contemporary art

The 66 goes past Coolidge Corner?: John Ewing’s Virtual Street Corners

Virtual Street Corners, created by Boston artist John Ewing is scheduled to go live, 24/7, on June 8 at Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner and Nubian Notion in Dudley Square. Videoconferencing terminals, transplanted from well-outfitted boardrooms to storefront windows, will connect the two sociologically disparate neighborhoods with audio and video, giving residents and denizens a chance to virtually converse and interact. Ewing ran a successful pilot of the project two years ago and has since been awarded grants, including the Knight News Challenge grant in support of creative journalism, as well as in kind donations to hone the operation and better connect the two communities that are so close (2.5 miles) and well connected by the 66 bus route, yet so far apart. Over the past two years, project logistics are about the only things that have changed in Brookline and Roxbury (neither Verizon nor Comcast served Dudley Square in 2008); it will be interesting to see what direction the conversation goes and if these communities do indeed become more neighborly over the next month.

QHow did the idea for this project originate?

AI did this project Symphony of a City in 2001, actually that probably came from doing murals around the city of Boston. One thing I really loved about doing the murals was being on the street corner in different neighborhoods. I’d be there and I’d be painting over the course of two or three months usually. And people would just come up and start talking to you and I’d get to learn all about the neighborhood, I’d meet all these interesting characters and it was really interesting for me. And I liked that. But when I’d go to the next neighborhood, I’d talk about something I heard in the other neighborhood and people didn’t know what was going on in the neighborhoods that were very close to them, it just seemed kind of strange to me. So, Symphony of a City in some ways addressed that, we tried to take characters, eight different characters, from all over the city and wire them with web cams and have them go around and then put their lives up on the Internet. I think this was a similar concept of trying to find ways, using digital media, to connect these neighborhoods that seem like they’re out of touch with each other.

QWere Coolidge Corner and Dudley Square your first choices for places to install the project? Did you have any other location ideas?

AAt one point I was thinking about doing it between Tel Aviv and Ramallah and New York City. I actually got pretty far along in that process and I had folks who had suffered family deaths in each of the conflicts there and they were going to kick off the whole thing. And because of time differences, politics, a whole bunch of difficulties, in terms of logistics, it fell through. But I still thought it was a great idea. And I thought, well why don’t I do that at the local level, and like I said, it made a lot of sense from the work I’ve done before. So, I figure I’ll do it on the local level, if it’s successful, a lot of people have already come to me saying oh it’d be great if you did it here, you did it there, did it there. I think it’s a pretty easy to grasp concept and so people, when they hear about it, they immediately think of these other places because its true in all the cities around the US.

John Ewing Virtual Street Corners Map

Dudley Sqare Travelers vs. Coolidge Corner Travelers (John Ewing)

QHow did you choose the videoconferencing sites in Coolidge Corner and Dudley Square?

AWe’ve been really fortunate in Coolidge Corner in that you have the Brookline Booksmith and it’s just worked in all kinds of ways. They’re an independent bookstore, they’re very supportive of the arts, they get speakers to come there, and they’re into encouraging dialogue, so it sort of fit very much into what they’re about and they’ve been great about supporting the project. And they have this little cove in the store where it’s set back a little from the street and creates this perfect place to install it. Coolidge Corner is a place where people are out late in the evening, especially in the summer.

One of the difficulties we’re going to have in Dudley Square is there are a lot of buses going by, it’s sort of a center because of the bus depot here, but they interrupt the conversation a lot because they’re so loud. And it’s very active in the day, but after five or six it tends to clear out because there’s not a lot of restaurants and places people can hang out. It tends to be a little desolate.

QWhat are your primary objectives for the project?

