Git along lil dogies.

For our last week we read an interview with Leo Castelli, the once prince of New York's art scene, and Modernism at large, for the influence he garnered through his gallery. There he showed the likes of Warhol and Lichtenstein and other pop art elite. He was as much a social phenomenon as an artistic one, and single handedly shaped the art world of the 1970's and 1980's. This was a time of the Great Ego, where artists relied on what Castelli called confidence. The absence of this confidence was not humility according to Castelli, but more of a  kind of existential crisis, a crippling sense of reality. I think that this lack of confidence is the number one obstacle to my own work as an artist. Throughout our reading of Suzi Gablik, she has been crushed by the weight of realization of ecological crisis. Personally, I am too busy being crushed by the local and global socio-economic crises, in addition to the ecological and spiritual crises, and don't even get me started on aesthetic or ethical crises, that I have succeeded in not being wholly crippled by any of them. Yet.

Without an ego that can withstand the knowledge of global suffering, it is often hard to find motivation to keep working. The egos of Warhol and the like allowed them the comfort of treating life kind of like a big joke, but one to which only they knew the punchline. By not sharing this little secret (or in fact pretending that they indeed held this secret), they were spared the responsibility of responding to the world's strife, unless it was convenient for them to so.

But what has happened since artists decided that maybe they should give a fuck? That their audience certainly needed to give more of a fuck than they did before. What we have found in the interim is kind of reactionary art, where artists no longer feel able to make art without shouldering some of the world's burden. This makes artists way less fun and less likely to be paid bazillions of  for having fun.

I find that Donald Morgan has found a kind of elegant solution to these two sides. Instead of needing to pull off the big hustle, the inside joke of the pop art scene, and without the obligation to have a greater cause to his work like so much of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, he is satisfied to present a personal take on a much smaller joke, one he shares with the audience. There is attention to craft that undermines the urge to write the work off entirely as a one liner.

Throughout the term we haven't really broached the subject of humor in art, or in politics for that matter, but it seems a strange topic to avoid. I think that the "traditional" art world frowns upon the use of humor, that satire may cheapen the value of sentiment, but from what we have discussed in this class I fell like the art world could use a little cheapening. I think it's ridiculous that no one saw any humor in a bunch of screen printed soup cans.  I have always thought it strange that every one took a lot of modern art so seriously, that the artist themselves felt obligated to fill the role of tormented genius.

I was recently watching a documentary on Ron English, and he started as this really funny, outlandish street artist and then ended up on a knock off of Donahue being told he needed to settle down. His wife wanted him to make more money (fair enough), so he started turning out more paintings, but they just weren't as funny, and for that I found them less meaningful- perhaps because they were being designed with the gallery in mind. Conversely I think that Morgan's Drunk Robot is so funny especially because of it's gallery setting, but I may find it less humorous once I see the price tag.

***Above is Ron English's take on Andy Warhol's take on Marilyn Monroe (with a little help from Disney). Funnier is better.

This week we took a look at the work of Tannaz Farsi and read a conversation between Suzi Gablik and Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett. I felt like both shared a focus on stripping multicultural art of its specific cultural meaning, and therefor able to make it meaningful to all audiences. Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett talks about how the backlash from the art establishment in response to the 1992 Whitney Biennial was to establish a kind of meritocracy that would do the same type of sidelining that institutional racism, sexism, homophobia and western bias had done for years. This conversation is especially relevant to the work of Tannaz Farsi. She is Persian, and I believe still has family living in Iran. As a woman from a predominantly Muslim area, now living in America, she has about every disadvantage to breaking out into the established art world as possible. I feel that her success is not the result of tokenism, as Hilton Kramer would maybe suggest, but instead because of the philosophy she and Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett share that all experiences are relevant to art and that there is some kind of meaning that we can all glean from these experiences.

Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett states that she is not particularly interested in the art world being able to absorb some works of "arts of living". I feel that Farsi often takes these "arts of living", such as the swing set in her back yard, or the sealed letters, and wants to translate them into the world of art. Farsi's intelligence and intent is obvious when she speaks about her work, but her craftsmanship and symbolism are obvious at first glance. I think her work agrees with Kirshenblat-Gimblett's idea that all work is in some way political. I think that it does not have to be overtly so, like Farsi's piece with the rotating mirrors, but there is a certain way in which societies (here, both American and Muslim) determine the role of women and our image of ourselves, and while the audience is not intended to be solely women, perhaps that influence is evident in that piece.

