Consume My Form

ARTH 344 Art, Culture, Politics Blog about contemporary arts that participate in global, political, environmental, and relational topics.

[consumemyform]

I think that I have a growing enthusiasm toward Ryan Trecartin's work. DIS magazine is a group of artists that "does not distinguish between disciplines nor conform to aesthetic value systems. DIS explores the banality and novelty of product and image making." They explore topics of music, teen culture, fashion, art, style, image ownership, and art school; however, they are not issue-specific. It is a collaboration between artists, designers, stylists, writers, and friends. DIS reworks facets of culture in order to confuse ideologies and facets of culture that seem odd when they put the microscope on it, like stock imagery. When you first enter the site, it even resembles somewhat of a stock photo page, but when you delve deeper into the oddity of it all, sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised.

One of my favorite projects hosted by DIS is called artselfie, where participants are encouraged to take a picture of themselves via smartphone and post it to twitter with the appropriate hash tag. Eminem can be spotted in one of the photos. Check it out.

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In the face of tragedy, a knee-jerk response is to look away. Those who have not had the luxury of looking away, and those who know too well the price of aversion, are determined to make us see. By insisting so emphatically that we not look away, Mapplethorpe and the artists of “Witnesses” insist that we acknowledge the visibility and power of homosexual love. That is precisely what some people would prefer never to see. It is no accident that it is art which alludes to or documents homosexuality that has become the catalyst for these debates. Homosexuality will be tolerated in this culture only to the degree that it remains invisible. Art, even in the post-Everything 90s, still is married to vision and visibility.

     Peggy Phelan, Serrano, Mapplethorpe, the NEA, and You, “Money Talks”, 1989

[swearbyallflowers]

Guerrilla Girls Do Women Have to be Naked to get into the Met. Museum?, 1989

The Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of female artists and art-world professionals, first affixed iconoclastic posters to Soho and East Village walls in 1985, provoked by an international survey of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. The New York show unwittingly confirmed what the group knew to be true, that insufficient notice was being paid to female artists. Of the 169 artists whose works were included in the survey, only 13 were women. Thus began a campaign—waged largely with cold, hard facts and a humorous twist—to raise the consciousness of the art world.

Four years later the group turned their attention to the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The result was their most celebrated poster, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Surveying the works on display in the museum’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century galleries, they tallied the number of female nudes versus the number of male nudes and counted the number of works by female artists versus the number by male artists. Their findings were startling: not even 5 percent of the artists represented in the modern galleries were women, while fully 85 percent of the nudes in those same galleries were female. The image they made to expose this discrepancy features a reproduction of the sumptuous nude in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque, with her face hidden by a gorilla mask, the Guerrilla Girls’ signature disguise. When presented to the Public Art Fund of New York City, which had commissioned the design for a billboard, the work was rejected. The Guerrilla Girls, in retaliation, rented advertising space on New York City’s public buses, where the poster’s display caused a stir.

The Guerrilla Girls guard their anonymity. In the role of “feminist masked avengers,” their stated mission is to use “facts, humor, and outrageous visuals [to expose] sexism, racism, and corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture.” Since the mid-1980s they have aimed their sassy wit at museums (including the National Gallery of Art), art dealers, curators, collectors, critics, and even other artists.

In 2007 twenty-one staff members of the National Gallery of Art, calling themselves the Gallery Girls, made personal contributions to an acquisition fund in order to purchase for the Gallery the Guerrilla Girls’ Most Wanted portfolio—a portfolio containing thirty of the group’s most illustrious posters from 1985 to 2006, including the now historic 1989 poster about the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

via the National Gallery of Art

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Still working today, the Guerilla Girls continue to poster about issues around discrimination against marginalized artist groups like blacks and women. They use comedy and research to expose unequal practices in museums, galleries, academies, and institutions. They work anonymously by taking on the names of famous women artists. The use of public postering invites street audiences to hold these institutions responsible for their poor practices and to give women and female artists a voice. They encourage women to identify as feminists and provide them with a platform to express their concerns like their interactive banner at the Art Boom Festival in Krakow. They fight against “sexism, racism and corruption in politics, art, film and pop culture”. They tour giving talks and staging events at welcoming, and maybe not, museums, galleries, and universities donning their distinctive gorilla masks to maintain their identity. Some of the participating Girls are successful professional artists themselves, but what I admire the most is their drive to fight for change while working within anonymity.

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Bishop vs. Kester

Aesthetics Versus Activists Question

Kester saw flaws in Bishop's pitting these two facets of contemporary art against each other. Do you think that activist art can function without concerns for aesthetics? Some believe that what separates art from other types of cultural conditions is the use of aesthetics, so what does that mean for artists that try to be anti-aesthetic? Can the two (activism and aesthetics) work together? Do you have any examples of this, and can you make an argument either for against? 

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Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.

-Andy Warhol

[arthistory2013-blog]

“Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that’s why I made works of art. ”

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (via arthistory2013)

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NEA Controversy

5. What are the 'tough questions' Phelan suggests that the arts community must ask itself following the NEA debates?

1. To be able to argue for the freedom of expression, the art community must protect all forms of freedom of expression and over come their own contradictions, like not censoring Pro-Nazi work even though it would be politically and morally controversial. The art community should embrace all controversial work, and produce strong writing about it to combat praise of solely nonoffensive art.

2.The art world must confront its leftist image to be able to stand it ground in funding questions, but to also find balance in the art market as well, and possible open an artists credit union to fund the unknown artists and to build separate support from public funds.

3. The art world needs to re-embrace the use of the image, even though text can be very powerful, images can say more than one meaning, and even the New Right understood the crucial relationship between images and the public.

4. Finally, the art world should demand better explanation from politicians who want to speak about art, and have them not just debase “obscene art” but also explain their idea of what is good art, and instead of allowing them to attack art, they must be asked to defend art.

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Manifesto of the Self-Entitled, Artist as Genius

For too long now art has moved away from object-rendering, image-creating, and creative fabrication. The artist genius has been slandered by critiques and historians for decades, and it is time to reclaim the glory that was once proclaimed at weighted up signature.

Art is autonomous and operates within its own cultural sphere.

Artists produce work that is creative and original, brought forth from intellectual, inspiring, and distinct ideas.

The signature and image of an individual artist is prestigious and deserving of glory and reverence.

We are creators and shapers whose names rightfully belong within historical texts for generations to learn about and aspiring to.

We are tortured souls that express personal emotions and ideas to audiences.

Artist genius create art that is timeless and stands up to the duration of critique and cultural shifts.

An artist's style is his life's blood, and should strive to create and form their own particular novel and unique technique.

By creating and innovating artist geniuses can outshine the dredge of art as life that becomes dull, obsolete, and situational.

[continuities]

Untitled (Perfect Lovers) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres

[thesquid44williambarnes]

This piece is simple with two ordinary clocks synchronized to one another.  As time progresses they are destined to fall out of synch with one another.  The piece can be read as symbolic for his lover who died shortly after the piece was completed.  Its presence stirs emotions of time that is fleeting for all of us.  This work is quite powerful even though it consists of two mundane objects.  To me it reads to the mortality of time that has control over us all.  Especially when we are with a significant other it is more than likely that one of us will go before the other.  Therefore this piece brings forth thoughts of the pain of that inevitable loss.

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Untitled (Perfect Lovers) is poignant due to Gonzalez-Torres’s use of ready-made objects, which he commonly used in his art in opposition to modernism. Here, the clocks could stand as any lover of any type, background, gender, or sexuality: their ordinary, objectness leaves this sort of portrait open for the audience to identify with the piece. Gonzalez-Torres himself was queer, but steered-away from queer imagery by using ready-made objects so that the focus of his work was not on his sexuality, but on the concept of the work.

