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.