AI’d like to get a dialogue going between the two communities and allow people to define for themselves how they feel about their own community and maybe how they feel about the other community and get a back and forth going. It allows people to find the issues for themselves. In addition to dialogue, I hope they’ll actually get on the bus and go visit the other community and be there physically. Once they’ve established a connection talking, then hopefully they’ll go to the other places. Additionally, another goal is to raise important issues and get other media to cover those issues. Hopefully, through this project, people will raise things from each community that haven’t been addressed by the media or have been viewed differently in the media’s eyes and try to get it from citizens’ perspectives.

QHow do you plan on engaging the audience?

AIf you introduce topics that are interesting then it stimulates more conversation, so that’s the idea here. I have community organizers in each neighborhood who are going around and trying to find people to address different topics, like education, politics, youth talking to each other and criminal justice systems, to get dialogues going everyday in hope that other people will pick up on them and continue them. I also have three citizen journalists from each neighborhood who are going to do a daily report. Their job is to go around the neighborhood, try to see it from different perspectives and come back almost the same time everyday and give that report just as a way of allowing people to get a different perspective. Then you also see their reports online so you can go and follow each reporter as they go throughout the month.

We’re also going to have an interactive smaller screen, so you can text to it from your cell phone, we’ll be able to play video clips too. So you’ll have one live screen where people are communicating, but then you also have a side screen where other things can go on, the news reporters can show videos and photographs. It can actually pull down Tweets, so if people are Twittering in the neighborhood it can pull those messages down around a particular topic. The idea is to activate the screen in as many different ways as we can.

QDo you have a goal number of people to reach?

AObviously we’d like as many people as possible to come out. The idea is to make it really accessible. One of the things this project allows is a lot of people to participate in the conversation that may not go to the museums or might not go to different lectures at universities. It feels like it’s a much more on the street, accessible medium and it’s real easy for people to participate. And so we hope to engage all types of different people.

QWas a bus route/T track essential to the camera locations?

AI liked the fact that it emphasizes that it’s so easy to get back and forth. These two communities are connected with public transit and yet they don’t go back and forth. It’s clear that its not a logistical or transportation issue, it’s obviously some kind of social issue and that’s what I wanted to address.

John Ewing Virtual Street Corners Photo

Coolidge Corner photo from the June 2008 test installation (Ewing)

John Ewing Virtual Street Corners Photo

Dudley Square photo from the June 2008 test installation (Ewing)

QThe mapping project in 2008 was very striking, tell us about it. How did you select the participants?

AI felt like there are these two communities and people don’t go back and forth between them, but how do I visualize that for people, or get people to immediately see that in a concrete way? I had this idea; I’ll ask people in each location to draw in a map their route and how they got to either Dudley Square or Coolidge Corner that day. I just asked the first 25 people that came by, or that were willing to do it, and they drew their routes and it was much more dramatic than I even would have expected. It’s almost like there’s this line and nobody crosses over that line.

QDid you have any specific influences in creating Virtual Street Corners?

AThere certainly have been other similar projects like this such as Hole in Space in the 80s using satellite TV and a project where they connected New York and London with a telescope. Those projects really focused on connecting communities over distance, so we can talk from east coast to west coast, and isn’t it great that we can do that with this technology. The thing that I think is different here is that I’m really trying to use it more to bridge a social divide rather than a distance divide. The sites that you choose to put the screens is also very important.

I think there’s this real push in the art world that you have to create these super original pieces and I really kind of work against that. I really think what’s important is: it effective? is it interesting? And certainly it’s going to be the first time in Boston, the first time for these neighborhoods. I’m sure ninety percent of the people who participate will never have heard of these other projects and that’s important for me. I think its sort of an influence of marketing or something where you have to create this product that’s brand new, and bigger and better. For me, what’s much more important is that it accomplishes something and it’s an interesting project.

For further information about Virtual Street Corners, check out the website as well as Ewing’s blog as part of the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab.

