Wednesday, March 25, 2009
I've moved!
Blogger has served me well, I love it! But it's time to upgrade. You can now find me at: www.catherinespaeth.com.
Friday, March 13, 2009
"Extraordinary Critique": Peter Cowling of Art Connect Interviews Catherine Spaeth
I was quite flattered to be contacted by Peter Cowling for his second interview in this series for Art Connect. His first interview with Ruben Natal-San Miguel, of ARTmostfierce, makes a wonderful story of the role of photography in the post 9/11 years, so be sure to visit Art Connect and read that as well. But for now:
Peter Cowling - loveart (PC)
You first started blogging back in October 2007. What factors prompted you to commit to writing a blog?
Catherine Spaeth (CS)
I was writing for magazines and newspapers, and after studying the history of contemporary art for so long was very frustrated by the limits upon one’s writing in the established forms of print media. Many magazines, for example, are not interested in reviewing group shows. I provide well-curated art tours privately, and in New York there are amazing appearances of things down the street from one another. This is just the way that art is visible here, works of art can be like ideas bouncing off one another, and this is often very interesting. I felt compelled to write in a way that newspapers and magazines do not appreciate, and there was really nothing to stop me from doing it.
PC
It is one of the very best moments, when you are able to think ‘why not, there is nothing stopping me’.
Now, one opportunity I would like to get your thoughts on would be bloggers who want to develop the ability to produce better-written art critique. Before we start, perhaps you could set out your thoughts on the job of an art historian when writing critique?
CS
I think the first job, really, is to respond to what’s immediately before you, and this is why I am drawn to contemporary art to the extent that I am. It is the job of the art historian to be adequate to that. So description, being able to describe an experience of something, is where it starts. And then it begins to get interesting because there are always competing histories in any choice of words. Knowing the history of art criticism is crucial - you do align yourself within a history of words, carry that history forward even as you are re-writing it, bearing upon it with the inflections, corrections of your own time. The work you are doing remains that of description, these words adhere to the work of art at the same time - they are not loose interpretations and you can really tell when they are failing to stick to the object and when they are successful in describing it.
PC
Okay, so it is completely possible to critique contemporary art as an art historian?
CS
From my perspective, it is impossible not to critique contemporary art as an art historian. This is not in the flippant sense that because I am an art historian I think art historically, but because art actually thinks, and there is a history of thought that it is thinking with and inside of. I feel that if you are not attending to that you are missing the best of it.
PC
I tend to think of the writing on your blog as being highly accessible, but that is probably the wrong description. It is not accessible in the sense that any child could read it, but it is in the sense that it makes the art you critique highly accessible. Is that your intention, and do you have any perspective on the wider debate about the need for art to be ‘dumbed-down’ in order to accommodate a wider audience?
CS
I have been a strong advocate for the expression of difficult ideas in arts writing. I am quick to condemn other art’s writers who make jabs at difficult language when it comes off as sheer anti-intellectualism, and it frequently does. So by making a work of art accessible without skirting away from difficult ideas, one is acknowledging the thought of the work, making it visible - not simply glossing over it. In turn, I always write with something at stake, and those stakes are sensed out of the art.
There is no one art world, and so I don’t have much at stake in condemning art or art writing that is accessible. I do, however, take very strong objection to what you are referring to as “dumbing down” when it is relied upon as uncritical fodder for the market. For this reason there is a very important role for the academy and the museum to uphold a place for scholarly research. But I have also seen some atrocious academic writing, produced by galleries especially, that relies upon a history of philosophical thought to dress something up for the market.
PC
One way in which the writing on your blog stands out is that you do not seek to impose a single flow of thought where none should exist. It seems to me that this works because you build your thoughts around the art, rather than trying to shoehorn the art into an a-z style of writing. Is this an accurate reading of your approach? Could you give some perspective on the overall writing style you utilize when writing a blog entry?
CS
Right. I think there is a way to have authority in your writing by successfully delivering the sense of the object and it meanings, and to do this in such a way that your address to others is quite broad and generous. The form of the blog is perfect for this kind of openness in writing. And it really does start from being very open to the art, attending to it. It is not that there aren’t strong declarative statements in my writing, and I do think I am saying what things are. But there is an awful lot of room in what things are.
PC
Another aspect that stands out is your use of references, and analogies. Do you have any tips on how to balance the desire to be inclusive with the need to maintain momentum?
CS
I don’t think there are tools, per se. Inside of your question there might be something about reach, and I do enjoy having a lot of reach. This has to do with that sense of there being a lot of room in things. By this I mean that the meanings generated by a work of art extend into the larger context of the world at large, and it is here as well that you are becoming art historical. The references and analogies that appear are only appearing because the work of art as I understand it has that kind of reach, it really comes from there. As for momentum, you might call it running room. But in order to see it perhaps you need a lot of curiousity, and the self-criticism to be playfully aware of your own tics and habits. Sometimes even references and analogies are really in the way, will slow things down, and you need to bust through them entirely to get back to the work at hand. It’s not about what you already know, there is a sense of being taken up by a history of thought when you write about art.
PC
Art historians are able to build-up an extensive and detailed understanding of their chosen area of expertise. It is tempting to think, then, that art historians are just the sum of their facts, applied to a given situation. I do not agree with that view – not least because I have seen art historians who provide illuminating insight into art they have little prior knowledge about. Is it the case that art historians develop a systematic approach to viewing and thinking about art?
CS
For myself there is no system or method. If I have a system, I suppose it is that I know the history of words and their use with relevance to the objects they’ve described. So for example if a word like “complicity” shows up when I am looking at and thinking about a work of art, I am automatically beholden to that word and its histories, and can’t help writing from the perspective of the question, “What does it mean, when I look at this specific work of art, to use the word complicity as an expression of this time, given its history with regard to art?” There is a great deal of care in that. And so maybe the systematic approach would be in this way of caring.
Read more...
Peter Cowling - loveart (PC)
You first started blogging back in October 2007. What factors prompted you to commit to writing a blog?
Catherine Spaeth (CS)
I was writing for magazines and newspapers, and after studying the history of contemporary art for so long was very frustrated by the limits upon one’s writing in the established forms of print media. Many magazines, for example, are not interested in reviewing group shows. I provide well-curated art tours privately, and in New York there are amazing appearances of things down the street from one another. This is just the way that art is visible here, works of art can be like ideas bouncing off one another, and this is often very interesting. I felt compelled to write in a way that newspapers and magazines do not appreciate, and there was really nothing to stop me from doing it.
PC
It is one of the very best moments, when you are able to think ‘why not, there is nothing stopping me’.
Now, one opportunity I would like to get your thoughts on would be bloggers who want to develop the ability to produce better-written art critique. Before we start, perhaps you could set out your thoughts on the job of an art historian when writing critique?
CS
I think the first job, really, is to respond to what’s immediately before you, and this is why I am drawn to contemporary art to the extent that I am. It is the job of the art historian to be adequate to that. So description, being able to describe an experience of something, is where it starts. And then it begins to get interesting because there are always competing histories in any choice of words. Knowing the history of art criticism is crucial - you do align yourself within a history of words, carry that history forward even as you are re-writing it, bearing upon it with the inflections, corrections of your own time. The work you are doing remains that of description, these words adhere to the work of art at the same time - they are not loose interpretations and you can really tell when they are failing to stick to the object and when they are successful in describing it.
PC
Okay, so it is completely possible to critique contemporary art as an art historian?
CS
From my perspective, it is impossible not to critique contemporary art as an art historian. This is not in the flippant sense that because I am an art historian I think art historically, but because art actually thinks, and there is a history of thought that it is thinking with and inside of. I feel that if you are not attending to that you are missing the best of it.
PC
I tend to think of the writing on your blog as being highly accessible, but that is probably the wrong description. It is not accessible in the sense that any child could read it, but it is in the sense that it makes the art you critique highly accessible. Is that your intention, and do you have any perspective on the wider debate about the need for art to be ‘dumbed-down’ in order to accommodate a wider audience?
CS
I have been a strong advocate for the expression of difficult ideas in arts writing. I am quick to condemn other art’s writers who make jabs at difficult language when it comes off as sheer anti-intellectualism, and it frequently does. So by making a work of art accessible without skirting away from difficult ideas, one is acknowledging the thought of the work, making it visible - not simply glossing over it. In turn, I always write with something at stake, and those stakes are sensed out of the art.
There is no one art world, and so I don’t have much at stake in condemning art or art writing that is accessible. I do, however, take very strong objection to what you are referring to as “dumbing down” when it is relied upon as uncritical fodder for the market. For this reason there is a very important role for the academy and the museum to uphold a place for scholarly research. But I have also seen some atrocious academic writing, produced by galleries especially, that relies upon a history of philosophical thought to dress something up for the market.
PC
One way in which the writing on your blog stands out is that you do not seek to impose a single flow of thought where none should exist. It seems to me that this works because you build your thoughts around the art, rather than trying to shoehorn the art into an a-z style of writing. Is this an accurate reading of your approach? Could you give some perspective on the overall writing style you utilize when writing a blog entry?
CS
Right. I think there is a way to have authority in your writing by successfully delivering the sense of the object and it meanings, and to do this in such a way that your address to others is quite broad and generous. The form of the blog is perfect for this kind of openness in writing. And it really does start from being very open to the art, attending to it. It is not that there aren’t strong declarative statements in my writing, and I do think I am saying what things are. But there is an awful lot of room in what things are.
PC
Another aspect that stands out is your use of references, and analogies. Do you have any tips on how to balance the desire to be inclusive with the need to maintain momentum?
CS
I don’t think there are tools, per se. Inside of your question there might be something about reach, and I do enjoy having a lot of reach. This has to do with that sense of there being a lot of room in things. By this I mean that the meanings generated by a work of art extend into the larger context of the world at large, and it is here as well that you are becoming art historical. The references and analogies that appear are only appearing because the work of art as I understand it has that kind of reach, it really comes from there. As for momentum, you might call it running room. But in order to see it perhaps you need a lot of curiousity, and the self-criticism to be playfully aware of your own tics and habits. Sometimes even references and analogies are really in the way, will slow things down, and you need to bust through them entirely to get back to the work at hand. It’s not about what you already know, there is a sense of being taken up by a history of thought when you write about art.
PC
Art historians are able to build-up an extensive and detailed understanding of their chosen area of expertise. It is tempting to think, then, that art historians are just the sum of their facts, applied to a given situation. I do not agree with that view – not least because I have seen art historians who provide illuminating insight into art they have little prior knowledge about. Is it the case that art historians develop a systematic approach to viewing and thinking about art?