Personally, I was a little intimidated by Tannaz's work and ideas. I find myself relating more to Kirshenblat-Gimblett's idea of living arts. I know from personal experience that I sometimes have trouble making art for months on end. In that time, I still need to exercise my creative muscle, and will often do so by cooking elaborately, gardening, knitting or other crafts. Sometimes I want to make with out the pressure to create. That type of work is nice,  it comes without the ego of fine art. You can make dinner or a pair of mittens and share them with someone else and it improves both the maker and the receiver (even when one and the same) without the weight of meaning. That is one problem I have had with Suzi Gablik throughout the readings- as an artist, I simply am not strong enough to bear the burden of sharing Meaning with the world at large all the time. And I feel incapable of finding the type of meaning in my own work that Tannaz makes hers with. Sometimes I just want to make my immediate world a little bit better.

**** I chose to post a couple images by Banksy. I think he is a good example of how sometime a small joke can be really meaningful depending on how it affects your space, how operating outside of a gallery is like giving a gift to people and how the political will always show up sooner or later.

White Boxes, Ivory Towers

This week we had Terri Warpinski come and speak with us. She is a interdisciplinary photographer, and I think like one of the readings this week very interested in process. I think that her work was interesting, and
I am curious to see what will become of her work regarding borders and walls around the world. I think it was also interesting that she mentioned briefly how exploitative this work has a potential to become. Because her work begins with landscape photography, she is not confined night and day to the studio like some artists. She mentioned briefly some hairy situations that this type of real world engagement has put her in. Still though, she relies on the institution of Art with a capital A to get a lot of this stuff done. She teaches and has won grants that are strictly within the realm of "Art".

From this weeks readings Carol Becker, director of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says artists need to get out of the institution more. Having grown up in Chicago and had a couple of very close friends who attended her school, I think it would have benefited them to get out from under of the protective arm of the school. And while I even went so far as to help convince my ex that he wasn't getting a real education there and should drop out, I was probably wrong to encourage him to throw it away and become a cook at the hipster coffee shop. While I find it hard to stomach a lot of the bravado and self absorption that came out of that place, I can now see the benefit in participating in a system that may eventually provide the resources to travel and do work along the lines of Terri Warpinski. I personally do not regret my years "dropped out" of art at all. Chicago had a great 'zine and music scene which I was lucky enough to be a part of.

I also wonder if 20 year later, Becker has held fast to her resolve not to join the burgeoning tech revolution, which bears the question 'How long can a "responsible" artist hold out against a tidal wave such as that?'

Then there was Shusterman. At first I was just incapable of getting past the introduction. I was so overwhelmed by the use of the word 'aesthetic' (12 times in the intro alone), I just went numb and didn't snap out of it until Gablik described him as an "attractive man" before she called him an incisive one. Her overwrought intro seems to be the result of some school girl crush, which I am surprised by only in that she is so over the top with her eco agenda and Shusterman thinks that maybe humanity is ok too, I figured she wouldn't be able to set aside any type of dissent long enough to develop such an attraction.  I eventually sucked it up and went back to read the article, and Shusterman seemed ok in the end. I think it is a very important point he makes that if we begin to worship nature over everything else, we become the one-sided reactionaries that we are fighting against. I also thought his insight as to our society's resistance to change was interesting. That is especially true when things are going your way.

Throughout the course I have felt like Suzi Gablik was the late comer in Chicken Little who has just finally realized the sky is falling. I believe the sky has always been falling, but certain people were just too privileged to notice. My grandfather is an asshole. I still learned the most important thing I've ever learned from him. I used to be Chicken Little, I thought that world was careening off track and headed for disaster, tomorrow. It filled me with a type of existential dread so intrinsic that I still have to fight off sometimes. It left me angry and useless. But one day my grandfather, who I rarely saw and who then even more rarely spoke to me, who I hated so much as a child and who as a rebellious teenager I thought I had nothing in common with, told me something that would change my life: He felt the same way. His whole life, beginning just before WWI, he figured that the end was nigh, that the world would come to a screeching halt sometime in his lifetime. So did his parents.  When you are poor Jewish Polish immigrants in the early 1900s, sometimes apocalypse can seem more appealing than the day to day routine. The sky is always falling for someone. The tragedy is not that it may have begun to collapse for all of us, but that this is the human condition; occasionally lives are miserable and brief. That with all of our thinky-thoughts we still haven't figured out how to beat the house, because we still have to play by the houses rules.

***In Chicago, we used to discuss things in Art as being inside and outside the lions. These two bronze behemoths guarded the front doors of the Art Institute were a common landmark and an excellent place to bum cigarettes.

