” You may actually do a work more damage by calling it art. It’s certainly much easier to overlook.

Some of the many things that attract me to the Internet as both a medium and venue for art are the ephemerality of the work, the lack of objecthood, and the ability to reach an audience that is not necessarily in a museum or gallery mindset. Those of us who come from a fine art background still tend to refer to what we do as art, and to ghettoize ourselves as I have with this “art portfolio” you’re looking at. But some of the most interesting, ambitious, impressive and open-hearted work in recent years has come from Ze Frank, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard him refer to himself as an artist, or what he does as “art.” And to do so would, in a way, discount the huge amount of audience participation that powers his work. One fantastic effect of the Internet is that it is creating a web of collaborating makers, sharing ideas and expertise, and I think the rise of this term, “maker,” in the past few years actually holds a lot of promise for the future of what we call “art.” If I call myself a “maker,” the emphasis is on the activity, on doing, on what I make, rather than on where my work will be displayed, the social relations it will become a part of. “Maker” gets a lot of power from its vagary.

But it’s not just semantics.

What I have taken so long to say is that I’m thinking that this term, “art” has been useful and that now it is something of a liability in terms of actually identifying what you choose to produce. And as a topic of conversation within our culture it has become extremely dull. The sliding scale of at exactly what point a popular record crosses over into “art.” Is a website “design” or is it “art?” Is an iPhone application “art?” Would it be art if it were sold in a gallery rather than the App Store? Would it be art if you charged $75,000 for it rather than $5? Would it be art if it didn’t do anything useful? These are all interesting questions if you would rather run in a hamster wheel than get anywhere. If you spend any amount of time worrying about whether you are writing poetry or prose, you are missing the point of making anything.

There are still ideas we can take from art, and it was these I wanted to infuse into “the everyday”: the aspiration to reach something higher, something beyond simply pleasing an audience or creating something useful. The aspiration, really, to transcend reality, create new experiences. But whatever we make, we shouldn’t allow the idea of “art” to determine its value, significance or meaning. It should stand on its own legs as whatever it is. (If a chair is to be a work of art, it should be because of the qualities of the chair, not its surroundings. And if the gesture of putting the chair in the gallery is to be a work of art, then… well, that was interesting for a moment, but now it’s over. Let’s make something else.) Whatever we make, we should aspire to make it as well as we can–better–to make it for ourselves and for the pleasure, education, comfort, joy, fear, anger, amusement or provocation of others. This is not really done, but it’s as close to manifesto-ing as I hope I ever get.

What do you say?

Nature As A Text: Complexity theory and the Modernist eye in Maggie Leininger’s “Text/ile”

Andrew — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 05:01:20 +0000

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This quarter’s The Present Group project includes a piece I wrote about the current work of Maggie Leininger, a textile artist in Illinois.

“A white plastic box inscribed with a colorful legend, anonymously medical or scientific in origin, opens to reveal a woven textile, folded upon itself, black and white threads that merge into a shifting pattern of gray rectangles. Unrolled and displayed vertically, the swatch immediately brings to mind the reductive shapes and optical experimentation of Modernist abstraction…“

Read Nature As A Text…

Lexicon: Dude Art

Andrew — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 06:42:10 +0000

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Dude Art has become so mainstream since I first started carelessly throwing around the term that the definition is almost too fuzzy to be useful anymore. Originally intended to refer to the type of art that one finds on skateboard decks–but not the type of skateboard decks that you use, the type that you hang on your wall (“you” here referring to everyone but “me”), dude art exists at the highly profitable intersection of graffiti, skate culture, independent comics (post-Fort Thunder), “design” (advertising), collage and video games–I’ve heard most of these referred to collectively as “boy culture.” The prototypical piece of dude art will involve a naked woman, video game paraphernalia, graffiti/advertising/design flourishes and will most likely take the form of a mural (see: Coop).

The term was originally (and, I suppose, pejoratively) meant to apply to art made by/for young urban males who were not effete, skinny intellectuals in high school (and indeed there is an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in the “movement,” if a “movement” can be said to exist). However, the rapid mainstreaming of Dude Art has caused it to snowball and pick up a number of other pseudo-movements, which would now most likely be called (collectively) something like “neo-pop” or (equally meaninglessly) “hipster art.” (The “female” version of dude art, for example, replaces naked women with fey graphite drawings of woodland creatures or burning houses, but includes many of the same visual flourishes). The center of Dude Art seems to be California, certainly L.A. but perhaps equally as vital in San Francisco–the type of work featured on San Francisco art-blog Fecal Face, for example, probably represents the apex that Dude Art aspires to.

Lexicon: Art Trolls

Andrew — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:34:46 +0000

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Though actually predating its namesake by a generation or more, the Art Troll gets its current name from the Internet Troll, a special class of Internet users who post “controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages…with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.”#

Certainly art has been shocking and occasionally scandalous for most of its history, but I say the Internet Troll only predates its namesake by about a generation because the Art Troll requires the mass media in order to exist–requires that particular combination of uninformed opinion, moral grandstanding, sound bites and short attention spans. The simplest route to art-trolling involves depicting anything–but particularly a recognizable persona–using excrement or any type of bodily fluid. The most recent (and perhaps most ultimately relevant) example of the Art Troll is the Yale-Art-student-who-induced-and-collected-miscarriages-for-an-eventual-art-installation-which-was-pre-emptively-closed-but-then-it-turned-out-that-she-probably-didn’t-even-induce-any-miscarriages-but-no-one-really-knows (I’m neither naming the artist nor linking to any publicity because the Troll only grows in power through attention, and the only way to counteract the Troll is to ignore it.) At its most successful, in fact, the Art Troll is referred to in hyphens (“The-guy-who-paints-baby-portraits-with-dog-diarrhea”)–the art itself inevitably taking backseat to the concept associated with the artist.