CS
For myself there is no system or method. If I have a system, I suppose it is that I know the history of words and their use with relevance to the objects they’ve described. So for example if a word like “complicity” shows up when I am looking at and thinking about a work of art, I am automatically beholden to that word and its histories, and can’t help writing from the perspective of the question, “What does it mean, when I look at this specific work of art, to use the word complicity as an expression of this time, given its history with regard to art?” There is a great deal of care in that. And so maybe the systematic approach would be in this way of caring.
Read more...
Friday, March 6, 2009
Emptiness is the New Absolute: theanyspacewhatever and Ann Hamilton at the Guggenheim
“A giant wave,” is how Frank Lloyd Wright described the Guggenheim, its spiral sweeping away all corners and walls for an unobstucted vision. In 1959, sheer opticality was the Modernist Absolute and painting was its model. In 1971 Daniel Buren's Peinture/Sculpture sliced clear through the center of this unobstructed vision, but was removed before the public could see its perceived violence to the space of exhibition. However, by the late ‘80s a critique of the hegemony of vision made many an academic career.
The recent exhibition "theanyspacewhatever" was a good attempt to consider what it means to hold an exhibition at the Guggenheim in our time. I can only imagine Pierre Huyghe’s Opening from the photograph: Donning my battery-powered miner’s hat in the darkened space of the museum; gradually adjusting to the disconnect betwen the eyes in my head and the orb of light emitted from the lamp above them; losing this orb in a mass of others bobbing across the distance and chasing across the walls and floor; viewing an object in the light of a gathering upon it. This awareness of one's own vision cut away from the self and in play with others is visible to me in the photograph. Viewers'orbs of light echo the moonless and star-filled sky above - Angela Bulloch's Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus 12.
In the course of the exhibition as a whole, leisure took over as a pleasant meandering, a mood in which aesthetic criteria vanish with a casual yes to everything. The “objects” themselves were so slight and so variously and deliberately placed to the furthest edges of the space at the center that the exibition felt as well-designed as a movie soundtrack, barely noticeable but for the occasional shift in action or place, its parameters finely tuned. Here, Maurizio Cattelan's newstand tucked in a remote service corner and offering "The Wrong Times," loaded with interviews between contemporary artists.
The title of the exhibition , "theanyspacewhatever", carried with it a tone of idle disinterest and a lack of care for place and historicity. Much has been made of the globalizing tendencies of the '90s, and the title is a fine enough expression of this. But it is also a reference to the empty spaces that take the place of - serve the broken - narrative in contemporary film. Empty spaces characterized this exhibition to the extent that whatever objects there were between them - what in a conventional exhibition would have been the art - were felt more as forms of punctuation, discrete events that served to amplify the emptiness of space.
"Theanyspacewhatever" is in fact a Deleuzian term, meaning "a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as a pure locus of the possible."* The apparent opposition between a flippant expression, "any space whatever," and the more utopian dream of the possible, has the feel of a carelessness turning away from effort, without tension or traction. Elsewhere in this exhibition such an opposition feels more like duplicity. This sense is borne by the words ARE WE EVIL, a declarative interrogative emblazoned by Douglas Gordon on the floor of the rotunda, both a chilling statement for our time and the snide commentary of a prankster to those who are in on the joke.
Emptiness has different values - in a strictly Western sense it can mean that something is simply not there, or that it rings hollow. But in Asian philosophy there can be very different senses of emptiness, and different stakes set out in one's relation to it. Here is Rirkrit Tiravanija, interviewed by Mary Jane Jacobs in 2004 about his artistic practice and Buddhism. Jacobs asked if Tiravanija's work is about “trust, allowing a work to connect to people in their own way, suspending judgment?” To which he replied:
I think the idea of judgment is interesting in relation to Buddhistic practice. I always get asked, “What are your expectations?” And I say, “ I don’t have any,” because I don’t predetermine things. And, “Do you feel it’s succesful or not?” and I say, “I don’t measure things that way, in terms of good or bad, or success.” It changes how you look at what happens. And I think that is quite important in terms of living in a Buddhistic way: not to have preconceived structures or to close off possibilities; but it’s not even about being open or closed; it’s just about being blank. In a way, of course, you can receive more if you are empty.**
Tiravanija’s work does circumvent expectations and notions of success by being so out of place in its ordinariness that aesthetic criteria are no longer relevant. There is a politics to this, a critique of a productivist society that refuses to labor and seeks exoneration in the always mediated context of the the everyday. In terms of his own practice, formerly characterized by dishing out Thai curry to gallery and museum visitors around the world, Tiravanija upped the ante at the Guggenheim by having illy caffee do his work for him, a company already known for marketing its product in a gallery setting. From the Illy website:
Illy Gallery is an on-going timed event, a happening that’s adjourned in one venue in some place of the world, and then gets going again in another venue in some other place. These venues are places where visitors and patrons can get to know all the products, forms of expression, passions and people that go to make up the world of illy, places where they can experience and get a rare taste of things beautiful and rich in flavour, and discover art and culture at their best.
Strolling at our leisure through the Guggenheim we were asked to and we did suspend our judgment and seamlessly entered the “world of illy.” In fact Cinema Liberte/Bar Lounge (1996- ) is an ongoing collaboration with Douglas Gordon - on the other side of the partition were clips from censored films. The press release stated that "...this installation invokes concepts of political, social and artistic freedom, " and that "it has been made possible by the generous contribution of illy caffee." On one side of the partition, then, was an already long-playing liberation from censorship, and on the other the seamlessness of a life that is produced for us by a globalizing lifestyle culture of refinement and ease. Something like a contradiction is on display, but there is no real contradiction here, no traction at all. The space of opposition has been evacuated, is empty and blank.
In 1984 T.J. Clark wrote about Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882) as an expression of the blase attitude, a recently emerged public demeanor that he describes as arriving upon the heels of public censorship in late nineteenth century France. Popular cultural expression in the cafe concert halls lost the resistant political inflections inside of double entendre, and scepticism about social relations took its place. Lifestyle as a commodity appeared in this moment, and Clark cites Georg Simmel, who described the blase attitude as a psychic mood reflecting the neutrality of money, how it "hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness in a way which is beyond repair." The blank look of Manet's barmaid and the skewed mirror reflection displacing the viewer leads Clark to write that "Doubts about looking accumulate...all reinforcing one another. What begins as a series of limited questions about relationships in space is likely to end as scepticism about relations in general."***
Tiravanija's work does not function as Manet's Bar to disturb our social relations into a quandary of doubt and scepticism as to appearances. Rather, there is a loose certainty projected upon us, and confidence that any questions about the status of illy caffee as art will be appeased, lulled by social relations. The extended psychic mood that has us drifting from marquis to magazine rack to headphones, etc., has the consistency of our pedestrian nods to others in an increasingly franchised world, and this includes the Guggenheim itself.
The strongest criticism of this kind of work so far has been that of Claire Bishop in her essay "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," published in 2004. Bishop's claim is that a well-functioning democracy relies upon critical antagonism and that Tiravanija's work in particular is lacking critical consciousness, offering instead a placating and false - produced, in fact - sense of community.**** Bishop is also worrying over the loss of contemplation as a valued experience in viewing a work of art, and that social production has taken it place.
Currently on view at the Guggenheim, and in an exhibition that is handed over entirely to contemplation, is Ann Hamilton's human carriage, 2009. The title is very much about how we carry ourselves in the world, and the work itself offers an alternate model of emptiness. As with Tiravanija's Bar Lounge there is in human carriage a visible laborer, tending to the balance of the machinery she operates. At the top of the spiral of the Guggenheim, she hangs from a carrier Buddhist texts that have been sliced apart and rebound as dangling packages of fragments. These are then lowered to a holding place just above the dry pond in the lobby. A small carriage on wheels is then sent off down the spiral of the Guggenheim, suspended from wheels that glide along a rail attached to the balustrade exterior. When it meets the holding place at the end of the spiraling rail the text fragments are released and fall into the dry pond below. All the way down, whenever there is a bit of extra traction, tilt, or movement of air a pair of bells suspended from the carriage will hit each other and ring.
In the week after September 11th, and just prior to her collaborative performance with Meredith Monk, mercy, I interviewed Ann Hamilton. At the time she was worrying over an installation conceived in previous months, involving papers that fell from the ceiling. I wrote in my review of the performance:
...with her worries of opportunism in mind, it is striking that somewhere between our conversation and the performance of mercy, Hamilton and Monk took the risk of concluding with a spellbinding performance of catastrophe as papers falling from above. Swooping, spiraling or floating, their shadows as tangible as the actual, different temporal layers filled the air. It may be that the success of mercy will be measured by how, or even if, the socially and embodied immersion in catastrophe has a power that both exceeds and informs the actual and political specifics of our present time.*****
It took months of standing atop a ladder to achieve the right float of paper on air, and this subsequently became the foundation of corpus at MassMOCA in 2004, where 7 million sheets of paper were dropped from the ceiling of a room the size of a football field. Joe Thompson the director of MassMOCA, described it as "haunting and, in the end, liturgical, but without liturgy."******
Removed by time from the catastrophe of the World Trade Centers and without the same sense of time adrift that one gets from a falling sheet of paper, human carriage is a different sort of utterance, addressing the space of the Guggenheim and the context of the show. It is nearly as though human carriage is passing through the works in the exhibition in acknowledgment and without attachment. These packages of text are an expression of the value of language and translation in Buddhist thought. The effort to balancing in human carriage is similar to the description offered by Dogen, a 13th century Zen master, of the fairness of the Chinese steelyard - here is an image from EBay:
Writes Dogen, "In emptiness [the steelyard] embodies equilibrium; fairness is the great principle of the steelyard. By virtue of this principle of fairness we weigh emptiness and things; whether it be emptiness or form [we weigh it to] meet fairness."******* Emptiness, then, is not an evacuation of the world and of judgment towards an ideal blank, but is in the effortless effort of calibration, with the sense of buoyancy that one feels in the steelyard above. Hanging in the balance, discernment in human action expounds freely as though from the open mouth of a bell. Hamilton's own work, so quickly leaving behind initial worries of opportunism in the political context of catastrophe, has been able to follow the path of its own weight in emptiness. When human carriage descends, the famous void of the Guggenheim is crowded by the faces at its edges, attentive to just this moment that the bells will ring.
By Catherine Spaeth
*Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001, pp. 107-10, as cited in Nancy Spector, "theanyspacewhatever: An Exhibition in Parts," exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation 2008, p. 16.
** in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, c.2009, p. 21.
***T.J. Clark,Painting in Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, Princeton, c.1984, p. 251.
****Calire Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," in October 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51-79.