Something Clever

Nothing is worth 17.7 million dollars. Absolutely nothing.

We have lost the concept of value.

We live in a world where spending 160 million dollars can't even buy you the governorship of California. Meg Whitman just found that out the hard way.

We piss money away on the most foolish things. Athletes. Celebrities. Politicians. Artists.


I liked the fact that the Guerrilla Girls were maintaining a healthy separation of art and politics. Still, I would rather they not want to bring womankind down to the level of the bourgeois white, male, New York artist of the 1990's (or the 1890's for that matter). I am appalled at not only the disparity between the value assigned to the work of men versus women, but that any such a value is assigned to anything. "Romaine Brooks" says right out loud that the system is "pretty fucked." I was not surprised to read the statistic that more than 50% of art school students are female, but later women only make up a tiny fraction of artists in galleries. I personally believe that it is because women tend to lack the ego necessary to make it in the gallery scene. One of the side effects of motherhood is learning you are not the most important person in the world. An artist that doesn't believe that of themselves will never "make it". While I don't condone the system as it stands, nor have any desire to participate in that type of capitalism, I respect what the Guerrilla Girls are doing. It is much more effective to change parts of the system than it is to undermine the whole. I wish that weren't always the case. I wish that, in general, society was more compassionate, an ideal that directly threatens the gallery/artist/critic relationship as it stands.


I really liked Mary Jane Jacobs approach. It takes a lot to walk out on a few of the world's most important museums and decide to become an independent art advocate. She talks about the futility of fixing one problem at a time; a women's show, an African American show, a Latino show, etc. I don't think that there is necessarily a solution to the problem of tokenism, as Suzi Gablik puts it, but I think it is important to make sure the progressive efforts we make are not purely reactionary, obligatory. I think that Jacobs touches upon the issue when discussing the relevance of works presented in Charleston, SC. I think the most important fact is that the artists geared their work to be contextually relevant to Charleston. I think the best way out of the big business popularity contest that art has become is a certain level of local relevance. I think the idea that access to art should be free is also crucial.

I think that some of my own background is relevant to this argument. I grew up in Chicago, a city so segregated that the term "hyper-segregated" had to be coined to describe it. Chicago had a lot of ups and downs- the Art Institute Museum technically only charged a donation to get in. I spent a lot of my childhood exploiting that rule. This gave me access to some of the most famous artists in history, but it also taught me they weren't worth paying for. Also, my mom and I moved around a lot, and very rarely lived in dominantly white, English speaking neighborhoods. This meant that I got to see something that seems a little overlooked in Gablik's interviews: just because it isn't in a museum, doesn't mean that it's not art. In a lot of the neighborhoods, small cultural centers and even nominal museums celebrated the work of the residents and the micro local cultural heritage. This was true in almost all the neighborhoods: Puerto Rican, Mexican, West African, Polish, Korean, Thai, Pakistani, etc. All the neighborhoods were vibrant and valued creativity in their own way. They just didn't pay millions for it. Art was just a part of life, and that's the way I like it.

***Above, a friend's piece, a mural on the side of a shoe store near the El in Chi,  that fucking Jasper John that sold for 17.7 million and a painting by Jenny Seville, who is one of my favorite lady painters.

I Guess My Pink Hair Don't Cover Up My Red Neck

In the introduction to her conversation with Coco Fusco, Suzi Gablik states that it is the nature of the White intelligentsia to label multiculturalism a threat and to demean it with the term "political correctness".  On page 322, Fusco mentions that her education is what provides her the tools to enter into this discourse, and I think that access to even basic education is a far more important race issue than what a lot of the rest of the interview talks about. I find that intellectuals are more likely to be classist than racist (not that that is not often the same thing), but I am white so I may be wrong. I tend to find that intellectuals error on the side of being PC to the point of denying open discourse. We can look at this week's firing of Juan Williams from NPR radio as an example. Williams admitted a bias against Muslims. He did not admit to or condone any sort of giving in to that bias, he just stated that it existed.  For this he was fired. (He did later accept a 2 million dollar contract with FOX news, which may actually be a hate crime.) Regardless, I think the fact that the persecuted PC's refuse to admit their own biases, that even us liberals may have them, is ridiculous. I don't know anyone, of any race, gender, class, or sexual orientation that is wholly unbiased. The trick is to try to know your bias, understand where it stems from and see if you can deconstruct it once you have that understanding, not to just pretend like it isn't there. Let me be clear, politically I am the textbook bleeding heart liberal. I want healthcare and food stamps not fences and drones, but that does not mean that if I plumb the depths of that bleeding heart, that I do not find bias. I don't like that bias, but it does belong to me. I think that non-objectivity is vital to art, and that to pretend to be a totally evolved artist with no room for improvement is a joke.