The Sol LeWitt MASS MoCA Show: Don’t wait until 2033

If you haven’t yet made it out to North Adams for MASS MoCA’s Sol LeWitt exhibition, I suggest you do, and that you do it before the weather turns while you can still more or less have the museum to yourself. Only Massachusetts’ own little haven of contemporary art could pull something like this off, and it’s the exhibition’s scale (a 27,000 sq ft. space over three floors refurbished specifically for these 105 massive wall drawings) that makes it work. In a sense, Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings lend themselves to a retrospective like this. They don’t really have to be acquired, nor insured for vast sums of money or securely transported. They only have to be drawn, though, if you watch one of the timelapses, you’ll see that this isn’t easy work. LeWitt’s early drawings may have been monotonously demanding to execute, but the latter stuff of the exhibition’s upper floors required dauntingly precise masking, projection, drafting, and measuring techniques, as well as a scientific eye for how colors meet. 22 of LeWitt’s former legion of assistants teamed up with 30-odd students from Williams, Yale, and Mass College of Liberal Arts, among others, to execute these 105 murals.

LeWitt’s cubic sculptures and wall drawings are some of the purest pieces of conceptual art out there. They ask all the right questions and engage their viewers in all the right ways, without falling into the post-pop (in a few cases, even pre-pop) traps of being nothing but witty one-liners or being so esoteric and controversial that their value is determined by how many people they piss off. LeWitt’s ideas were clear and articulate. His Sentences on Conceptual Art and Paragraphs on Conceptual Art are some of the first stops in the Conceptual Art literature. Of varying complexity (and simplicity), they are purely about the process of art-making and investigate the nature of the artwork by democratizing the process that creates it, and pushing the work itself to the end of the equation.

Left: Wall Drawing 414. Right: Wall Drawing 413 (Drawing Series IV (A) with India ink washes. 24 Drawings. March 1984. India ink wash. LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut)

The MASS MoCA exhibition is an exhibition of process. So much of it focuses on the execution of the drawings–including a documentary video of mostly time-lapsed footage aptly accompanied by a Steve Reich soundtrack. You’re not allowed to forget that LeWitt only provided the instructions for these drawings and that’s how LeWitt would’ve wanted it, with viewer’s attention pulled from the individual artwork and re-focused on the idea behind the body of work presented–on the concept. What’s so beautiful about this (and I don’t know if this is how it’ll work out, but I’m sure LeWitt would’ve wanted it this way) is that when 2033 comes around and it’s time for MASS MoCA’s Building 7 to be filled with some other unprecedented exhibition, everything can just be painted over. Not returned, loaned out, moved back into storage or another gallery, but just painted over as if MASS MoCA has decided on a different color scheme. The art-making machinery of the idea of LeWitt’s instructions remains intact, while the work itself is ephemeral, temporary, and almost a second thought.

Of course, LeWitt doesn’t throw aesthetics to the wind. They’re certainly here, across 3 floors and 4 decades in countless permutations of shape and color and on an immense curatorial scale, with drawings flowing into one another in a retrospective that provides a career survey more thorough than anything I’ve ever seen. The 1st floor brings together drawings from the 1970s height of Conceptualism and Minimalism–the most historically important portion of the show and LeWitt’s career. I’ve decided to skip dwelling on specific works here, since there are just so damn many and they’re so easy to browse on the exhibition’s excellent website. These early works, mostly in pencil, are diverse in their own right. They alternate between the psychedelic arrangements of lines you might find on a dorm room poster, and the plainest geometric seriality. Some are broad and vivid pen drawings, others are pale and washed out. One connects the gallery’s architectural points and many mirror the precision of architectural drawings. You see LeWitt establish his basic vocabulary of shapes and lines, woven into patterns like textiles under a microscope.

Wall Drawing 584H (Squares, divided horizontally and vertically into four equal parts. Within each part, color ink washes superimposed. The squares are bordered by a ½-inch (1¼ cm) white band and a 4-inch (10 cm) black band. January 1989. Color ink wash. Courtesy of the Estate of Sol LeWitt)

Floor 2 brings us into the 1980s and 90s, when LeWitt began to experiment with pigment-based ink and acrylic washes, as well as crayon, ink, and chalk. Geometric rainbows of bright, washed out colors are formed by LeWitt’s then expanded visual vocabulary of broken lines, arcs, and simple figures and forms. Some drawings evoke television test patterns and others convey basic geometric progressions like mathematical proofs. The aesthetic begins to become more rooted in color than the patterns themselves.

Floor 3 (late 1990s to the artist’s death in 2007) further expands on LeWitt’s shape bank with waves, bars, and more complex curves. These drawings have a child-like expressiveness in their bright acrylic coloring. We get vivid high gloss colors that, despite the simplicity of the forms, are visually confusing–combining in such a way that blurs and distorts your vision as if you were trying on someone else’s glasses. The latest and final drawings in the show are part of a so-called “scribble” series begun in 2005. They show LeWitt’s return to his original medium of graphite pencil, but where previously in the show the medium mostly dictated the aesthetic, these stand out from the early graphite works of the 70s. His previous plays (through the 90s) with light and color are desaturated, producing simple luminous shapes done (or described) in six different densities of scribbles that don’t appear to be drawn, but rather to emanate from the walls themselves, creating textures and visual confusion for the viewer. White and black sway in an ordered field of gradations, almost as if we’ve zoomed out on an immense early drawing so that the repetitions of graphite lines become more congested and uniform.

Wall Drawing 880 (Loopy Doopy (orange and green). Semptember 1998. Acrylic paint. Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts.)

Left: Wall Drawing 631 (A wall is divided into two equal parts by a line drawn from corner to corner. Left: alternating diagonal black and white 8-inch (20 cm) bands from the lower left. Right: alternating diagonal black and white 8-inch (20 cm) bands from the upper right. January 1990. India ink. Collection of Frances Dittmer.) Right: Wall Drawing 614 (Rectangles formed by 3-inch (8 cm) wide India ink bands, meeting at right angles. July 1989. India ink. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the artist.)

Herb and Dorothy (2008)

I missed the short run the Kendall Landmark gave the 2008 documentary Herb and Dorothy a few months ago. Apparently, I also missed it on PBS’s Independent Lens, but we all know how hard it is to keep up with PBS’s schedule. I was finally just able to see it on video. The film follows the legendary New York City art collectors Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, who built up a valuable collection of Conceptual and Minimalist art with only their meagre salaries as a postal worker and librarian. The couple stuffed their small apartment with artwork nobody else really wanted to buy, the kind of art people love to hate, at least when a significant value is applied to it. With Dorothy’s salary covering the rent and other necessities, Herb’s was devoted entirely to buying art, mostly directly from artists in studio sales (which pissed off a few gallery owners).

The Vogels have been the subject of many print features, but never a feature film and since almost everything remotely interesting gets a movie made about it these days, why not? It’s a shame the film came so late because I feel the Vogels (especially Herb) might have been a little more interesting ten or twenty years ago. Today, they’re a little past their prime and aren’t as interesting as subjects as one might have thought. Certainly their story is interesting, as is their collection, but the collection itself doesn’t fill a feature length film nearly as well as it filled their cramped one-bedroom apartment. Herb, although his passion for art is still visible, isn’t as sharp as he probably was. And Dorothy seems more caretaker to her aging husband than anything else, though she cares for their drawings as well as she does for Herb, keeping them draped in sheets to prevent fading from exposure to light, refusing almost anyone a peek.

These are people that have a Sol LeWitt in their bathroom, if you can really have a Sol Lewitt line drawing. Their apartment was so stuffed with art objects by the likes of Richard Tuttle, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Chuck Close, and Pat Steir that they had to give it all to the National Gallery in ’92, which could only absorb a portion of it. The rest was distributed to museums across the country in the Vogel 50×50 program. Another movie is being made about that. What’s really amazing is through all these years they never sold a thing, when one sale in the 1980s could have substantially raised their standard of living, at the least providing them with a little more space to display (at the least store) their collection. After the artwork was transferred to the National Gallery the Vogels were provided with a small annuity, which they spent on more art to fill up their apartment once again. The film never divulges what the Vogels pay for art and one gets the sense that they’re receiving substantial discounts from artists like Richard Tuttle, whom they used to partronize and have now hit it big. So, maybe if they did start to sell, artists would be less generous, ending this practice of reverse patronage.