*****Catherine Spaeth, "mercy: An Interview With Ann Hamilton,: in Dialogue Magazine, November/December, 2001, pp. 49-51
******Annette Grant, "Art: Let 7 Million Sheets of Paper Fall, NYT Sunday April 11th, 2004. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D03EEDA1638F932A25757C0A9629C8B63
*******As translated by Hee-Jin Kim, in "Weighing Emptiness," Dogen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen, SUNY, c. 2007, p. 42.
Image Credits:Daniel Buren's Peinture/Sculpture before it was removed from the "Guggenheim International Exhibition" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1971, photo Robert E. Mates and Paul Katz, c.SRGF, NY; Pierre Huyghe, OPENING, Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008,© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York. Photo by Kristopher McKay; Angela Bulloch, Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus 12, 2008, LEDs (light-emitting diodes), neoprene, animated program, control gear, structural elements, power suppliers, and various cables, Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008, © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York. Photo by David Heald; The Wrong Gallery, The Wrong Times, 2004–06 (reprinted 2008), Newspaper, Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008, Photo: Kristopher McKay, © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York; Douglas Gordon and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cinèma Libertè/Bar Lounge, First realized 1996,Made possible by illy caffè,Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008,© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York. Photo by David Heald; A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (detail), Édouard Manet, 1882, The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London; Ann Hamilton, human carriage, 2009, Installation composed of cloth, wire, bells, books, string, pipe, pulleys, pages, cable, gravity, air, and sound, Courtesy the artist, photos by photographer David Heald, © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Friday, January 2, 2009
The Strategic Museum: George Tooker in Columbus, Ohio and the Value of the National Academy Museum in New York
Long before the controversy and concern about the National Academy Museum, I contacted Melissa Wolfe, a curator at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio and catalog contributor to the show George Tooker, which closes this weekend. What originally inspired me to contact her is that I was struck by the specific value of exhibition and scholarship generated by these smaller museums. In the interview below, the value for New York of the smaller strategic and collaborative museum emerges.
CS: My response to it is maybe personal, but I remember so well at the Columbus Museum of Art Cornice, a painting of a man about to jump off the building, and it was just so curious, among the Sloans and the Bellows'- it’s such an oddball painting.
MW: It’s interesting because we bought that in the ‘50s, and why did we buy that? I mean in the ‘50s that’s an odd purchase for the museum, really. But we always recognized what an interesting painting it was, and we always had it up. Then in 2005 we bought the Schiller Collection in Chicago, he began collecting in the ‘70s artworks that dealt with social issues, and really amassed one of the best collections of Social Realist works from about 1930-1970. We are a collection of collections, more so than a lot of museums. We bought from a collection of the Photo League as well, and our personality has changed massively. When you are a regional museum and you buy 400 works of art it totally changes your personality. So that’s how the other Tooker, Lunch, came in, it was one of the pieces in that collection that was of really strong interest to us...
CS: I remember that Nanette Maciejunes, also of the Columbus Museum of Art, was responsible for bringing Charles Burchfield to life, all of the sudden he showed up as though a brand new discovery and in a sense he was. That’s another example of someone at a regional museum finding this really quirky painting that people in New York were not interested in. There’s the Blakelock show at the Academy too, from the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, side by side with Tooker, and they make a point in their catalog of saying that this one painting in their museum became the support of the entire show. And it is a show full of very quirky, ‘uneven” one would say, paintings.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art when they rehung the 19th century they really brought a lot of stuff up from the basement, re-imagining what the curatorial role was and in recent exhibitions wanting to make more visible the history of the institution as well, showing collector’s room after collector’s room. But what you don’t see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is that while they may decide to have an entire room devoted to Orientalism, or to tourist landscape paintings, you don’t see them landing on one of the curious oddities, such as Cornice, and deciding that they are going to devote an entire show to that. Those kinds of things are just sort of there in the layer of culture.
MW: Well, I think if you are a regional museum, or just a smaller museum, you have a little more leeway to be invested in that one painting that you don’t really get, and in that sense that’s where we can make our mark. Very good curators and strategic museums get that, so with the Tooker, I hung Lunch up immediately. We realize that’s our opening, and the director of the NEA saw it , he was actually here for something else but he saw the George Tooker and fell in love with it, and suggested we nominate him for the National Medal of the Arts, so we did, and he got it the next year, so we initiated that because in Columbus it is large.
The strategic museum is either dwarfed by a larger institution or is in Columbus,Ohio or Lincoln Nebraska. If you’re smart you look at what you’ve got on your walls and you do something with those artists who no one else is doing anything with...We have Hopper, but the Whitney isn’t really loaning out it’s Hoppers to us little museums, so that’s how Nanette got to Burchfield - you can get deep rich exhibitions with works by artists like that, and that’s where you can make your wedge, your mark. Just look at all these Burchfield’s! And you rethink him - the same with George Tooker. The major museums who have him don’t really care if they go. The strategic museum knows that this is good for them, they can get a really rich, deep, multifaceted show.
While George Tooker remains in many ways a New York artist - he was born in Brooklyn in 1920 only moving to Vermont in 1960, studied and taught at the Art Students League, painted Subway, an icon of New York, and his collectors are here - it took the strategic interest of smaller regional museums to make this show happen at the National Academy, and this is a good thing. In turn, the National Academy, with its strong interest in the singular lives of artists and the figurative tradition, is the perfect home for such exhibitions - in this case, one of its own members. Where else in New York could this show have successfully occurred? (The Whitney, which has had Subway in its collection since it was painted?) Finally,to suggest that these paintings have a special meaning for the National Academy, here is a sentence from Melissa Wolfe's catalog essay: "To paint the figure as deliberately and meditatively as does Tooker, is, in a sense, to touch, caress, and care for it."*
*M. Melissa Wolfe, "George Tooker: A Biography, " in George Tooker, Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe, NY: Merrell Publishers Ltd., 2008, p.33.
Image Credits: All works by George Tooker, American, born 1920: Cornice, c. 1949, Egg-yolk tempera on panel, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Derby Fund, from the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970; Lunch, 1964, Egg-yolk tempera on panel, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Derby Fund, from the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970: Children and Spastics, 1946, egg tempera on gesso panel, 24 1/2 x 181/2 in. (62.2 x 47 cm), Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, gift of Mary and Earle Ludgin Collection; Embrace of Peace II, 1988, egg tempera on gesso panel, 18 x 30 in. (45.7 x 76.2 cm), Reis Private Collection.
CS: My response to it is maybe personal, but I remember so well at the Columbus Museum of Art Cornice, a painting of a man about to jump off the building, and it was just so curious, among the Sloans and the Bellows'- it’s such an oddball painting.
MW: It’s interesting because we bought that in the ‘50s, and why did we buy that? I mean in the ‘50s that’s an odd purchase for the museum, really. But we always recognized what an interesting painting it was, and we always had it up. Then in 2005 we bought the Schiller Collection in Chicago, he began collecting in the ‘70s artworks that dealt with social issues, and really amassed one of the best collections of Social Realist works from about 1930-1970. We are a collection of collections, more so than a lot of museums. We bought from a collection of the Photo League as well, and our personality has changed massively. When you are a regional museum and you buy 400 works of art it totally changes your personality. So that’s how the other Tooker, Lunch, came in, it was one of the pieces in that collection that was of really strong interest to us...
CS: I remember that Nanette Maciejunes, also of the Columbus Museum of Art, was responsible for bringing Charles Burchfield to life, all of the sudden he showed up as though a brand new discovery and in a sense he was. That’s another example of someone at a regional museum finding this really quirky painting that people in New York were not interested in. There’s the Blakelock show at the Academy too, from the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, side by side with Tooker, and they make a point in their catalog of saying that this one painting in their museum became the support of the entire show. And it is a show full of very quirky, ‘uneven” one would say, paintings.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art when they rehung the 19th century they really brought a lot of stuff up from the basement, re-imagining what the curatorial role was and in recent exhibitions wanting to make more visible the history of the institution as well, showing collector’s room after collector’s room. But what you don’t see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is that while they may decide to have an entire room devoted to Orientalism, or to tourist landscape paintings, you don’t see them landing on one of the curious oddities, such as Cornice, and deciding that they are going to devote an entire show to that. Those kinds of things are just sort of there in the layer of culture.
MW: Well, I think if you are a regional museum, or just a smaller museum, you have a little more leeway to be invested in that one painting that you don’t really get, and in that sense that’s where we can make our mark. Very good curators and strategic museums get that, so with the Tooker, I hung Lunch up immediately. We realize that’s our opening, and the director of the NEA saw it , he was actually here for something else but he saw the George Tooker and fell in love with it, and suggested we nominate him for the National Medal of the Arts, so we did, and he got it the next year, so we initiated that because in Columbus it is large.
The strategic museum is either dwarfed by a larger institution or is in Columbus,Ohio or Lincoln Nebraska. If you’re smart you look at what you’ve got on your walls and you do something with those artists who no one else is doing anything with...We have Hopper, but the Whitney isn’t really loaning out it’s Hoppers to us little museums, so that’s how Nanette got to Burchfield - you can get deep rich exhibitions with works by artists like that, and that’s where you can make your wedge, your mark. Just look at all these Burchfield’s! And you rethink him - the same with George Tooker. The major museums who have him don’t really care if they go. The strategic museum knows that this is good for them, they can get a really rich, deep, multifaceted show.
While George Tooker remains in many ways a New York artist - he was born in Brooklyn in 1920 only moving to Vermont in 1960, studied and taught at the Art Students League, painted Subway, an icon of New York, and his collectors are here - it took the strategic interest of smaller regional museums to make this show happen at the National Academy, and this is a good thing. In turn, the National Academy, with its strong interest in the singular lives of artists and the figurative tradition, is the perfect home for such exhibitions - in this case, one of its own members. Where else in New York could this show have successfully occurred? (The Whitney, which has had Subway in its collection since it was painted?) Finally,to suggest that these paintings have a special meaning for the National Academy, here is a sentence from Melissa Wolfe's catalog essay: "To paint the figure as deliberately and meditatively as does Tooker, is, in a sense, to touch, caress, and care for it."*
*M. Melissa Wolfe, "George Tooker: A Biography, " in George Tooker, Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe, NY: Merrell Publishers Ltd., 2008, p.33.
Image Credits: All works by George Tooker, American, born 1920: Cornice, c. 1949, Egg-yolk tempera on panel, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Derby Fund, from the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970; Lunch, 1964, Egg-yolk tempera on panel, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Derby Fund, from the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970: Children and Spastics, 1946, egg tempera on gesso panel, 24 1/2 x 181/2 in. (62.2 x 47 cm), Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, gift of Mary and Earle Ludgin Collection; Embrace of Peace II, 1988, egg tempera on gesso panel, 18 x 30 in. (45.7 x 76.2 cm), Reis Private Collection.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Untitled (Vicarious) at Gagosian and Michael Fried: Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before
Ending today at Gagosian is an exhibition exploring the relationship between sculpture and photography. While the photographers here have created sculptural tableaux in order to photograph them, “Untitled (Vicarious): Photographing the Constructed Object” is not about the photographing of sculpture, per se, but in how photography “dematerializes the constructed object.”
Automatically when I read the word ‘”dematerializes” I see a history of conceptual and performance art that photography has carried along since the late ‘60s, and all the burdens of the photograph as a document that go along with it. But this was not the most striking thing for me in this exhibition - more compelling was that sculptural practices in contemporary photography support an absenting of the figure. In this self-portrait by Cindy Sherman, the dramatically intended detail of a gleaming drop of sex takes over the pictorial field to the extent that an exposed vagina is mere background for the grimace of the figure pinned before it. Carter Mull’s photographs of what appear to be salt crystals, jewels, hair, blood and a halloween mask further exaggerate the thematic disappearance of the figure as a scene of a crime.
The absenting of the figure effectively sidesteps a quite different trajectory in the history of contemporary photography, which understands the camera as a technology that frames and captures what is seen. In this trajectory the camera is a prosthetic of vision extending out into the world as a social construct., and the world’s pictures can only offer themselves to view as socially constructed in turn. From here an emphasis has been placed upon the relations between the photographer and her subject, as in ICP’s first triennial in 2003, “Strangers,” and the current exhibition at the Bronx Museum, “Street Art/StreetLife.”
In a shift away from such a reading of the social technology of vision terms for understanding photography are re-orienting towards more traditional interests in medium-specificities, no less social but a different address entirely. I am also reading Michael Fried’s “Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before,” and what he refers to as “new art photography” really begins when it takes its full place upon the wall much in the same manner as painting, and now carries the history of painting along with it.
Sculpture has always lent itself well to photography, notably in the case of Constantin Brancusi. Drawn to balanced instabilities, Brancusi explored qualities of surface and light that could project the substance of his compositions. In “Untitled (Vicarious)” David Smith and Moholy-Nagy are the forebears of a sculptural interest in photography. In Untitled (Tableau), 1933, David Smith violently scratches an eye into the surface of the photograph. Radiating lines expose the pulp beneath the gloss of photography so that the surface is looking back, and in doing so makes the picture.
Contrary to Smith’s attention to the surface, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is drawn to photography for its transparency upon the world. In the 2006 exhibition of Albers and Moholy-Nagy at the Whitney a carousel of Kodak slides whirred and clicked, the projected images only visble for the light passing through surfaces of film. His early color photographs were transparencies, as printing didn’t live up to his standards (it wasn’t until 1973-4 that Eggleston was confident to leave transparencies for the dye-transfer print.) It was when working on constructions of glass and metal that transparency first became for him the essence of a technological modernism. Moholy Nagy believed that modernist transparency could dematerialize sculpture into the motions of shadow and light, ultimately becoming glass architecture.
According to Fried, this sense of photography as ultimately a medium of transparency is what characterizes new art photography - apart from being on the wall as though painting, it has no real interest in the picture plane . Where tenderness (in the sense of both the surface’s raw vulnerability and the care a painter has in tending to this) might have existed for David Smith, in new art photography the surface of the photograph is taken for granted as a transparent screen, “put out of play as a bearer of pictorial meaning.” It is Thomas Demand who best plays this out. Demand describes his own practice as furthered along by what he refers to as the “dehistoricizing effect” of digital media. He is most well known for images of of vacant crime scenes culled from photo agencies - the banality of Jeffrey Dahmer’s vacant hallway, for example, seems to bear no relation at all to the horror of its context. It is a way of screening the viewer’s curiousity out of the scene, without instantiating the pictorial surface itself as an object that faces. Even what is depicted is a paper illusion.
Fried rejects the notion that Demand's photograph has anything to do with the fact that he was trained as a sculptor. It is the controlled intention behind each detail that makes the difference for him, and he refers to Baudelaire, who described the difference between sculpture and painting in 1846:
Demand's KFC, above, is "there for us" behind the transparent screen of photography, but it is in the absolute control of the artist. Further, the cuts that are visible do not make of this a seamless entry into a world, but a scene cut away from our own, riven throughout by the artist's intent.
Like sculpture, photography is known for being prone to the vagaries of detail, and is valued for this. Based on my experience there is no question that what distinguishes a still photograph from film is that there is always that one detail that will sit with you in a way that it can't in film, and I'm convinced that drawing attention to this is why the archivist-photographer Allan Sekula will show a series of slides via carousel. At issue is the value that one gives to what Roland Barthes referred to as the punctum, an absorbing detail unplanned by the artist and entirely personal to the viewer. That the character of such details is an issue for contemporary photographers is clear in the work of Anne Hardy, who in the photograph above depicts a space completely handed over to an obsessive cataloguing with its own private logic, of no sense to us but doing its best to saturate the room with intention in every detail.
Fried offers another example of how photography excludes the viewer in Sugimoto's Seascapes, an installation of which is currently on view at Gagosian's 21st St. location. In "Untitled (Vicarious)" Colors of Shadow: 1015, 2004, makes a degree of autism visible with regard to Fried's understanding of Sugimoto's work. Sugimoto rented an apartment in Japan, and had expert plasterers sand and polish down the walls, so that every detail has been smoothed out. Only the wooden floor gives away the fact that these fine grays have been photographed with color film. Exhibited with this series of photographs at Sonnabend in 2006 was a sculpture by Robert Morris, four grey cubes from the center of which one could stand - the furthermost sides of these cubes were at such an angle that you were effectively at the center of a truncated pyramid, and felt very positioned by it. That the gallery saw such resonance between Sugimoto's photographs and a minimalist sculpture is not simply because of abstract minimalist forms they share. In "Untitled (Vicarious)" I was struck by Sugimoto's framing. While so much care has been given to sanding these walls down in order to remove the arbitrary effects of light, the print itself has been laid over a bumpy surface, capturing a light not permitted by the depicted surface. Further, Sugimoto very intentionally uses a glass that reflects the lighting of the gallery in green. Not only is the artist drawing attention to the surface in relation to the space outside of it, but Sugimoto also draws attention to the entire space of the gallery from the beholder's point of view as reflected by the framing glass. For a photographer who describes his work as a sculptural practice, a matter of chiseling space, such invitation to the arbitrariness of light in our own space and the denial of it in the photographed image is crucial to extending and putting to the test the ontological claims of medium-specificity that Fried holds dear.
By Catherine Spaeth
* Oeuvres Completes, paris, 1961, pp. 943-4, as quoted in Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, Yale, c. 2000, p. 62-63.
Image Credits: Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1992, © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York;Carter Mull, Sumere...Sumptuary, 2004,© Carter Mull. Courtesy of the artist and Rivington Arms; David Smith, Untitled (Tableau) 1933, © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,Untitled, 1940's, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery; Thomas Demand, KFC, 2007, Courtesy of Gagosian; Anne Hardy, Untitled VI, 2005, Courtesy of Gagsosian Gallery; Hiroshi Sugimoto, Colors of Shadow 1015, 2004, “© Hiroshi Sugimoto. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”; Honore Daumier, Salon of 1857, "Sad Countenance of sculpture in the midst of painting."
Automatically when I read the word ‘”dematerializes” I see a history of conceptual and performance art that photography has carried along since the late ‘60s, and all the burdens of the photograph as a document that go along with it. But this was not the most striking thing for me in this exhibition - more compelling was that sculptural practices in contemporary photography support an absenting of the figure. In this self-portrait by Cindy Sherman, the dramatically intended detail of a gleaming drop of sex takes over the pictorial field to the extent that an exposed vagina is mere background for the grimace of the figure pinned before it. Carter Mull’s photographs of what appear to be salt crystals, jewels, hair, blood and a halloween mask further exaggerate the thematic disappearance of the figure as a scene of a crime.
The absenting of the figure effectively sidesteps a quite different trajectory in the history of contemporary photography, which understands the camera as a technology that frames and captures what is seen. In this trajectory the camera is a prosthetic of vision extending out into the world as a social construct., and the world’s pictures can only offer themselves to view as socially constructed in turn. From here an emphasis has been placed upon the relations between the photographer and her subject, as in ICP’s first triennial in 2003, “Strangers,” and the current exhibition at the Bronx Museum, “Street Art/StreetLife.”
In a shift away from such a reading of the social technology of vision terms for understanding photography are re-orienting towards more traditional interests in medium-specificities, no less social but a different address entirely. I am also reading Michael Fried’s “Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before,” and what he refers to as “new art photography” really begins when it takes its full place upon the wall much in the same manner as painting, and now carries the history of painting along with it.
Sculpture has always lent itself well to photography, notably in the case of Constantin Brancusi. Drawn to balanced instabilities, Brancusi explored qualities of surface and light that could project the substance of his compositions. In “Untitled (Vicarious)” David Smith and Moholy-Nagy are the forebears of a sculptural interest in photography. In Untitled (Tableau), 1933, David Smith violently scratches an eye into the surface of the photograph. Radiating lines expose the pulp beneath the gloss of photography so that the surface is looking back, and in doing so makes the picture.
Contrary to Smith’s attention to the surface, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is drawn to photography for its transparency upon the world. In the 2006 exhibition of Albers and Moholy-Nagy at the Whitney a carousel of Kodak slides whirred and clicked, the projected images only visble for the light passing through surfaces of film. His early color photographs were transparencies, as printing didn’t live up to his standards (it wasn’t until 1973-4 that Eggleston was confident to leave transparencies for the dye-transfer print.) It was when working on constructions of glass and metal that transparency first became for him the essence of a technological modernism. Moholy Nagy believed that modernist transparency could dematerialize sculpture into the motions of shadow and light, ultimately becoming glass architecture.
According to Fried, this sense of photography as ultimately a medium of transparency is what characterizes new art photography - apart from being on the wall as though painting, it has no real interest in the picture plane . Where tenderness (in the sense of both the surface’s raw vulnerability and the care a painter has in tending to this) might have existed for David Smith, in new art photography the surface of the photograph is taken for granted as a transparent screen, “put out of play as a bearer of pictorial meaning.” It is Thomas Demand who best plays this out. Demand describes his own practice as furthered along by what he refers to as the “dehistoricizing effect” of digital media. He is most well known for images of of vacant crime scenes culled from photo agencies - the banality of Jeffrey Dahmer’s vacant hallway, for example, seems to bear no relation at all to the horror of its context. It is a way of screening the viewer’s curiousity out of the scene, without instantiating the pictorial surface itself as an object that faces. Even what is depicted is a paper illusion.
Fried rejects the notion that Demand's photograph has anything to do with the fact that he was trained as a sculptor. It is the controlled intention behind each detail that makes the difference for him, and he refers to Baudelaire, who described the difference between sculpture and painting in 1846:
Sculpture has several drawbacks that are a necessary consequence of its means. brutal and positive like nature, it is at the same time vague and eludes one's grasp, because it presents too many faces at once. It is in vain that the sculptor strives to put himself at the service of a unique point of view; the spectator, who revolves around the figure, can choose a hundred different points of view, except the right one, and it often happens, which is humiliating for the artist, that a chance illumination, an effect of lamplight, reveals a beauty which is not the one he had thought of. A painting is only what he wants it to be; there is no other way of looking at it other than in its own light. Painting has only one point of view; it is exclusive and despotic: and so the expression a painter can command is much stronger.*
Demand's KFC, above, is "there for us" behind the transparent screen of photography, but it is in the absolute control of the artist. Further, the cuts that are visible do not make of this a seamless entry into a world, but a scene cut away from our own, riven throughout by the artist's intent.
Like sculpture, photography is known for being prone to the vagaries of detail, and is valued for this. Based on my experience there is no question that what distinguishes a still photograph from film is that there is always that one detail that will sit with you in a way that it can't in film, and I'm convinced that drawing attention to this is why the archivist-photographer Allan Sekula will show a series of slides via carousel. At issue is the value that one gives to what Roland Barthes referred to as the punctum, an absorbing detail unplanned by the artist and entirely personal to the viewer. That the character of such details is an issue for contemporary photographers is clear in the work of Anne Hardy, who in the photograph above depicts a space completely handed over to an obsessive cataloguing with its own private logic, of no sense to us but doing its best to saturate the room with intention in every detail.
Fried offers another example of how photography excludes the viewer in Sugimoto's Seascapes, an installation of which is currently on view at Gagosian's 21st St. location. In "Untitled (Vicarious)" Colors of Shadow: 1015, 2004, makes a degree of autism visible with regard to Fried's understanding of Sugimoto's work. Sugimoto rented an apartment in Japan, and had expert plasterers sand and polish down the walls, so that every detail has been smoothed out. Only the wooden floor gives away the fact that these fine grays have been photographed with color film. Exhibited with this series of photographs at Sonnabend in 2006 was a sculpture by Robert Morris, four grey cubes from the center of which one could stand - the furthermost sides of these cubes were at such an angle that you were effectively at the center of a truncated pyramid, and felt very positioned by it. That the gallery saw such resonance between Sugimoto's photographs and a minimalist sculpture is not simply because of abstract minimalist forms they share. In "Untitled (Vicarious)" I was struck by Sugimoto's framing. While so much care has been given to sanding these walls down in order to remove the arbitrary effects of light, the print itself has been laid over a bumpy surface, capturing a light not permitted by the depicted surface. Further, Sugimoto very intentionally uses a glass that reflects the lighting of the gallery in green. Not only is the artist drawing attention to the surface in relation to the space outside of it, but Sugimoto also draws attention to the entire space of the gallery from the beholder's point of view as reflected by the framing glass. For a photographer who describes his work as a sculptural practice, a matter of chiseling space, such invitation to the arbitrariness of light in our own space and the denial of it in the photographed image is crucial to extending and putting to the test the ontological claims of medium-specificity that Fried holds dear.
By Catherine Spaeth
* Oeuvres Completes, paris, 1961, pp. 943-4, as quoted in Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, Yale, c. 2000, p. 62-63.
Image Credits: Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1992, © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York;Carter Mull, Sumere...Sumptuary, 2004,© Carter Mull. Courtesy of the artist and Rivington Arms; David Smith, Untitled (Tableau) 1933, © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,Untitled, 1940's, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery; Thomas Demand, KFC, 2007, Courtesy of Gagosian; Anne Hardy, Untitled VI, 2005, Courtesy of Gagsosian Gallery; Hiroshi Sugimoto, Colors of Shadow 1015, 2004, “© Hiroshi Sugimoto. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”; Honore Daumier, Salon of 1857, "Sad Countenance of sculpture in the midst of painting."
Friday, November 21, 2008
"Monitor": An Interview With Noah Fischer
This interview with Noah Fischer occurred at his gallery exhibit, “Monitor,” at Claire Oliver on November 12th. Interesting to me was how an artist who is accustomed to larger installation-based work turned to the discrete object in a gallery context.
What follows is our conversation, lengthy but focused. So get that cup of tea, and enjoy!
CS: So are these like altars in a way for you? The scale of them is very much like an altar.
NF: Sure, I didn't think of that but yeah, sure they are, like in Buddhism how idolatrous is an altar anyway? How much are you really bound to that statue? You can put a basketball on the altar and it can still be serious about the world.
CS: Yeah, it's attending to it, it's a matter of intending.
NF: Exactly, it's attending, it's a commitment to things.
CS: You used that word commitment earlier and in theory the word comes from Sartre's reaction to the nouveau realiste writers in France. It was literature he was writing about, a politically engaged kind of writing, which is a very sort of specific argument to make about what commitment is.
NF: Yeah, I think Adorno wrote about commitment in the context of the political in an artwork, but I wasn't actually thinking that way when I use the word, words are, words can be a little full of baggage, and I'm interested in that, I like to engage with the different meanings when they come up, but I was thinking of emptying that word to mean a constant practice, constant engagement. In that sense it's more like not idealizing or allowing objects to become ideological but also getting personal with them. This is my life, my studio work, and in that sense the objects are more in the tradition of Morandi in the sense of objects that speak to a constant commitment to being an artist and to making work, and the physical nature of that, the commitment to having an artistic life. This is one reason the hand appears persistently in the work.
CS: I used to have a fascination with the word conviction, I was so fascinated by this word because it is so double-sided, such a personal thing but it also means the state and the law. For a long time, like you're using the word commitment, I was using the word conviction, it was something I thought I could really hold on to. Then I discovered what was -even meaningful and powerful don't fall into line here - but, beyond conviction, something being beyond conviction is what supports the energy that I put into things.
NF: Those are really...commitment, conviction are good words to think about. I think that Adorno writes about works of art as a crossing line between supporting a cause and just being art. It's about watching out that your art, that it doesn't support the wrong cause, to have a certain consciousness of politics in the work. With “Monitor,” it's simple, it's a problematic object, in fact it's hardly an object at all because we don't notice it, we have a very strange relationship with it...
CS: Yeah, I sleep with my Apple! There was an essay that Lacan wrote, and I'm not a big Lacan reader, and this was written during the Vietnam war, so there's always a lot of anti-American sentiment, but it's a great description of the American ego and the automobile, about how the American is attached to this thing as a prosthetic extension of themselves, and looking around the world from their little automobile ego. My Apple feels like an extreme relationship to an object, I've never had one like that before. It can have me spellbound for a day straight. And the politics of the iPod, there's been a lot of really good writing about the danger of such commodities.
NF: Oh yeah, there is a danger, and it's why I got into Apple design specifically because the Apple campaign has managed to insinuate itself deeply into the lives of people who wouldn't consider themselves to be materialistic.
CS: Oh, it's kind of uncool now not to have an iPod.
NF: That's really important, that's the thing that's going on that we don't know, give it ten or fifteen years it's going to be whole different thing. Talking about Obama and how he won, by the internet, by the interface, it's an Apple generation thing, he's like an Apple, he's not PC, he's Mac, and it's based on an Apple type of interface, and now that he's President he's keeping his web site up, I don't know if you've noticed...
CS: I've been getting email after the election letting me know that we're all still a part of it, and they're keeping their members aware. I think the last email I got was to purchase t-shirts. That's the first time a presidency has had that kind of connection, and a public.
NF: Well, y'know Facebook, the Obama site is basically working like Facebook now, you can have your own - I have my own page on the Obama web site.
CS: Yeah, me too, but I haven't really done anything with it. It's more than Facebook, though it's a blog.
NF: Yeah, it's the US President, blogging, right? It's a huge resource, that's just sitting there, it's like the fireside chats with FDR on the radio, that era where this squarish object called a radio became the manifest president for a moment. That was a technological era where this one piece of progress embodied the President.
CS: You had to be in a space probably with more people than your one lone self, in a room, listening to sound, and the thing about this is that the president can make his speeches at any place and any time of day, and it is something you do by yourself.
NF: And it's not only that you're by yourself, it's stepping outside of the physical reality and into a world where there's many many more options going on and that you can get lost in, and you meet other people, but you're meeting them in this cyberspace.
CS: And they are real relationships, that will never become in real space. So the other thing I was interested in when I was looking at these objects, I guess I'll call it an "issue" of facingness. Much of the glow of the Apple computer is in that facingness. I was noticing that of course in the wall pieces you have to do that, but in every single one of these, this one is revolving, that one is awry, this I call the ass monitor...
NF: That's a great name for it, I would have called it ass monitor if I'd thought about it.
CS: And here the monitor is a little too high for the face to face thing to happen...these are in a way social objects differently in their facingness than these. So obviously, there is a space issue, these are on the wall, but still there's something abut them belonging to a category of space differently than the things that are in the room and the avoidance of facingness that occurs in these more everyday objects.
NF: Well, that's a very good point, obviously I knew that these wall pieces were doing their own thing aside from the furniture studies. It's a good point you bring up about facingness.
CS: It felt insistent, but you weren't thinking about it as you were doing it?
NF: Maybe unconsciously insistent, y'know. This work is really, the ideas don't come first, put it that way, it's just art work.
CS: Studio.
NF: It's just studio, it's developed in the studio, there's a lot of ideas behind it, I'm always researching, but I have to let go of that stuff when I'm making the work, instead of pointing things in a certain direction.
CS: Well, we are being asked to attend to the objects, and in attending to them I found this thing about facingness.
NF: It's a good point and its true that even this is hung high. Well there's two things going on with it. Everything is about interface, that's why the show is called "Monitors". It's kind of funny, y'know, interface, two faces, your own face facing the face of the thing.
CS: Also face-to-face meetings.
NF: Right, and if the computer is facing away from you there is nothing happening there.
CS: You still try to go in there.
