Fariz Firdausi's ART 272 Blog

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Artist Interview: Philip von Zweck

Philip von Zweck is an artist based here in Chicago, IL. I had the pleasure of interviewing him about his life and work.

I noticed you were from Slidell! How do you think your background relates to your work, both art-related and otherwise? What brought you to Chicago, and what kept you here?

Thank you, it is an interesting question about how background relates to work and life, etc. but not an easy one. I mean, isn’t that kind of what therapy is about? I feel like I could answer it in a few different ways (and will), and they might all be wrong. But I’ll give it a shot and try to not be on this couch for hours….

I was/ am not a good student.

I think I started school too young and am self-diagnosed as a dyslexic with some degree of ADHD. Shocker but… Louisiana doesn’t have the greatest public education system so when I was really struggling with reading at the end of the second grade my parents put me in a very small secular private school. There were between 16 and, maybe, 20 students per grade. By the time I got to junior high (6th grade) skateboarding was the common fascination of the boys and the small basketball court, which was pretty much the only piece of pavement on the school grounds, was usually taken over by skating at lunchtime. Skate culture was the thing all the guys did, like if there were 30 boys in junior high, I bet 25 had boards. Skating had a tremendous influence on me, especially in relation to art. Not only through board graphics and magazines but in particular street skating trains one to reimagine the built environment as a playground, to imagine and enact potential, and that expands out to looking for the creative potential in any circumstance. Skateboarding also introduced me to punk and post punk music which, in time, led to experimental and avant-garde music which has also been very important to me over the years, especially in terms of community post college.

Another important aspect of being in Slidell was just proximity to New Orleans, one of the greatest cities on earth even if it wasn’t as interested in the versions of contemporary culture as I was growing up. Perhaps it has changed now.

If we’re talking about background relating to work then of course, parents play a big role. My parents seemed to theoretically like what might broadly be categorized as “culture” but they are people of science and that sort of skepticism has defiantly been impactful but not necessarily helpful.

That background stuff said, which probably only scratches the surface: I took the Amtrak from Hammond on my 18th birthday to attend the only college I applied to: SAIC. A few months after graduating I started producing/hosting a weekly radio program which I left after 15 years, so that was one thing that kept me here, plus friends, relationships, etc. I considered moved to LA for grad school but I got a better deal from UIC then Art Center so stayed put. After grad school I taught for a year at Brooklyn College but being broke, lonely, and NY’s lack of allies led me to leave.

Now I have a job I generally like; I’m married with a daughter, two cats and a home; I have a gallery I like to work with; and although I haven’t been active lately some folks still remember me, so I just sort of feel settled.

You've been involved in the Chicago art scene for many years. In your view, how has the art scene changed over time, and how do you see it developing in the future?

I have been involved with a Chicago art scene for a sometime but having moved away from most of my community to the far Southside seven or so years ago, having a child and a pandemic I’m not as active or in the know as I once was so I may not be the best person to ask.

What I think I’m seeing, and this may be more of a 30,000-foot view, is that the art scene I was trained for by SAIC, the one that aspires to blue chip galleries and “encyclopedic” and “contemporary” museums, an art scene which comes directly from European colonialism and white supremacy is, to some extent, becoming  less resistant to acknowledging other art scenes, other traditions or practices. As for the future I can’t make predictions but the hopeful side of me wants more of that.

You work with many kinds of media, including radio and sculpture. What do you like about each medium? How is your approach different for each?

I don’t really think about mediums. I often think more about access and possibilities, how can I take this thing I have access to and use it. You’re going to give me access to a xerox machine, I’m going to make zines; you’re going to give me access to a radio station, now I’m doing a show, or two; you’re going to give me an office, now it’s a gallery…

I used to say that my projects stemmed from two conceits 1) a desire to make stuff, to participate, without knowing what I wanted to make 2) a desire to make work for a non-art audience. These weren’t necessarily represented evenly in every project but for me there is very little difference between Something Else which was a weekly radio program of experiential sound work that only broadcast work submitted for airplay and Temporary Allegiance which was a 25ft flagpole on UIC’s campus where folks could sign up to fly whatever they wanted for a week at a time. They’re both public space so can find a non-art audience and they both allow me to participate without generating some of the content. I think of it as nested authorship, I make the pole someone else makes the flag…