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tARget: Art Revival

tARget is an Art Revival coalition that Natalie Blaustone-Dye and myself started in response to the CVA Galleries' funding being cut for the 2013-2014 SOU school year. tARget's aim is to bring attention to the  practices and pervasiveness of the arts on campus. We want to act as advocates for artists, art resources, and art projects with SOU students. tARget also hopes to work towards budget transparency and to end the myth that artists do not know work with and against the bureaucracy of arts funding.

tARget plans to start poster campaigns, rallies, events, and performances that questions the values of art in our current culture and to show that arts do not function exclusively. Artists are not tortured individuals that only create art for viewing, but they work to question, confront, expose, and participate with culture and humanity.

If you are interested in the joining tARget, let me know and I will add your email to our list.

It's not a matter of money, it's a matter of value.

[arth344]

From The First Feminist Art Program: A View from the 1980’s by Paula Harper, I find this quote rather prescient in it’s radicalness as well as a poignant reminder: a social problem exists when a large enough group of individuals speak up and say that it does. This is evidenced here and it is...

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Separatist vs. Inclusive

During the 1960s-1970s Feminist Movement, I think that the need for women to separate themselves from male identity was pertinent. This male-centered identity was exposed in Wilding's performance of Waiting; women's lives were directed by and relied upon their male counterparts'. However, in Linda Nochlin's essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, Nochlin urges her audience of women to stop separating themselves from the large population; ultimately the aim is to be equal, right? That by making that separation, then women as a group can be told something like that their work is just "crafty" and "diaristic".  So I think that marginalize-people movements function by marking themselves, being heard, fighting for rights, and then assimilating into a new normal, and hopefully not the old.

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http://we-make-money-not-art.com/

Is a blog of contemporary art that posts work from global resources. It might seem a little difficult to navigate, but the blog sort of functions by exploring all of the tags that contain related work. It's an interconnected network that can lead off into other resources and even artist's other sites and projects. Unlike other art blogs, it actually delves into discussion about the work and doesn't provide just images. Take a awhile to explore.

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Massages to the Public

Coordinated by Public Art Fund in 1982 and it continued until 1990. The Spectacolor light board, which Messages was displayed upon, in New York’s Time Square was used as animated commercial space. The ad designer at Spectacolor, Inc., Anne Dickinson, conceived of the idea that the board should be used for non-commercial art through the medium of a commercial platform. She was excited for it’s potential propaganda, and brought the idea to the Public Art Fund, which is an organization interested in public display of art existing outside of gallery walls.

Messages compromised of 85 different animations from contemporary artists including those seen above: Act Up, Barbara Kruger, jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Robin Winters, and Jon Kessler. Each 30-second animation played for a month, sandwiched between a 20-minute loop of commercial advertisements.  The messages were intended to address the public on varying topics like consumerism, patriotism, greed, and social ailments. The use of commercial media functioned to blur the line between commercial art and fine art, while also giving a pause to the stream of consumerist images. This was Jenny Holzer’s first use of an electric light display of her text work, a tactic that she has continued to use inside of commercial and gallery space, as well as in public.

In the modern practice of relational aesthetics, I think that Messages to the Public could now function with more audience participation; perhaps a call for animations and text could be sent out to the public to participate within the dialogue of advertisement and public art.

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Mammalian Diving Reflex

"Ideal Thinking For the End of the World"

Images include the following projects:

Ask a Teenager

Haircuts by Children

All the Sex I've Ever Had

  The Mammalian Diving Reflex was founded in 1993 by Darren O’Donnell as a community-centered performance art atelier that works publically with Marginalized people groups based in Toronto. They work collaboratively to question social norms and issues of class and power by bringing strangers together to perform, think, feel, and have fun in social settings.