NF: In a way there's a space in the show I was working with, and I knew about it but you put it in a very good way, and the idea is that...These things here are sort of just barely sculptural, there's not too much going on really, it's like a stand-in, almost, for what's going on here, you've got the light, you've got the thing...
CS: But the light does a lot, you've got this empty casing, and I was saying something earlier about hollowness.
NF: It's like Donald Judd, y'know, it’s a sublime space in there y'know, and a sublime shadow very crisp, adding a new dimension to it.
CS: The word hollowness is something that, I teach the history of contemporary sculpture at Purchase and we were reading Fried's essay last night and he uses the word hollowness as a very strong condemnation of Minimalism, something can ring hollow, apart from being descriptive, and so there is something about the interfacing that is occurring in this really quirky place in the history of human consciousness let's say, where this kind of facingness is a subjectivity that's real, but it's constructed and fake and not there.
NF: Right, a whole election happened in this space, so how can you argue that's not real. At the same time it's so new, in a historical sense, it's so new, nobody gets it, nobody knows where its going and what it means, nobody can make an ethical, final argument about whether its a good thing or a bad thing in that sense, the jury is out.
CS: One of my favorite zen things is the Sandokai, form and emptiness, the absolute and the relative, and so there is the sense of something that is empty and hollow being where the world is, where it's happening.
NF: Well, I like that you can use hollowness and emptiness and accept them both in a way, emptiness is good.
CS: In relation to a history of sculpture hollowness is useful as a way to get to emptiness, which is what you started with.
NF: Yeah, it's interesting to think about those words and the history of those words, the thing is that in this work I don't think there's a strong moralistic condemnation of this type of interface, of the hollowness of a sublime digital age for example, because there's a warmth, this is a beautiful lantern, I chose to use the incandescent bulb, a yellowish glow.
So this is talking about re-presenting, but not much changed. These sculptures here, all in a different way, I was chasing after a space, some kind of interaction, in some sense of the violence of that...
CS: Right. Smashing the monitor.
NF: It makes me think of the rubbish piles where the computer monitors are processed, in China for example, so just looking at them even in their pre-junk manifestation as nasty; the toxic part of them, the low kind of, in a way just putting your ass on them, the low chakra aspect, the bodily shit reality.
CS: And sitting on glass and putting yourself at risk in some way.
NF: A little uncomfortable and wanting to bust through, this is not accepting that reality and wanting to bust through it and pop the concept, really,
CS: Wait the violence thing, I want to stop there for a second, because, um, uh, the violence, as you descibed was located in the act of busting these out of their frame and putting them in the chair, but I think of them as violent in the sense that on the one hand these monitors are opaque, they're shut off, and they're in some cold but sexual relationship to the body, perhaps, on the other hand you can't decode them as monitors, so there's a thing about surveillance as well, so there is a sort of violence about opacity and surveillance that...? I'm playing with this word violence and finding where it is.
NF: Yeah, I kind of threw that out there. I think that there's a violence in objects, period, and it kind of has to do with the fact that violence of the body has its symptoms, it's always breaking down, it's not a story with a happy ending, put it that way. Things ending.
CS: So is planned obsolescence a delusional relationship to death?
NF: Yeah, you could say that, I mean sure,because the idea of continuous new generations of technology, you're never watching your object slip all the way into death – you're supposed to replace your cell phone constantly... although I do let mine go all the way to their slow death.
To go back to the surveillance thing you brought up as in "Monitor" – to most people that word right away means surveillance, but I avoided making that obvious show.
CS: So you wanted to return it to this obdurate object...the monitor, without carrying the burdens of surveillance technologies.
NF: I made a monitor for a previous show that had a big eye on it, so it was really directed surveillance, mid-century, '80s surveillance, the problem with that is that it gets very black and white, you're pointing a finger and saying "big brother is doing this to us, it's watching us" and no, actually we're watching ourselves, you can't really point the finger at surveillance. I'm more interested in saying "nobody's watching, we have to watch ourselves interacting with the world and ourselves creating strange and destructive relationships. So when I use the word "monitor", it means monitoring consumption, we are definitely consumers.
CS: How does the use of the word monitor show up in the history of television, do you know, I mean it's curious that this object would be called a monitor.
NF: I have to humbly say that I didn't particularly do research of the development of the word.
CS: It's interesting, the history of this word, I think its right to pull it way from surveillance technologies and give it back to its original meaning, which is more about attending to things, registering things, right, when you monitor your own behavior, labeling.
NF: Right, as you say labeling, monitoring your thought process as it arises in relation to this object. That’s how I use the word to guide the show, actually.
CS: [looking at the map installation on the wall] This really interested me a lot, can you tell me about this specific piece of furniture?
NF: These are things that I grabbed off the internet mixed with snapshots I took. This one was, like, it was a futurist, actually it was contemporary they just labeled it as a futuristic, domestic computer environment.
CS: And this an Apple..
NF: Yeah, that's an Apple, I was interested in it because it's a strong Mac aesthetic.
CS: It also looks like a dentist's chair...
NF: Yeah, it also has that, it's this complete interface with the body...
CS: A pod...
CS: [pointing to another image] This is the console.
NF: This is the entertainment console, true, in the '60s, the moment in the past where you accept it as a sculptural object in your environment, y'know, it's kind of like the sputnik everybody used to have.
CS: Wait. People used to have a sputnik?
NF: Yeah, people used to have sputnik-like sculptures in their environments, like in the '50s, my grandparents did I think.
CS: The sputnik was a spaceship or something, what was the sputnik?
NF: It was a satellite, a completely beautiful polished orb with just antenna legs coming out of it.
CS: I totally remember sculptures and design.
NF: Yeah, because there was such a heightening of technology at this time, the late 1950's, and 1960's, because of space travel and stuff, people were really accepting of sculptures, quasi-sicence-art-objects into their space where the function in question could be opened up a little bit because there was such an elation over this strange object up in outer space, so it was almost religious, an object...
CS: connected to us all...
NF: So people wanted one in their house! That's the context that this comes out of.
CS: Well they're so different, that one is in relation to the body in a way that that one is not, the connection to the body here are the dials, that's what was going on then, dials...
(It's rarely mentioned, but this 1964 Oldenberg, "Soft Switiches," was an example of what Donald Judd referred to in his own writing as a "specific object." People usually only think of Judd's Minimalism.)
NF: This piece, the desk piece which is called "Information Platform" was picking up from my thoughts about furniture and interface, short-circuiting any possible function while at the same time presenting function. You put your keypad on this wooden keypad, so it's already like a double obsolete thing, and this is the light source and it slides... I was thinking it's like a typewriter- another obsolete object that became part of today’s computer.
CS: So you want these really to be in this weird ambivalent space, not like when Donald Judd started making furniture straightforwardly as furniture, alongside of his sculpture. But these are, as you were talking about it, also intended to be used as furniture but they're not really that straightforward as furniture, so there's this kind of weird space that wasn't available to Donald Judd but that is available to you.
NF: Yeah, I would be happy if someone were to use this as furniture for sure, all of this stuff, I could imagine it not being used but i'd much prefer, the best thing somebody could do is use this computer table. Whoever buys it is going to have the newest computer monitor for sure , but then it will be beside this old micro-film reader I found on the street, making the constant nagging comparison.
CS: Helluva name, “Eyecom."
NF: Yeah, “Eyecom," like iPhone or iMac. It's function is light, and a double function is this drawer where you can keep your documents.
CS: The secret spot.
NF: There's layers of obsolescence. I'd be interested in interviewing someone who has had this piece in their life for a few years and asking them, what's your experience working on this station? I think this is a pretty good station to use. There is a strong invitation for people to use it and for people to bring it to their lives because this show is about consciousness in people's lives so I think these objects, work better at home in use, than in a gallery. I'd like to see people live with this obscelete laptop thing here...to use it somehow...
CS: as light...
NF: As art, as light, that's the zen part thing.
CS: Okay, that's that's well, here's the thing, when Turrell and Flavin and all of those things started coming out there was really harsh criticism against all those light people and it was regarded as inviting this kind, well with Turrell this kind of piety - in '68, in the '70s people were very concerned about this use of light in sculpture because the dialogue of the time was about “the real", the “specific object" and when you introduce light into it all of the sudden you get, y'know there's that book Downcast Eyes by Martin Jay, a history of philosophy that is about privileging the eye, enlightenment, as a real sort of problem, a tradition, I'm glad that you're mentioning it, it's also a problem for zen discourse, 'enlightenment,'in terms of relating with a public, when people talk of enlightenment it's often regarded as this purity of achievement. So there's something about light, you can talk about this in an interesting way, in a way that is importantly there in your work.
NF: Of course I was thinking about that, yeah, sure, James Turrell, I was thinking of Flavin, so the question is about sublime light, it stands for enlightenment, also that type of sublime is transcendence of the material world, an optical transcendence of materiality, I've had the experience with James Turrell where I was caught in a space...
CS: Suspended.
NF: Suspended, not sure what I was looking at.
CS: I get something different from Flavin, a colder technology.
NF: Flavin's been kinda overrun by the last decades of the way lighting works now- the way we see it in malls sometimes looks like Flavin.
CS: They don't even make those bulbs any more, it's a real problem for anyone who owns one, they can't turn it on anymore! Obsolete.
NF: I'm not transported by Flavin very much but I saw a Turrell that, I was suspended and it's a strong feeling, I can see that it's almost like a religious experience, a little cheesy...
CS: That was in this criticism that I remembered, and it was specifically in relation to, and this is important, the discourse it was competing with at the time was the concrete, a big word in the Minimalist crowd, the real was a big word, object, objecthood all those words were about being invested in the materiality of our everyday space, something that remained in an art context but was nonetheless an address to an actually lived daily experience. So to bring light, y'know, this is like a hauling it back, retrieving it from the piety let's say of someone like James Turrell, only there's still that facing thing that's going on that can be really powerful.
NF: In general these things don't have one meaning, they're sort of cross-referencing meanings [points to the hole behind the monitor and in the back where the light appears from]
CS: That's a nice touch. It's fake!
NF: I always work with demystification, In a way, in all my earlier work, all the drama, all the cinematic moments are demystified, because you can see, your watching the illusion at the same time as you're watching the machines that create it, so it's kind of like this Plato's cave thing, so it's important that there's immediate demystification of what's going on.
CS: But it's not immediate, you have to be drawn.
NF: But you can figure it out. That's important, but essentially you do get this kind of sublime light. In one sense it's a little sublime as opposed to a big sublime, like a mini-sublime.
CS: It's like an incidental sublime. And you lose it, too, you sort of be in it and then have it vanish.
