You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2009.
A List:
Good Things (+)
5D Mark II, 24mm Tilt-Shift Test Image
-The Adaptation of Dante’s Inferno I bought yesterday.
-The sweet plastic smell of my MacBook.
-Knowing I don’t have to work Monday.
Not So Good Things (-)
-Getting on the bus and promptly having a bloody nose.
-Finding out exactly how much getting my BFA and MFA cost me.
-Corporate Art.
-The Grey Dinginess that is Minneapolis in February.
All in all… that was the last 12 hours summarized in +/-
Tuesday Morning 02-18-2009
*****
I’m going to blather on and on today. I started this post, stopped it, started it again, and am now finally finishing it while I dread looking up my checking account balance. That’s the life of a multi-tasker.
I’ve been thinking too much about the role of the market and salable visual appeasement in art production. This little bit of mental annoyance has led me back to a basic questioning of my stance on idealism and materialism.
When it comes to both art/life, I’m an idealist. Despite being enmeshed in a thoroughly material culture, I maintain that meaning and value lie somewhere outside of, or underneath material reality. Plato’s notions being conscious, or being able to sense, indicates that there is a higher reality – replete with greater meaning.
Perhaps there is some small part of me that wholly subscribes to this idea. And… perhaps its the role of the artist to indicate other forms of meaning that could be underlying material reality.
However, there is a very large part of me that is yearning to just give in and subscribe to a fundamentally materialist view of the art world. I’d like to think that it is governed by laws… that there is a rhyme and reason to the production and selling of art objects. To be honest, it might be refreshing to see art as just another realm of objects to be bought and sold… traded off and refurbished when the time is right. To know that if something is marketable it is therefore good, could be the revelation I’ve been waiting for.
Desktop at work... organized in a way that even scares me.
And Desktop at home... ridiculously organized...
At the moment I’m feeling a bit like a self-diagnosed autistic person. I’m obsessed with ordering and arranging everything around me in precise and perfect grids. Scary. Very Scary.
For those that are also grid obsessed: http://www.thegridsystem.org/
Created from a photograph of Hanson Hall on the U of M Campus. Completely random and roughly as, if not more pleasing than the actual building.
Depth Map
Friend and former professor, Jenny Schmid, has turned me on to the work of Jakub Nepraš.
It finally sunk in today that I’m moving out of my cube apartment. In retrospect, it is amazing how living in a place that is distinctly modern and stripped of ornamentation shapes your thinking. I’m going to do the healthy thing and document all of the stages of moving.
Kale and Rice in the Cube
I’m taking a break from packing to digest my oat pancakes… I’m amazed at how many great books and magazines I’ve acquired recently. Here are a few highlights that I definitely recommend you add to your library.
Joachim Schmid, Photoworks 1982-2007
Julia Christiansen, Big Box Reuse
Seed Magazine, January 2009
I was having dinner last night with two friends and the same question that has followed me through graduate school popped up again to say hello. I thought I’d take a second to stick my tongue out.
The question is age old… if you count the last 30 years as an age…
Does visual art have to be visually compelling?*
With the risk of being rude, here is the answer that I did not give last night as I was downing my gin and tonic: No. Personally and professionally speaking, I do not feel for a piece of art to be worthy of my attention that it has to be visually compelling. I would go so far to say that I am utterly fascinated and refreshed by visual artists who are able to make aesthetic decisions that lead to work that isn’t visually thrilling.
I’m compelled by images constantly and it is not a pleasant experience.
Visual culture in the West is characterized by a constant and unending stream of images that are… visually compelling. Some people call them advertisements and they are always there, captivating us to buy/feel/do something. It is all really quite numbing and feel like I’m building up an immunity to this type of image-function.
After all, there is something inexplicably gracious about an image that can function in ways other than… aesthetically compelling.
*I’m going to go ahead and assume the unsaid/uncouth/unfashionable connection between saying that something visually compelling is also saying it is formally compelling.
Colleen Mullins has another great post in the continuing discussion of relationships between the market and art production. LINK.
Here’s my comment on her comment:
I can’t stop thinking about this…
Now… wouldn’t it be exceptionally ironic if we looked at those little hand-made cards that come with each 20X200 purchase in the same way as the defunct signage Miyazaki photographs? To quote from Miyazaki’s 20X200 page, they could easily be seen as objects whose “transformation to… relic is fast and impersonal…” Perhaps that unopened print you mention is already undergoing this transformation as it lays perfectly flat in its little cardboard coffin.
To take this one step further, maybe in the not-too-distant future, the 20X200 website will be regarded as one of those “unsentimental spaces created through corporate analysis of demographics, traffic flow, and consumer desire.”
I feel as though I could be playing hooky at the moment. I’ve got a loaf of banana bread in the oven and I’m doing — nothing. It’s amazing how delightful temperatures above freezing can be. Perhaps I’ll kiss my neighborhood goodbye by taking a walk to the liquor store.
My great indulgence for the day has been watching documentaries instead of getting off my ass and photographing the Walker for an architecture blog. I’ll do it tomorrow morning… when the light isn’t so punchy.
If you haven’t seen it already, Our Daily Bread is an amazing documentary/piece of video art. The film follows mechanized food production around Europe – from salmon fishing vessels in Norway to almond trees in Greece and Italy. Mostly consisting of long shots of workers and machines doing their business to make our lunches possible, the repetitive motions of how we get our food is interspersed with workers having their lunch breaks.
Two favorite moments:
-Workers trying to get bulls to mount cows… and then jumping in last second with a beaker to collect the semen.
-Workers endlessly, tirelessly piling soil around asparagus so that it never conducts photosynthesis and stays white.
The film is available on DVD from NetFlix and here is the trailer:
