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This is going to seem like a ramble… but… I’m idle at the moment and idle fingers must tap keys in order for me to stay awake at my desk. I might as well think through some one of the things that is running through my weasel-brain today.
My neighbors probably hate me right now.
Last night, like a true multi-tasker, I cranked up a great Philosophy Bites podcast and hopped in my shower. In the latest download Julian Savulescu talks about the ‘Yuk’ Factor. Put more in expanded terms, the Yuk factor is more of the question: should we make decisions based on our base emotional/gut responses to situations/objects/actions.
I rather loved this discussion as it brought me back to the feelings I have when looking (or trying to look) at visual art. Back in graduate school I had the good fortune of taking a theory seminar with Jan Estep. One of our tasks was to respond to the question: what if a person, who has NO knowledge of art, looks at your work – how do they find value in what you’re doing? This person without any base knowledge of art is then, in theory, running purely on their yuk factor.
This question was a tough one for me to answer because my work isn’t concerned with aesthetics/beauty/sublimation. How is it possible to hook someone into looking at your work, when your work doesn’t visually stimulate them? If someone doesn’t have a preconceived notion of what art is, how can you make them consider something art? In the past, I’ve tried to make the argument that aesthetic appeal is not a necessary ingredient for a great piece. If this is possible, then I believe that there is a different mode of experiencing art that can be invoked… perhaps something along the lines of the viewer as researcher?
Speaking as a viewer, I love art that makes me work to uncover or create meaning. That’s always been the hook for me… understanding as a type of conceptual challenge. It’s not so much the gut-response factor that makes me love art. Instead, I find myself drawn to work that forces me to suspend any yuk factor, delve deeper, and resist making a judgment.
Enough of my blathering.
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Definitely worth reading today:
Strained Relations, by Rick Poynor
AND
Letter from London: See You Later Contemporary Art Curator, by Ben Street
Tuesday Morning 02-18-2009
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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.
January 31, 2009 Walker Entrance
I’ve been running around like crazy lately. The process of moving to a new apartment is… more stressful than I remember. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to update this blog as much as I would have liked.
Something good…
I’m beginning to shake off the frigid weight of winter and photograph again, with hopes of eventually building a portfolio of architectural photography.
While that is starting to simmer on the back burner, I am also beginning to expand on the dialog that was initiated with a post on Dec. 05. A post on Elysium, the blog of Colleen Mullins, caught the attention of another blogger… creating a trifecta of discussion about the role of the market in art production.
Check out the first question in the discussion here…
Stay tuned for updates…
Vacationing in Golden Valley This Year!
Zen Habits has a great article about being pigeonholed. I feel like the art world demands that artists brand themselves through their work… this little article has a great take on how to recognize when you’re being pushed to be one way or another based on surrounding circumstances.
I’d also like to add that the Minnesota Martini at the Longfellow Grill is amazing.
Proof my phone's camera sucks!
Cheers to all and to all a good (but cold) night!
Clinton Ave Public Space, February 2008
Americans are either in their cars, in their homes, or in shopping malls.
The sense of public space in the contemporary American city is so exceptionally abbreviated it seems that I am able to pass to and from work without ever really having to navigate a truly “public” place. I get up in the morning, and pass from my house to an abandoned street of private homes and get onto a bus that systematically seals me off from the public sphere passing outside. When I arrive at work, I migrate upwards into the sky-ways and am deluged by an array of private interests and intentions – starting with some corporate architect’s premeditated control of my movement and ending with the various retail establishments that pull me in to spend money.
There is never a sense of openness, possibility, or social exchange in the mock public environment I’m surrounded by. I guess I’m comparing this to the various public spaces I’ve spent time in – The Zocalo area in Mexico City or Central Park or the Museum Plein in Amsterdam. There is something that is distinctly lost when public space is mutated and downsized as it is in Minneapolis. Supposedly there is a new public space opening up – Target Plaza… next to Target Field… next to the Target Center.
Does it bother anyone else that we are so willing to have our open forum spaces co-opted by a corporation’s private PR interests?
With the above thoughts in mind, I intend to actually start doing some work again (keeping in mind, I can’t really make any prints until this time next year). A couple of goals for this project/direction:
- Research the history of the corporate sponsorship of art, architecture, and the public sphere.
- Photograph the spaces that constitute public space, in its abbreviated and shrunken state.
- Intervene in the dialog between the accessibility and inaccessibility of the public and private, corporate and free.