The Vogela at The Clocktower with a drawing by Philip Pearlstein behind them, 1975 (Nathaniel Tileston)

One can’t watch the film without having at least some appreciation for the Vogel’s taste, that seems less ahead of its time than it is simply passionate and open in its aesthete sensibility. One also gets the sense that they simply bought so much, that some of the artists they bought from were bound to become famous and valued by the Academy and the art market. The Vogel’s dialogue on their collection is strangely devoid of the critical engagement offered by those art historians, critics, and sometimes even artists interviewed in the film. Strange in that we’re not used to hearing about Sol LeWitt without this dialogue, because this art is so difficult to get or like without it. Conceptual art depends on a dialogue with these eponymous concepts.

The one-bedroom looks like something on A&E’s Hoarders and that’s a difficult thing to reckon with their aesthetic sensibilities. One usually associates art collections with clean gallery spaces and posh apartments with imported steel and leather sofas. Even storage rooms furnished with flat-files and crates are organized, clean, and catalogued. The space usually agrees with the art it contains and, I think often in the case of private collectors, fulfils the same visual tastes the art does. The Vogel’s cluttered apartment contrasts so much with the spacious studios and rooms of the critics and now-famous artists interviewed (not to mention the clean lines of their Don Judds), that one feels a little bad for them, like they ended up with the short end of the stick.

Herb and Dorothy is a love story about the couple’s marriage and their life-long love affair with art. The Vogels are so removed from the art market, never having bought or sold at auction, that their (now gifted) collection is unpolluted by lucre and it’s very much because of this that the art world holds the couple in such high esteem. If one takes any thing away from the film, it’s the respect the art world has for the Vogels; these people who have a more ardent and unadulterated love for art than almost any artist, gallerist, or critic. The Vogels are still buying art and have toured with this movie on the festival circuit, spreading their collecting doctrine: buy what you like, can afford, and can fit into your home (there’s some flexibility to this last one).

Notes from the MFA: A Mummy Head, Footed Canopic Jar, and Madonna

Egyptian art always freaks me out a little. Although I certainly don’t believe aliens built the pyramids, it is so alien, and often so much more unsettling in its abstractions of human form than modern or contemporary art is supposed to be. Those wide dark eyes on the statues and paintings, the lines of sculpture evoking forms of gods from a mythology that’s visually entirely separate from ours, and even though everyone learns about mummies in kindergarten, one is never completely at ease when reading wall-texts about priests pulling brains out of nostrils. Perhaps the oddity de resistance (though not necessarily an art-object) of the MFA’s current exhibition The Secrets of Tomb 10A is this mummy head to the left. Not only were its brains removed through its nostrils, but apparently, mummification distorts facial features so much that the priests performing the embalmment ritual must re-shape the eyes, nose, and mouth by hand– even painting on eyebrows. Adding to this wall-text gore, the tomb’s inhabitants, a Governor Djehutynakht and wife, were found in 1915 by a MFA-Harvard archaeological team literally torn to pieces; body parts scattered about the walk-in-closet sized tomb. Grave robbers in search of valuables tucked away between linen mummy wrappings and in nested sarcophagi did not exercise much solemnity in their trade, so much so that scientists do not know to whom this head belongs.