This is why I loved Ron Graff's presentation. Honestly, a lot of his paintings I liked, but wasn't ecstatic over, but as a philosopher, he is right up my alley. I think I would be more interested in his work if it was more controversial, but I appreciate that he is painting primarily for himself. He has a type of unapologetic demeanor, tempered with self deprecation and a combination of talent and work ethic, that as an artist, I can only hope to one day emulate. I was a little worried about his suicide references, but on the other hand, they were pretty funny. Personally, I like to paint because I like to paint, not because I think it will save the polar bears. If I want to save the polar bears I'll vote, recycle and buy a motherfucking tote bag.

I think Danto's opening statement in his interview with Gablik, about how philosophy is trying to undermine the power of art was pretty spot on. I think that Gablik doesn't really like art, she likes politics and intellectualism and she likes believing she's right. I've been to those fundraisers where the night devolves from art auction to a bunch of winos sitting around the fire in Patagonia fleece singing Kumbaya. Maybe Gablik was there. She is so worried about the coming ecocatastraphe, that she totally dismisses Danto's mention of genocidal cultures. I feel that our species propensity for genocide and ecological destruction really bring to bear the question whether or not or demise is something to mourn. I feel like Danto's stance is that the good things we do may counteract that, and art may be one of those things. Art also relays understanding, which in all things is the first step to action. Or at least it should be.

Sorry. Suzi Gablik has officially gotten on my nerves.

***Above is a painting I did of zombie kittens eating a severed leg. This will not stop global warming, I promise.

Who's that Jung kid over there? Id don't know.

Sorry about the bad pun, I just couldn't resist. Down to business.

This week's readings spent a some effort tracking the development of ego and selfishness in art and society. I think they matched up well with Dan Powell's work because, whether or not he intends to, there was a significant lack of ego in his work. What I found most interesting about this was that is was not only in his sweeping landscapes, but in his quirky vignettes as well. Photography is art form in which I find it easiest to "refocus our attention away from ourselves and onto the world..." The camera's form requests that we do just that. I find that even when I do a self portrait photographically, I feel like it is less a picture of me and more a documentation of my passing through or witnessing something. I felt like Dan's works were somewhat opposite but complimentary to that sentiment in that he did a lot of psychological self portrait-ing in pictures of garbage tacked to a wall that he scribbled on (I saw that positively). I personally relate to Dan's wanderlust and dumpster fetishism.

I was glad that Carolyn Merchant, in her opening statement did not lump all of humanity into an evil doing paradigm, but specifically chose to criticize the actions of "Western industrial capitalism since the seventeenth century as it developed in North America and Europe." I think all too often in the interviews with Suzi Gablik, there is a sort of artificial long view which seems to imply that the values and crises of the Industrial Revolution, or even the 1970's cultural revolution (they don't call them the "Me Generation" for nothing),  began somewhere around 10,000 years ago, or just about the time that we humans put plow to field. I think it is folly to assume that people have so long viewed the world through the same glasses, and pretty ego centric to boot. I also think the sentiment of relief about Bush and Quayle leaving office is pretty frickin' hilarious in hindsight, although it is a dark cloud of humor that does not bode well for any kind of cultural shift. I do agree with her idea that some people aver nature because they want total control, but I do not find a satifactory solution to explain why so many people are duped into thinking that they have any meaningful control whatsoever. I certainly did not find solace in many a crappy job that paid for many a crappy apartment, regardless of whether or not said job and apartment hand central air conditioning (admittedly they usually did not). I feel that there is some great hustle going on where we try to sell a way of life, and even the people who don't get it still buy it. Again, I am glad that in this interview neither Merchant or Gablik is calling for people to drop everything and go back to the land. Art, when made without that huge ego, is the best type of in control, and the best way to let go of control at the same time.

I think this kind of relates to James Hillman and what brought him to lose faith in the usefulness of therapy, despite, as he states, the fact that he is so good at it. It seems to me that for many decades therapy's role was to attempt to realign those who felt that lack of control with the general direction of society. It encouraged small, personal victories and gave the impression that the patient was learning to take control. This is a pretty big leap from lobotomies and electroshock, which in effect did the opposite. Those methods punished the patient for not being able to wield control. The individual would be sacrificed for the good of the whole. One of the down falls of both this and more modern therapy, is that in someways you are still living primarily with the trauma, and not as a healed person (But I think I'd rather have some shrink pick an emotional scab once a week than live forever in drooly lala land.) But this again is one of those things that makes art so wonderful. We all need to process, to interpret our lives. Making art lets us do that and move on.

