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.