MDR Provides Socially engaging events and performances that call audiences from varying classes and backgrounds to participate with each other in public. They work within schools, galleries, international festivals through theatre, Installation art, Text, and social practice in hopes of blurring the line between art and life. Their projects intersect ideas of relational aesthetics and positive social exchange. 

Projects like haircuts by Children acts to put power in the hands of disenfranchised peoples, like children. MDr set up Haircuts for professional hairstylists to teach Kids between the ages of 8-10 the basics of hair cutting for the kids to then cut outsider adult’s hair for free. This produced an environment of anxiety for those under the scissors to have to trust their novice stylists and also questions around ideals of beauty and appearance.

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New Genre Public Art (NGPA) Question #2

2. What are some of the debates, inconsistencies, and possible problems involved with New Genre Public Art (esp. regarding the question of 'the community)?

How “communities” are produced, defined, and used politically and in NGPA has changed with the advent of “community”-focused art making. Kwon questions multiple concerns and inconsistencies within NGPA surrounding the use of community like if the identity of the artist matters within the community that they are working in. NPGA tends to blur lines of social services and their “community” projects. Another blurred line is that of the function the audience who become the subject, yet also the creators, but they began as the audience. Some critiques consider the way that Culture in Actions projects functioned was an abuse of the communities that they focused on due to the fact that some projects were just “realizations” of an artist’s concepts. Often curators, funders, and artists directed the collaborations more than the audiences involved, and project structures were even decided by “higher ups” as opposed to participants.

HAHA Flood, 1993

Grennan and Sperandio and Bakery, Confectionery, and Tobacco Workers’ International Union of America Local Number 552,  We Got It!, 1993

[art-in-the-garden]

Faith Wilding was born in 1943 in Paraguay on a commune. She immigrated to the United States in 1961. Wilding’s art is some of the most memorable of the Feminist movement. Her current work is directed to cyberfeminist issues: issues regarding women and technology. She is currently employed at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. If you are interested in more about Wilding her website is: http://faithwilding.refugia.net/. You can find Wilding’s artist statement at this website as well.

  Wilding’s performance Waiting was one of her most memorable. The poetic monologue dealt with women’s socially outlined roles and desires. You can read the entire monologue here: http://faithwilding.refugia.net/waitingpoem.pdf. It was a very fascinating and charismatic performance. Waiting was a strong performance because of the Wilding’s choice of setting, actions, and words.

  The setting of Waiting made the performance very powerful. The audience sat in a circle around Wilding, all facing her. Wilding sat at the head of the circle, so that all could see her. This put all focus on Wilding, a very powerful position. Also, the circle the performance utilized mimicked many social functions, specifically social functions centered on teaching and story-telling. This placed Wilding in an environment that demanded attention.

  Wilding’s behavior when performing Waiting made her monologue unforgettably charismatic. Wilding did not make eye contact with any members of the audience. Instead, she left her eyes lowered and indirect. This reflected the boring quality of the waiting Waiting described. Wilding’s movement in her chair also made her performance riveting. It reflected an incredible variety of emotions like nervousness, boredom, anxiety, and pain. This created a very dramatic performance.

  Finally, Wilding’s word-choice made her performance Waiting a very influential work in the Feminist movement. Wilding’s use of repetition and sparse wording made her performance much more successful than if she had written an elaborate sonnet. Waiting utilized the importance of simplicity for getting a message across. This made Wilding’s points all the more poignant.  

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Waiting also plays off the ideas of a woman's life being directed by forces outside of her control, namely "waiting" for the male influence to act, and as a synedoche of women's life, she is the passive carrier for that direction. Wilding's performance took place in the larger scope of the Womanhouse which was designed and produced by FAP, Feminist Art Program at Fresno State in 1970. The performance laid out the expectations of a woman's life during that time, which are still considered typical today. By making these conjectures obvious, the audience hopefully can become aware and find their own personal direction.

[panoramamix]

The Society of Spectacle by Guy Debord (english subtitles)

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I am mostly reblogging this so that I can go back to it later.