That changed to an extent when I started wanting to free myself from a certain orthodoxy, I wanted to feel free to make anything, not just the sort of projects I already mentioned because that sort of liberation, to feel free, was the goal from the outset and I was in a rut.  My problem remains content, the question of what to make but now I’m outsourcing that less frequently…

Even now though I think my approach isn’t medium specific, but I do like to spend time researching materials and techniques and I guess that would be medium specific. I’d probably be better off if I spent less time doing that and more time actually making things in the studio.

What is it like running an art gallery out of your own living room and office? Would you recommend it to other curators or artists?

There is a long tradition, especially in Chicago, of what’s known as Apartment Galleries or Artist Run Spaces. Some of these, like Western Exhibitions, are now well-established commercial galleries, but many have a short shelf life. For me doing shows in my living room was great, I only worked with people I wanted to work with, with people I trusted with keys to my apartment. I got to engage with these artists one a different level, like, if you’re an introvert it can be hard to just talk to people but doing a show, writing the press release, hanging the art, having an opening, having gallery hours, those are all excuses to connect with people. So for me it was very rewarding and it is a great way to build community. I highly recommend it to artists and curators; I almost think it should be a requirement, like a rite of passage.  I don’t want to do it in my house and they changed the building access policies so I can’t really do it in my office anymore, but if someone wants to give me a space I’d go back to putting on shows and programming.

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Short Writing: Devin Kenny's Talk at Strangers

In the Art, Theory, and Practice department's first symposium Strangers in May of 2015, Devin Kenny gave the first of many talks. Strangers was meant to emulate the space of an underground bar focused on illicit activity and the disruption of ideological narratives. Kenny's talk certainly did not disappoint in exhibiting this theme.

As introduced by his colleague Thomas Love, Devin Kenny is an artist who needs no introduction and assumes the role of a familiar, yet not wholly acquainted with friend. Love notes that Kenny plays with the boundary between idiosyncrasy and commonality—that is, he makes audiences question whether something was a cultural reference or something truly strange. This spirit of playfulness and commentary on mainstream institutions was certainly exhibited throughout Kenny's talk.

After taking the podium, Kenny opened by rapping to a song, in what felt like a disorienting and awakening experience. Kenny then discussed his history with the internet—as a younger artist, he was able to recall chatting on older Internet tools like Usenet and IRC as teen in the era of Web 2.0. Kenny expressed that his opening performance was a form of trolling, a nefarious activity particularly characteristic of Internet users like himself at the time. Indeed, Kenny's talk discussed at length what defined trolling by comparison with troll-like art forms and cultural production.

The first item trolling was compared to was art produced to shock the bourgeoisie. However, Kenny noted that this sort of art was explicitly created to form some sort of culture, unlike internet trolling. Kenny then turned to reference material, noting Wikipedia's definition of "bad faith" and Merriam-Webster's notes on "playing yourself." These concepts were useful in helping Kenny outline the unique experience of being on the Internet. Because of its lack of physicality and pseudonymity, users often engage in bad faith practices and act ambivalent to the concerns of the millions of other fellow users.

Kenny then discussed explicitly three types of internet trolling. The first one, which he discussed at length, is ad hominem attacks. This type of "argument" is often used in internet debates when the debater's platform is on shaky ground, leading them to insult their interlocutor's person rather than argument. As a non-internet example, Kenny presented a clip from Bill O'Reilly in which O'Reilly attacks a journalist for their manner of speech and old appearance. Kenny expresses disdain at the use of trolling even when the subject is of significant importance, like global warming, or a plainly factual nature, like the roundness of Earth. Certainly, in the era of COVID, anti-scientific debate is something the general public is now familiar with.

The other two forms of trolling Kenny explained were doxing and swatting. Kenny noted that doxing, the act of obtaining personal, sensitive information about an internet user, is distinct from blackmail in that doxers do not wish to bargain with their victims—the information is gathered and released for the sake of pure harm. Swatting is also a form of pure harm. In a swatting, trolls will call a false police report on someone, usually a person who is livestreaming a video game. The troll gains nothing other than the enjoyment of watching police storm the streamer and detain them.

Kenny goes on to explicate the nature of trolling as being an end in and of itself. After reciting the 12 Commandments of Flaming, Kenny discusses how trolls came to exist. After the rise of blogging, hacking as a form of sadism ceased to be popular, and trolling in comment sections and discussion forums became commonplace. Kenny notes astutely that trolling cannot exist where there is some hierarchy of power, otherwise it would simply be satire.

It is here that Kenny explicitly dives into the worlds of art and politics. Behavior like defacing street art or the work of the Church of Satan are expressly not trolling, even though they have a similar disruptive nature. These non-troll actions are meant to effect some change in the community or politics, whereas true trolling is done without any such motivation. After going through several more examples of trolling and almost-trolling, Kenny concludes the talk by once again singing a song before opening up for questions.

Another aspect of the talk I found interesting that occurred throughout was Kenny's fiddling with his MacBook. Rather than a curated slide deck, Kenny presented clips and images by searching through his file folders and opening them up individually. Additionally, he would sometimes pause to scroll through a set of images as he talked. If not for the subject of the talk, I would assume this was simply a case of lacking tech-savviness. However, as I am now familiar with Kenny and his style, it seems clear that the talk itself was an elaborate troll and an instance of his tendency to play with the boundary of idiosyncrasy and commonality. Indeed, the talk felt more like an art performance than any sort of lecture.

Overall, I thought Devin Kenny's talk was fascinating as someone more familiar with internet trolling than contemporary art. Seeing these defined in terms of each other gave me a deeper appreciation of both.

[criticalmethodsforfirdausi]

Manifesto: On Generative Art

In this so-called "Information Age," with hordes of data available to researchers and scientists, nothing seems more inevitable than the onslaught of Artificial Intelligence. With every passing week the field inches closer and closer to upending entire systems of labor. AI is

Faster than any human

Cheaper than any human

Willing to work 24/7

Available to anyone on the internet

Easy to use

Rapidly learning and advancing

Capable of things we haven't even imagined

For creatives and artists, these should already be cause for alarm. Why should anyone hire an artist ever again? Any artist who relies on the patronage of others will soon have themselves a formidable competitor. Genuine and insightful work is substituted for generated and insincere creations. But why are practitioners of 2-d digital art not quivering in their boots? It's because

AI learns from humans

Statistical methods and big data feed off of creative minds like parasites, as they scour their data storage for any patterns that they can use to feign intelligence. The artist is now helplessly watching their livelihood crumble to dust, thrust into a future that they made possible without their consent.

But how is it different from the human artist, who themselves must have learned the technique from others before them? Consider, for instance, a child who learns to speak for the first time. Just like any halfway decent AI language model, they display a masterful command of vocabulary, syntax, and morphology. However, a child is no parrot. Their tongue is more than a conduit for information in the same way a text box is. A child can

Obtain food and water

Learn about their surroundings

Befriend others

Act out imagined scenarios

Lie

All with the use of language. These activities are not something we expect or want AI to do. A human child learns the patterns of language from their parents, but it has thoughts, desires, and intentions of its own. For people, language is not just a tool to relay wishes, desires, and thoughts, but also a way of negotiating their place in the world.

On the other hand, AI models are not standalone, independent, cognitive systems—they have a designated purpose. They might understand cultural and ideological systems, but AI does not have enough force to change or shape them.

In short, AI has a vastly different relationship to semiotic systems, including art, than humans do. In its current form, it can at best pick out the syntactic and pragmatic aspects of signs, but never the exact referent. Without a sensory system or memory to speak of, it could never identify an exact object in space, time, or place. It works only at the level of the signifier, recombining them into an interesting but ultimately unimpactful work.

Even in its ultimate form, Artificial General Intelligence, which can do any cognitive task available to humans and more, AI is still distinct in its ability to perform art. The works it might produce are definitively non-human and distinct in quality, for the reason that its relation to the world and society is different than that of a human.

For the reasons above, I argue that AI is no force to be feared in the art world. For now, it is inferior in technique and capability, but it is reasonable to assume that it may rival or surpass human artworks. What is important to remember is that AI is not human, and never will be. The task of the modern artist should be to refine what it means to be sentient, conscious, and living in order for the profession to survive.

[criticalmethodsforfirdausi]

Art Review: Alfred Conteh's It Is What It Is

Alfred Conteh's solo exhibition It Is What It Is provides a compelling depiction of the identity and culture of present-day Atlanta and its people. Conteh's exhibition consists of portraits of African-Americans he encounters around the city. Each portrait is titled with the name or nickname of its subject, and with at least 5 feet in height, they tower over the viewer. Situated in the Kavi Gupta gallery in the West Loop of Chicago, this exhibit provides a larger-than-life glimpse into life on the other end of the country.

It Is What It Is is housed in a single room, confronting the viewer with an unobstructed view of every portrait all at once. However, it is upon closer inspection that the subjects come to life. To start with, each work is incredibly detailed and almost photorealistic, allowing the expression of the subject to be communicated. The works on the left half of the room are half-body or full body shots. Conteh captures their particular body language and demeanor, which conveys a great sense of their personality. To the right are the portraits that depicted their subjects only from the neck up. Although these portraits have less personality and character (in addition to being smaller), they added to the diversity on display. Despite being composed of the same or similar materials, each piece has a unique color palette and impression.

The aspect of the paintings that stuck out to me most was the physical depth of the works. Conteh made use of urethane plastic and brass and steel dust in order to create an impression of old paint peeling off. In addition, the canvases are not framed, as if the painting were truly coming off of or embedded into the wall. In my opinion, the way the paint comes off of the canvas is the highlight of these works, as it adds a physical dimension and concreteness to the piece unachievable with a basic photograph or painting. For me, the peeling immediately evoked images of the rust on decaying and decrepit buildings and bridges. In this way, Conteh suggests that there is a fundamental link between Black Atlantans and the environment they inhabit. Despite a history of hardship and suffering, both are tough and resistant. These two components, the subject of the painting and the material Conteh uses, create an impressive and substantial sense of life in the exhibit.

A further investigation into the person and story behind each work only serves to reinforce the connection between Black Americans and their environment. For instance, one of the most memorable pieces, Stanton Road Water Boys, depicts three young men selling water bottles by the side of the road. As described in the exhibit guidebook, selling water bottles is how they make a living. However, the police often run them off due to their not holding a license. This backstory adds a tragic economic and social dimension to an otherwise amicable and casual depiction of youth. Conteh's decision to pick subjects with a story is part of the instructive nature of the exhibit. Because of the real, lived histories of the subjects of Conteh's work, the exhibit provides a crystal-clear example of the Black experience in the American South.

Conteh's emphasis on the personhood of African-Americans is even reflected in the background of each work. As opposed to perhaps depicting an urban landscape behind them or some other physical feature, the background is strictly of some textured material. As a result, the viewer's attention is focused entirely on the subject and their manner of existence. The material strongly resembles metal or concrete. Here, the peeling of the paint comes into play, as the cracks and ripples overlap and interrupt the figure. This mixing between the subject and the surface they are painted upon seems to express the integration between the subjects and the material makeup of Atlanta.

Alfred Conteh's exhibition here in Chicago is a long distance from Conteh's previous exhibitions. The guidebook points out that his work tends to be shown in the South, particularly Georgia and Alabama. In my opinion, this removal of the works from their place of origin does not do the exhibit many favors. Furthermore, the Kavi Gupta Gallery is located in a majority non-Black neighborhood of Chicago, putting further distance between the exhibit and its audience. Because of the emphasis on people and their stories, the works hardly provide a substantive view of their everyday life. The exhibit provides only a snapshot of their livelihood, and is thus less likely to provoke a discussion about African-American lives.