NF: But the sublime is very important at the same time because that's essentially what the thing is presenting to you is a sublime experience, that's what they have to offer, and if you put the lights down in the gallery or room you'd be even more sucked into the light. So they're sort of offering you this sublime experience that you can demystify on the next take. And its going right back to the artists of the '60s and '70s because I think that this is a strong tradition coming very directly from the work of Donald Judd and Flavin and James Turrell going into the Mac design. And the people who invented Mac knew very well about that type of art. What I think about art is that people think it's a canon that stays in the art world but its really not, the strongest part of what was developed in the '60s ended up having nothing to do with the art world, maybe the so-called art world went on a totally different track- almost more of an economic development thing- the art is the fairs and market today , not the discourse that the Turells and Judds had back then...
CS: As we were talking a word was niggling at the back of my head, we were talking earlier about Fried and Minimalism and all that and a word that was really important and that he didn't find in those sculptures was absorption, and he found that in the history of painting, Diderot's criticism and Chardin and painters like that, and the distinction, he was trying to make sense of this word theatricality by returning to painting and talking about absorption. Which is a really a good word...
NF: I like your theme of coming to different words, it's great, so tell me about absorption.
CS: People like to take him down but I like him a lot, and I don't want to turn him into some kind of "zen" guy because he isn't, but he infamously ends his essay with the statement that "presentness is grace,"and theatricality is presence. Absorption, it turns out, is going to be presentness. And so he talks about paintings in which pictures are not...there's a way of painting a mass of figures as part of a scene where they're performing for you and they're all very actively engaged with each other but the presentation is theatrical precisely because they're not really acknowledging you at all but they're very aware of you being there. Sometimes there were will one pair of eyes, y'know, a stand-in gaze. And you can think of it as some kinds of people, we were talking earlier about how you didn't want this to be overdetermined by ethical moral concerns. but this can be a description of people as well, that theatricality extorts complicity from people. Fried doesn't describe it this way, but I do because this is how people can be. You can be at a party, I've been this person at times, we all have...someone will walk into a room and they're kind of ignoring everybody but in a very theatrical way they're kind of drawing attention to themselves, it's very intentional but in order to pull it off they're refusing the acknowledgment of others.
NF: Performing rather than interacting.
CS: So that word theatricality, I'm not so interested in that but absorption, like a face-to-face meeting, it's not theatrical, its that...
NF: Absorption is a little Martin Buberesque, the I and Thou thing.
CS: Hm hm, right. But Fried was talking about paintings, such as with Courbet, where not only the artist in front of the canvas, his experience in the working of the material, but that artists experience in front of that object was really not different than the beholder's experience in front of the object in terms of materiality and absorption. The success of a good painting is that it hauls you into that space so there's no distinction between the artist and the viewer.
NF: Great, that's awesome, I don't really have anything to add to that. Absolutely.
CS: It's a way of getting at the problem of enlightenment I think and your issue of light, its something like absorption.
NF: What's strong to me is the materiality part of it. Courbet goes through a filter of working and struggling with this viscous material to bring to your eyes the image, right, and that is the same with Morandi. The struggle and honesty with that material are specific to art.
CS: Candor.
NF: Yeah, thank you. The work with that material in a way diminishes the facility by which you can create an illusion but at the same time it presents the same relationship with the artist and then it goes back with the viewer 'cause the artist takes time, and if you are really looking at that kind of picture you have to invest time. So there's the two things going on: the materiality which stops you and then there's another layer that creates the conditions for absorption. Consciously that's what's going on here. Y'know what, a lot of its about time. When you spend time working on a surface and letting things build up...It's great that you bring up this word absorption and I think it's also related to the word I was using, commitment, the way that I meant to use it, because it's about slowing down. Really what's asked for is to cut through a certain media attention span cycle, that's not fast forward, because this is how people consume not only products but also art. What's needed, especially when you're working with contemporary objects or products is to slow that superspeed process down a little bit. So the way I thought to do that was to personally slow down the process in the studio.
CS: So with these pieces something that is definitely going on that is not going on with these others are kind of big things, there's the facingness thing, the enlightenment thing, the absorption thing, but there' also painting here, yes, there's sort of Rachel Harrison painting over there, but this is like painting. And it's very deliberately there, as painting.
NF: Yeah, well, when you think about these as Steinbach objects, in that tradition, which they are, I wanted to continue this project, relate to it, not only thinking about the monitor but thinking about Steinbach and what it means to put consumer objects on a shelf in the Modernist tradition.
CS: And to never change,with Steinbach, it's to never change, he's not in the studio, he's sort of gone into production arrest, which is kind of curious about him.
NF: Frozen in time.
CS: Yeah, there was an exhibition at Sonnabend not too long ago, and I think that the way it works for him is that you purchase the shelf, and then added to the value of the shelf are the receipts literally form Walmart
NF: Is he buying from Walmart now?
CS: Oh, I don't know, I'm sure that he buys from a variety of places, but he's got an interest in the commodity and its value that's different than yours, you're much more, I guess I want to say that you are much more phenomenological in your orientation than he is.
NF: Yeah. But the thing is that he's talking about objects of desire and repositioning them formally in an art tradition.
CS: Butbutbut..hmm..he's in a place where you're not really seeing them that differently, I mean you can take that box of Fruit loops, I mean I'm sure if you owned one of those you'd put on those Hulk boxing gloves that make a noise, or..I think the piece that does it for me the most are those black chewy dog toys, you fill them with dog food and if you were to take those of the shelf they'd be flying around the house! So there's something about the mobility of those objects from the store to the shelf, by the force of desire being driven into the space of the room, y'know, flying off the shelves at either end. And your work has a quality of absorption or "holding power," if you will.
NF: The work relating to the Steinbach, well the painting on the bottom is there in a very conscious way, because the shelf thing he does is kind of flat glossy paint, a perfectly rendered shelf, and then I realized these Steinbach shelves have this big surface on the bottom side that could be used. So it could be a painting.
CS: Actually he's using laminates, they're' sheet goods. They are totally pristine.
NF: he doesn't even make them himself, so a part of this is about efficiency, contrasting with the world of production and wasted space. For one thing, crafting the shelf, whittling it down and exposing the materiality, and taking advantage of what art can be done in the space.
CS: He used to do this kind of vintage shopping, he'd buy a funky lamp with deer hooves as the base and put next to it a pair of Nike sneakers. I don't think he does that so much anymore, so you've got an obsolescence thing going on here, this monitor with the blackout - there's something that's explicitly about planned obsolescence here that doesn't exist in Steinbach's work.
NF: Even without the obsolescence physically being the work, with these and almost everything else in the show there is that knocking on the door of the death of these products, kind of turning the corner around materialist desire and planned obsolescence. You're kind of seeing around the thing because the object is presenting a kind of phenomenological version of itself, without its normal function really there. Probably why Steinbach came upon his project in the '80s is because that was a very materialistic moment in history. I like his work. I thought it was weird, I came upon it for the first time in an old Art in America or something, when I was at school at RISD. You could see he was the big deal in 1985, and it's so strange to come to these previous art histories . Jeff Koons sure got a little more into the art history books than Steinbach did, but his basketball and vacuum cleaner work is very parallel. So it's very much reacting to this Reagan era consumerism. Now, in the same way, we've come to the end of a very similar boom except that it's a tech-boom, I mean, now, everyone needs an iPhone, information is being sold to us as lifestyle, connections, immaterial things, and it's sublime.
CS: An important word that came up for me again as you were talking is this word complicity. Haim Steinbach is regarded as a complicit artist.
NF: Understandably so.
CS: Hal Foster has the most scathing criticism against commodity sculpture and what he refers to as "cynical realism." Complicity is in his text and it's in a lot of other writers at the same time, it suddenly became a term that re-appeared, and now Johanna Drucker has written a whole book about complicity as what defines the art of our time. I don't see what you are doing as involving or critiquing at any level this notion of complicity, which is I think another difference between what you are doing and what Steinbach is doing. It has a lot to do with planned obsolescence, that things fall away.
NF: I just have a problem with that word, complicity, because it sounds pretty moralistic.
CS: But it's been written about as a positive term, that's what Drucker has done is to take what Foster and all these other people were projecting as harsh negative criticism, and with Foster there is usually a bit of a seething Marxist tone. I do think you can charge Steinbach with a level of complicity and that is a zen thing too, I mean how do you deal with judgment and criticism? I do judge.
NF: Of course, we all do.
CS: So I don't want to run away from the word complicity as a negative word, but to investigate what can be earned from it.
NF: In that sense, I 'm thankful to Haim Steinbach because artists have to work with all this stuff they didn't have to before, to work with that material and be involved with it. He set up this thing in his moment that artists like me can react to. I suppose his was a complicit gesture. But I don't feel like what I'm doing is judging his work, just working off it.
CS: You're not critiquing Haim Steinbach by doing this.
NF: I'm not doing that at all. Steinbach's is a different project that is at this point I think quite historical actually. It really does belong to a specific time period, even though it's sort of frozen and as you say, he is still making these shelves. But when I see his work I think of Reagan.
CS: Right. You're talking about the President.
NF: The President is a deep metaphor right now, it's funny...Reagan delivered some unexpected and amazing speeches by the way. But it's also that Steinbach represents a previous moment in the art bubble so thats another aspect of the history-economics.
CS: That moment when people were writing about Steinbach, and there were people who were in the media also, Foster was feeding from others who were also critical of Julian Schnabel, those two were propped up as the artists created by a collector-driven market. So it's a perfect site to reach for from this moment in time. But I have to confide in you, and I think we're already in a place where we can do something with this, I really cannot stand the rampant art historical quotations that are passed off in contemporary art as insider jokes or a flat delivery of a narrative only for the sake of hooking into that narrative.
NF: Right, it's very common, it has to do with artists going to school.
CS: Well artists were going to school when the Minimalists started and they weren't doing that exactly, it's not that it's something else...
NF: Well, it's like everything on Broadway is a re-run now, right? It's how people feel, it's a market trend.
CS: It's also because everybody else is going to school too and they are required to take those art history classes...
NF: Quotations are a value, they already have a brand name, people know about them and people feel good about knowing about that.
CS: Right, so what I'm doing here is looking at these and thinking about this deliberate and specific reach to Haim Steinbach, and that there's something inside of these thoughts about planned obsolescence that has, not a critque, but a sort of moving inside of the operations of history, and not merely quoting them for the sake of quoting them.
NF: It's the first show I've done where I haven't been processing information in this way. Before, I was not referring to art history but to other histories.
CS: You've made ghosts of the information technology you were addicted to!