***This is a picture I took. It kinda reminded me of my version of Dan Powell's landscapes- bleak and documenting human footprints.  I think while we're on the subject of psychology, there must be some sort of connection we can draw between people's willingness to shell out hundreds of dollars to spend hours waiting in line to have a near death experience and the decline of our civilization.

Saturday Evening Post Apocalypse, or Social Conscience is the Black Beret of the Early 21st Century

Hilton Kramer is an asshole. I guess that's why it was so hard for me to admit that I agreed with him on several points. That's the danger of living a life out in left field; sometimes you go so far left you end up on the right again. I do find his moralizing repugnant, especially when he feels free to make a big loophole for Picasso (who, according to Jonathon Richmond and the Modern Lovers, was never called an asshole). I also don't really love a lot of the art that Kramer so staunchly defends;  I love some of the reasons why he loves it, but that's not necessarily something to be proud of.

Art can be challenging, often time the sole purpose of a piece is to challenge the audience. As the audience, the challenge can be frustrating. I feel like Hilton Kramer is the type of person who would've perhaps preferred a more static discipline. Sometimes I find myself wanting that as well. I sit around and study art history, memorizing thousands of slides, only to find there are other centuries and other regions that I haven't even begun to contemplate. That sense of accomplishment is so fleeting. And trying to synthesize different art traditions is like trying to synthesize entirely different cultures. Our world politicos are often trying to do that, with minimal, violent success. The other option is to ignore or belittle those artistic traditions, which Kramer has made a career of.

Ever increasingly, more information that does not directly relate to ones own personal experience becomes available to the masses. This means that artists and plumbers alike must begin to make decisions about what to do with that information. Kramer postulates that liberals in general and artists in particular react with a certain amount of guilt. This is why they can't be the great ego centric artistes of the 20th century, they are too busy losing sleep over starving children in Africa, instead of losing it with coke whores in Soho. Suzi Gablik disagrees with him, she believes that we live in a world where people are inherently selfish and turn a blind eye to strife. I think they're both right. Aids babies and coke whores for everyone.

Satish Kumar, on the other hand has a little more faith in humanity. In fact, he simply has more faith. Kumar champions the idea that humanity exists spiritually as a kind of collective, and that that collective directly relates to the world (nature) itself. I like Kumar's educational ethos he has cultivated with the Small School, and I appreciate his moral code in a very agnostic way.

This is one problem I am consistently running into when relating to some of the more social and ecologically conscious movements in art, and especially here in Eugene. There is this prevalent association of nature to spiritual, and I cannot help but associate the spiritual to religious. I am not a big fan of religion. And sorry to all the hippies out there: Buddhism is a real religion which is more than just getting "Zen" (read stoned) and playing with your Sharper Image rock garden, and Rastafari is a really misogynistic, scary Christian sub-sect. I digress. What is relevant to the greater conversation is that I am just as wary of Kramer's Saturday Evening Post Christian morality lesson as I am of every other kind of spiritualism. I see it as the snake devouring it's own tail. Fear is combatted with faith, faith breeds religion, religion (eventually, usually) inspires fear in the non compliant, who then attempt to subvert the system by instilling faith in a new paradigm, and these paradigms are very rarely based in logic and the well being of others that are unlike you. I feel like on its better days, the emerging artist movement in America is at least pretending to take those things into account.

Now on to Jack Ryan. Kramer would hate a lot of his work, Kumar might like it once the relevance was explained. I think Ryan was an appropriate choice for this weeks lecture. He has the sort of "traditional" skills exemplified by his drawings, and then he also has that social conscience that is so integral to art these days. I think we may have to begin to think of this type of social responsibility as another medium in the artist arsenal, just like paint and clay and humor and angst. It should be employed when it is the most relevant tool to the final outcome of a piece of work. I think if we try to didactically prescribe it's use, the way Gablik is sometimes in danger of doing, it will lose its poignancy and become a marginalized joke.

*** Speaking of  jokes: before I saw this a million times I was able to imagine living in the shitty town where this billboard was, and what it was like to be the kid that got up there and scribbled "to Slayer", the type of kid who probably scribbled "Slayer" on lots of stuff, and just how immediately important something like this was to them, and their community (especially to those it undermines). Is it funny? Yes. Is it socially relevant? Yes. Is it art? I hope so.