I’m beginning a new digital project for y’all. Its called Sympathetic Objects. Basically, I’m interested in the objects that are passing through life with me. I’ve started a new collection for this project – everything that came into being May 1982.
Object #1:
(A bit of a given… but…)
National Geographic Magazine from May 1982
Object #001
this may be all the use my loyal epson sees this year
At some point in the recent past I became what many Americans consider an “adult”. Maybe it is my age. Maybe it is the geographic gorging of my under eye region. But, I have officially reached the phase of my life where all of my peers are doing things like buying houses, sprouting children, or buying Prada handbags.
I’m doing none of these things and really have no ambition to.
However, by some stroke of this thing called “responsibility” I’ve decided that its high time to do things like paying off my credit card debt from my MFA thesis show. If I start now, and use all my extra cash, I can save $3,000 and be out of debt in 12 months.
What does this really mean?
- I cannot travel for one year. (Goodbye Mexico City, Montreal, Brussels, and elsewhere)
- I cannot fully produce images for one year. (I can take photographs but cannot print, frame, and exhibit)
Two incredibly important things for me to be giving up for New Years.
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In doing this, however, I feel there is some hope of liberation. In a time of instant turn-around with digital imaging techniques and also an excess cache of film, I’ve been able to point at will and make photographs with little concern for the resources going into them.
I intend to continue to make photographs, but they will remain latent, unprocessed and unprinted, until December of 2009.
Will this liberate me? Make me take the image making process as something more precious, rare, and important? Will I get to know a new appreciation for the images I see when in 2009 I take the mountain of 4X5 film in for processing?
I cannot guess what an image that has been latent for 12 months will mean to me.
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Two things come to mind:
- I’m reminded of Andy Warhol’s “Time Capusules”. Warhol would take various items and simply archive them in brown paper boxes, in a warehouse, until he felt the need to revisit them. Here is Andy at his finest:
“What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey.”
A. Warhol, THE philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and back again, London, 1975.
- Robert Capa’s lost negatives of the Spanish Civil War – long thought to be lost… http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/arts/design/27kenn.html
Some beautiful photographs that are making me happy on this bleak Sunday evening.
From Rune Guneriussen
Longfellow, 12-14-2008
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Living in Minnesota for the last three years has been a period of intense upheaval sprinkled with moments of lucid stability. This morning was one of those moments. I decided to go for a walk, before the blizzard sets in and take some photographs of this place that I actually have started calling home.
Did I end up here by choice? Is this as good as it gets? Can this locality actually be MY locality? And, if so, how? How am I to inhabit this place? Materially? (Through owning property, things, images?) Socially? (Through interaction with other inhabitants.) Spiritually? (Through ritual, religion, beliefs of this place).
Or is there a course of action that will take me away from here and somehow make me a better person? Is that other person the one I should be striving to be?
Good questions for an afternoon of being stuck in my house.
Longfellow, 12-14-2008
Longfellow, 12-14-2008
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In keeping with the “EMO, I reveal too much” facade I’ve had going for quite some time, I thought I’d post one of my daily images. So, basically: I try to summarize each of my days with a photograph/text/drawing… something to make it seem like I’m still an artist and not an “artist type”. They’re always lo-fi and harking back to my days as a printmaker.
(although a good halftone still turns me on)
Here’s today:
pinkwinter
5B4 is featuring the rather amazing work of Guy Tilim. I couldn’t be more interested in his images right now. As a die-hard lover/admirer/photographer of the relics of Modernist architecture, Tilim’s images blow my skirt up, way up and over my head. LINK
I’ve been planning a major trip to South America to photograph Brasilia for two years. Seeing the viability, depth, and richness of Tilim’s work makes me want to punish my VISA card and buy some tickets.
Anyone out there up for a trip to a Modernist Utopia?
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There are certain things I’ve learned about myself over the last 3 months that continue to amaze me. Things like how many gin and tonics I can drink. How delightful an ice-cold Cornonita can while driving throught the desert in a Toyota Prius. And…
How much I like French-Speaking boys.
They’re dangerous. Alot like the haircuts and dancemoves in this Vive la Fete video for Touche Pas:
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Finally, the image of the day. I found this amazing building when I first moved here in 2005. Its been graffitied, burned, reviled, spit-upon, and imploded. With any luck, the condo-crazy gay men will NOT be able to knock it over to build yet another generic building.
I cannot think of anything worse than living in a city filled with wifey gay men who are home owners. Someone out there has to offer a smidgen of difference.
Long live the relic.
Implosion Room, 2007