NF: I realize I've reached a certain point of making art where the fact that people before (like Steinbach) have done other projects that meant different things at different times-becomes to me so important, art history became important to me in a personal way. I wouldn't have done that before because you have to arrive at this moment organically. I know exactly what you're saying about a vogue to quote stuff but it's kind of beside the point in a way because what is needed is perspective to make it a new thing. When you know about an artist long enough, for years say, you can start to comprehend the power in their project and you can really interact with it and have a shadow double of what you are doing so it becomes rich territory.
CS: Without recovering or salvation.
NF: I think it's so important, I feel so good about evoking the Reagan-era '80s, with this show in this time now, I feel very good about it and I think it's a great thing to arise. People have different relationships to it based on according to who's looking at it of course, right?
CS: But we can say something is over, I take comfort in that and it's a lot of false comfort, I know, but..
NF: My work is about history, there's a consciousness of time in history, that's how I'm comfortable making quotations and interacting with art history. It's about a history effect.
Image credits: (All works by Noah Fischer unless otherwise mentioned, courtesy of Claire Oliver and Noah Fischer) Green Essentials, mixed media, 29x16 1/2x29";Giorgio Morandi, grabbed from Metropolitan Museum of Art: iRaq posters by Forkscrew, photo courtesy of Class Warrior; Beige Study Number 3, mixed media sculpture, 32 1/2x16x15 1/2": Chair Study Number 1, mixed media sculpture,14 1/2 by 17 1/2 x35"; Grandfather Clock, mixed media sculpture, 144x12x89"; Perfect Lantern, mixed media sculpture, 18x 33 1/2 x 15:; Chair Study Number 1, detail; Surveillance object; Treasure Map, 56x86x0"; Sputnik lamp; Claes Oldenberg, Softlight Switches, 41 1/8x 11", City Review; Information platform, mixed media sculpture, 60x26x45; James Turrell, Meeting, 1986, Photo by Michael Moran,Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; Beige Study Number 3, detail; Franz Xaver Winterhalter (German, 1805–1873), Florinda, 1853,Oil on canvas, 70 1/4 x 96 3/4 in. (178.4 x 245.7 cm), Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of William H. Webb, 1899; Family Portrait, Mixed media, 32 1/2x53 1/2x 15 1/4"; Haim Steinbach, Orient Point, plastic laminated wood shelf; rubber dog chew; electronic "Hulk" hands; plastic pumpkin lamp, 34 1/2 x 71 x 19" (87 x 180.3 x 48.3 cm) from http://www.haimsteinbach.net/; New Codes, mixed media, 21x9x13" detail; Family Poretrait, detail; Obama logo, Sol Sender; TV Kennedy, mixed media sculpture.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Plagiarism, Art Criticism, and the Web
My compulsion to write about the absolutely contemporary in art has driven my life beyond disciplinary boundaries and institutional forms. This includes the prestigious magazines and newspapers I have written for, which by my own choice I have slowed down. When I made the choice to post online, concerns about managing intellectual property fell away for the opportunity for my own thought to be publicly accountable in its claims. Intellectual property is here less a matter of real estate and closer to being open to what is earned in the vulnerability of one’s own claims. It is a democracy, and it is no free-for-all.
I do not have a rigid view of what a blog is or does - it can be a savvy pile of links or a conversation that goes on for days. What I do know, however, is that as a media form, the blog is subject to exploitation through information technology as it appears in capitalism. This appears most drastically in the form of the splog, a vehicle by which an ad-free blog with strong content is lifted in its entirety, stealing hits for another’s earnings in Google ads.
People who have been reading this blog know that I recently discovered my writing was plagiarized. I do not distinguish this event fully from the splogging I describe above. Immediately apparent to me is that the plagiarist, Thomas Hollingworth, sapped my writing of all its critical bite in order to provide comparatively glowing fodder, the kind of writing that “member-supported” blogs would support, for example, or the kind of writing of someone who aspires to make his living freelancing to artists and galleries.
Despite any forgiveness that can be offered, this event of plagiarism is beyond the scope of two individual lives. Art criticism is vulnerable to market forces, and we have known this since the early days of Artforum. Here is John Coplans speaking as the former editor of Artforum in a 1977 interview:
The web has exponentially exaggerated this problem. As much as a few small bloggers such as myself wish to write outside of market interest, the danger of plagiarism in the contemporary art world is that strong critical writing holds no ground of its own outside of the press release.
In researching what one should do when plagiarized, the dominant Google search consideration seems to be that it should all occur behind closed doors, in discrete contact with editors, so that they can deal with the issue in privacy. But recently, critics have been reacting more strongly against their plagiarists, such as Jody Rosen this past August in Slate magazine, and more recently Lane Brown for New York magazine. My own reaction was brutal by comparison, using the violence of an image in the expression of my seething rage.
I have also been teaching art history in the academy for over ten years now, where plagiarism will get you expelled or fired from your tenure track position. Beyond learning disabilities and novice ignorance, in American culture a plagiarist is a wily character who knowingly takes a risk with consideration for his own benefit against all costs. In the case of Thomas Hollingworth, this is someone who lied several times over in signing his name.
Because it undermines the entire purpose of education to inspire thought, the academy requires a clear and final sentence in order to preserve the system. This is no less true for art criticism on the web. But without an institution as its vehicle, what is needed is a form of peer review and activism in blogger culture. This is what occurred in Karen Justl’s discovery. It needs to be extended to those magazines that have failed to live up to their insider credibility in hiring inexperienced and unethical writers (Update and qualification: M: The New York Artworld, which advertises itself as an "insider's" magazine, has still not taken down the plagiarized article. I am also surprised to see that in the midst of all this controversy, Hollingworth has posted on his site an interview for Whitehot Magazine. I did however, advise him to stick with interviews and am happy to see he has taken the suggestion), to those advertisers who wish to protect the status and quality of the work they advertise (CulturePundits has been contacted but as of this posting Hollingworth remains in their network. Update: Thank you, CulturePundits, for withdrawing from your network a site that knowingly published a plagiarized article!), to those web hosts who care about the integrity of their product (WordPress has cultivated a good reputation for this), to those critics who otherwise endorse criminal behavior by granting permission to post their words (in this case Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times), and above all, to those critics who are looking for a reputable place to write.
Catherine Spaeth
* John Coplans interview, 1975 Apr. 4 - 1977 Aug. 4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
I do not have a rigid view of what a blog is or does - it can be a savvy pile of links or a conversation that goes on for days. What I do know, however, is that as a media form, the blog is subject to exploitation through information technology as it appears in capitalism. This appears most drastically in the form of the splog, a vehicle by which an ad-free blog with strong content is lifted in its entirety, stealing hits for another’s earnings in Google ads.
People who have been reading this blog know that I recently discovered my writing was plagiarized. I do not distinguish this event fully from the splogging I describe above. Immediately apparent to me is that the plagiarist, Thomas Hollingworth, sapped my writing of all its critical bite in order to provide comparatively glowing fodder, the kind of writing that “member-supported” blogs would support, for example, or the kind of writing of someone who aspires to make his living freelancing to artists and galleries.
Despite any forgiveness that can be offered, this event of plagiarism is beyond the scope of two individual lives. Art criticism is vulnerable to market forces, and we have known this since the early days of Artforum. Here is John Coplans speaking as the former editor of Artforum in a 1977 interview:
“I'm not saying that Artforum played a major role, powerful role, all-embracing role in the marketing. Nevertheless, a bad review sometimes would cause a lack of confidence. Let's put it that way. Maybe it did not even necessarily affect the market, but it made the dealers work harder and think twice and made the clients think twice. They felt that they were operating under a severe handicap. After all, they were advertising in this magazine and this magazine was panning their artists. Time Magazine or any magazine you care to name, the New York Magazine, if somebody advertised it, there was no commitment, far from it, on the part of the Ford Motor Company advertising in Time for Time to describe or write or yell about the products for Time to be skeptical about the products, and there is no problem. They are buying advertising space. Unfortunately, because of the nature of French criticism as it was and certain other magazines that exist now such as Arts and Arts International where you can literally buy space, the feeling is that if a dealer advertises in a magazine, he expects some results from it. There was a time when it was important to advertise in Artforum at the insistence of the artist or it was the artist paying the money indirectly through commissions who was really buying the ad. Later this began to change. Advertising became very regular. It was part of contracts. They should advertise. This feeling was less and less that and the galleries felt that they were buying the space.”
The web has exponentially exaggerated this problem. As much as a few small bloggers such as myself wish to write outside of market interest, the danger of plagiarism in the contemporary art world is that strong critical writing holds no ground of its own outside of the press release.
In researching what one should do when plagiarized, the dominant Google search consideration seems to be that it should all occur behind closed doors, in discrete contact with editors, so that they can deal with the issue in privacy. But recently, critics have been reacting more strongly against their plagiarists, such as Jody Rosen this past August in Slate magazine, and more recently Lane Brown for New York magazine. My own reaction was brutal by comparison, using the violence of an image in the expression of my seething rage.
I have also been teaching art history in the academy for over ten years now, where plagiarism will get you expelled or fired from your tenure track position. Beyond learning disabilities and novice ignorance, in American culture a plagiarist is a wily character who knowingly takes a risk with consideration for his own benefit against all costs. In the case of Thomas Hollingworth, this is someone who lied several times over in signing his name.
Because it undermines the entire purpose of education to inspire thought, the academy requires a clear and final sentence in order to preserve the system. This is no less true for art criticism on the web. But without an institution as its vehicle, what is needed is a form of peer review and activism in blogger culture. This is what occurred in Karen Justl’s discovery. It needs to be extended to those magazines that have failed to live up to their insider credibility in hiring inexperienced and unethical writers (Update and qualification: M: The New York Artworld, which advertises itself as an "insider's" magazine, has still not taken down the plagiarized article. I am also surprised to see that in the midst of all this controversy, Hollingworth has posted on his site an interview for Whitehot Magazine. I did however, advise him to stick with interviews and am happy to see he has taken the suggestion), to those advertisers who wish to protect the status and quality of the work they advertise (CulturePundits has been contacted but as of this posting Hollingworth remains in their network. Update: Thank you, CulturePundits, for withdrawing from your network a site that knowingly published a plagiarized article!), to those web hosts who care about the integrity of their product (WordPress has cultivated a good reputation for this), to those critics who otherwise endorse criminal behavior by granting permission to post their words (in this case Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times), and above all, to those critics who are looking for a reputable place to write.
Catherine Spaeth
* John Coplans interview, 1975 Apr. 4 - 1977 Aug. 4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
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