Nevertheless, It Is What It Is is certainly worth checking out for those who have the time. This exhibit is certainly something that should be experienced in person, as the peeling and material detail will truly shine. I think it is important to consider and contemplate these works fully, as the subject is lifted directly from our present. As a result, each person visiting the exhibit has some connection or relation to the subjects, whether on a personal or national level. It Is What It Is provides, as the title suggests, a way of looking at the world that is truthful and genuine. This exhibit will certainly challenge the way you interpret the world and society around us. The exhibit is open until March 4, 2023, which means there is only a little time left to see it for yourself.

[criticalmethodsforfirdausi]

Short Writing: Iman Issa's Visiting Artist Talk

On January 13, 2023, Iman Issa came to Northwestern to cap off a series of colloquiums. In her talk about "I, the Artist," Issa presented a longitudinal overview of her work and talked in particular about how she used perspective as an exploratory tool in her work, placing into forms she can argue with. It is this argument and the subject of communication in general that Issa was interested in portraying with her work.

Issa began by discussing her first works from 2005, when she moved from Cairo to New York City. Her first works in NYC made use of photography in order to make sense of her new environment and establish a relationship with the city. She explored the city with her camera and took photos of scenes that reminded her of something familiar and recognizable. However, the images turned out rather generic and stock image-like. To rectify this, she began working on Making Places, which introduced into the scene a human figure making use of a tool, such as a ball, megaphone, or flashlight. She tried to identify a specific place or meaning for each of those photos, but ultimately failed. The audience of her work connected Making Places to the concept of urban spaces, whereas Issa was attempting to evoke her own memories. It seemed like Issa had given herself an insurmountable task in attempting to convey what are indeed personal experiences of her own.

In 2009, Issa went back to working with her memory. In addition to using photographs, she attempted to rigorously recreate her perspectives of monuments and significant places in a studio setting. Issa created several triptychs related to monuments. Each triptych first consisted of a photographic component and a material component, which recreated how the monument appeared in her memory. What I found compelling from a technical perspective was her dedication in obtaining the exact right object to represent an aspect of the structure in memory. Then, she extracted a third component, such as an audio listening experience or sculpture, created from the perspective of a third person attempting to reconcile the two original components. She continued her work with memory in the series Material, which in my opinion was one of the most interesting of her works. Each of the installations in Material was accompanied by a description explaining what type of monument she attempted to recreate.

Continuing to explore the properties of monuments, Issa then backtracked to 2007, so that she could present and discuss her work Iraq War Memorial. This work, in the form of a video, was in response to a request for artists to produce what they might think a memorial would look like for the ongoing war in Iraq. Issa discusses her choice to have the narration be disinterested in the actual Iraq War itself.

Issa moved forward again to 2013, where she began her work on Common Elements. Issa had been reading autobiographies about people who had dedicated their lives to a common cause. In wanting to explore how autobiographies become something larger, she extracted snippets from four different authors and printed them for the exhibit. However, these snippets of text lacked any attribution or indication as to which piece it belonged to. Although the temptation of the viewer is to sleuth out which snippet belonged to which book, Issa explicitly calls out in her talk that that is not the intention. This conflict between the critics and Issa's intent was a recurring theme of the talk. I found it interesting how she made this disconnect explicit, as it was something I had not encountered before.

Between 2012 and 2019, Issa worked on Lexicon. Lexicon is a series of pieces with framed text, similar to Common Elements, but with the addition of a construction that represents her response and interpretation of the words. Continuing with this linguistic theme, she wraps up her talk with a discussion of The Revolutionary, an audio piece that made use of the then-nascent text to speech technology to narrate a story. In discussing these works, Issa mentioned how one aim of hers with all these works was to deal with language in the same way that she deals with forms as an artist. However, with The Revolutionary, she struggled to identify the linguistic referent of the works, a quality the piece shared with Lexicon.

The aspect of the talk I found most interesting was her consistent struggle with the subject matter of memory. Issa explains that as memory is inherently subjective and obscure, she even resisted using them for the reason that forms that are more objective are better to argue with. Throughout her work, Issa displays an acute awareness of her own perspective. As shown by the differences in her earlier works and later ones, she has developed a unique way of conveying her perspectives and memories. Overall, I greatly enjoyed getting to know Issa and her work.

[criticalmethodsforfirdausi]

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