Immediately following (though these days, frequently before) the initial shock, the artist releases a statement “attempting to clarify” his/her intentions. These statements usually involve the phrase, “To make people rethink x” or “To raise awareness of y” or “To call into question preconceived notions of z.” In reality, however, the Art Troll deliberately and strategically hijacks whatever cause or concept s/he pays lip service to for the purpose of gaining personal attention–by making any non-emotional reaction impossible. The Art Troll requires the easy and inevitable outrage of an audience who has not–and will never–encounter the work, and who have in turn been whipped into a pre-emptive frenzy by brief and sensational reporting. It’s a symbiotic relationship in which each is complicit in the other’s success: the artist receives massive exposure and attention and the “opposition” (usually some sort of culturally conservative outrage group) receives another round of ammunition (and massive exposure and attention). In this way the Art Troll actually has the exact opposite effect of whatever his/her stated goals were: no one “rethinks x,” and in fact those who oppose the rethinking of x only gain in power. The Art Troll plays, in the end, a conservatizing function, enabling those who attempt to delay social and cultural evolution to mobilize their forces, and giving extra credence to their views. In return, the Art Troll receives enough attention to launch a career (though usually only a career rehashing the same strategies that generated the initial attention).

Lexicon: Problematic Afternoon

Andrew — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:36:57 +0000

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The Problematic Afternoon is the sort of mental minefield peculiar to artists, writers, freelancers, grad students and other “self-employed” types. The Problematic Afternoon represents the time of day where morning’s promise has finally and completely worn off, all talent seems squandered, and it has somehow become impossible to produce any kind of quality work. This is where frustrated plans turn into a larger existential anxiety over your choice of career and life in general.

4:30pm is, for me, the absolute bottom of the day, when my ability to focus is at its lowest and I’m most prone to second-guess my skills, choices and right to even exist. It’s no coincidence that it’s also the time of day I’m most likely to slink guiltily out of the apartment to inflict my mood on the larger world. The afternoon constitutional is the natural remedy for the problematic afternoon, as is the one-off project. The one-off project has the potential to make everything much worse if it fails to go anywhere, but at least you’re working, rather than surfing the Internet (which is how most Problematic Afternoons can be diagnosed). The afternoon constitutional, in turn, has the potential to lead to a sort of endless meandering until dinner. But sometimes simply being on your feet will clear your head enough to let the ideas back in, and you may cut the walk short in favor of a one-off project.

This is where I talk about my feelings

Andrew — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:30:47 +0000

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One of the ideas behind redesigning my website was to give myself a space to talk about art in general, as well as process–my process of “making” “work,” especially as it relates to the current fad of personal productivity, lifehacking, &c.

(It’s hard, though, to transition into that level of discussion with you, my imaginary audience, after years of quietly hanging out in the background. Which is why I’m here now, introducing you to the meta-me that talks about this place where I talk to you.)

I’ve been listening to The Now Habit on my sister’s recommendation. It’s been around long enough that the main principles have filtered down into the standard productivity discourse at this point, but it’s interesting nonetheless for its discussion on some of the anxieties that impede work and tend to fuel procrastination. Many of which I know intimately and encounter daily (someday we’ll have a discussion of the “problematic afternoon” concept (EDIT: we did)). If you’re a fan of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as you should be, you might know some of these as Gumption Traps.

One of the things that has been really interesting, though, is how Fiore identifies the common problem of associating your self worth with the quality of your completed tasks, leading to the perfectionist’s spiral of not-doing-anything-because-if-it’s-not-good-I’m-not-good. And he tries to coach you out of that kind of thinking–you know: you’re great; you’re worthy ipso facto; if this project sucks it reflects on the project, not on you. Etc. I find this a really easy concept to understand as it pertains to $$ work, and really mystifyingly difficult to break through as it pertains to artwork. It’s sort of intrinsic in how we look at and discuss art, as a culture, to judge the artist along with the artwork. A Picasso painting is part painting and part Picasso–a reflection, supposedly, of his spirit in some ridiculous, mystical way. So while I agree intellectually, I’m finding it a really pernicious idea, hard to emotionally let go of, especially since I have come, over time, to value myself almost exclusively through the work that I produce (what else is there to care about?).

(Did Picasso think to himself, as he painted, “I’m a perfect me whether I screw this up or not”? Would the work have been worse if he had?)

Maybe I’m wondering if, when it’s not an impediment, that kind of thinking is a legitimate means of intense production. The intensity of having your whole self wrapped up in the work. It is easy to see, however, how that kind of thinking can keep you from producing all of the important failures of an early (and continuing) career. I think what you must end up doing is banking your self worth on the future works that will be enabled by current failures. The task I’ve been working on for a few years now is enjoying the process of courting failure, the idea of just getting it out and done, in whatever imperfect form. There are still projects, types of projects, that are so intrinsic to how I think of myself that I’m very resistant to just getting them out there, though.

How do you negotiate the relationship between your self and your work, especially with regard to cranking the widgets?

(And I see this, now–writing about this, on here, to you–as a definite step in the direction of courting failure. I will regret the anti-diegetic moment as soon as I’ve posted.)