[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" movie="/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/mummy.swf" width="400" height="166" targetclass="flashmovie" align="right" play="true" loop="true" allowfullscreen="false"]Get Adobe Flash player[/kml_flashembed]The head is actually billed as something of a medical oddity. It gets it own room, a space meant to simulate the actual dimensions of the tomb, and is the subject of an ongoing forensic investigation closely followed by the local press no doubt in a respectable effort to increase attendance by adding some mystery and a sense of the ongoing to these relics dug out of the MFA’s basement. This CSI-looking display loops on a large television next to the head.

I found this footed canopic jar (below) interesting; the Egyptian equivalent of a kitschy cookie jar, except for human organs rather than cookies.

jar

Other highlights include a large selection of wonderfully resorted model (pilgrimage, transport, kitchen, funerary, fowling) boats, thousands of lines of hieroglyphs, beautifully intact cedar coffins, and impressive efforts to translate these artifacts (and the archaeology itself) into a historical narrative and impart a sense of history (as well as historical distance, this stuff is over 4000 years old) without being dry.

Downstairs in the contemporary art gallery is Contemporary Outlook: Seeing Songs, an assortment of artworks relating to the song, from Stuart Davis’ masterpiece Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors — 7th Avenue Style (1940) to Candice Breitz’s video installation Queen: A Portrait of Madonna (below, wall-text here). This massive video installation loops YouTube-like karaoke videos of thirty individuals singing Madonna’s Immaculate Collection in its entirety. I was actually forced out of the gallery by a muddled rendition of Like a Prayer, though I stayed just long enough to record this clip. The video wall actually inspired a, if you can believe it, MFA karaoke/vogue party in July with MC Malcolm Rogers. Of course, video art is no stranger to camp or activities much more pedestrian than karaoke (and I suppose nothing is more pedestrian than being buried), but they at least need to turn the volume down on this thing, because whatever conceptual message it’s itching to convey about the consumption of global pop culture is clouded by Madonna nostalgia, a cheap effort to reach out to younger patrons (that looks like it would have benefited from some jello shots or something), and YouTube voyeurism–that for most seems to trump actual engagement or aesthetic experience. Regardless, the Davis should get a sound-proof room for this exhibition.

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

Boston’s Lecture Scene: Not John Stoddard Anymore

If BSO tickets or the MFA’s new prices are draining your entertainment budget, Boston’s gamut of free lectures, often followed by receptions with free food and even a little free booze, offer engaging and educational relief. The MFA’s Shapiro Celebrity Lecture Series may fetch $30+ for a ticket, but Boston’s universities rarely charge even a nominal sum. Because of their prestige and wealth, institutions like Harvard and MIT attract distinguished speakers on the national and international lecture circuits and play long term host with innumerable writer, artist, faculty, fellow, or scholar in-residence programs, where public lectures are de rigueur.

The Fluxus Manifesto

The Fluxus Manifesto

Tuesday, Alsion Knowles, one of the more indelible names associated with the Fluxus movement, gave a talk at Radcliffe (see here for more Radcliffe events, she speaks again on Nov. 12th at 6:00 p.m. at Harvard’s Carpenter Center). Fluxus begin in New York in the sixties and was immensely influential on performance and mixed media art. It absorbed a lot of John Cage’s ideas about indeterminacy in performance and was really an exciting and iconoclastic thing in the sixties that cemented the careers and styles of many of the young artists associated with it. Although Knowles had some cool slides to show, Fluxus didn’t seem all too radical Tuesday afternoon in the posh setting Radcliffe Gymnasium provides. Maybe I’m just not that hip, but I’ve found reading about Fluxus more exciting than I found it Tuesday, so here’s something to look at if you’re so inclined.

Julia Robinson, “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles’s Beans and Variations,” Art Journal (winter 2004): 97-115 (11.5 MB PDF)

Tuesday night the Coolidge showed Victor Fleming’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) as part of their Science on Screen series. Another great freebie for Coolidge members. MIT Museum director John Durant gave a great pre-movie talk about how Victorian medicine, and later Freud, informed the novella and the film adaptations. A perspective drawn from the history of science offers a great context for Jekyll and Hyde–the black market dealings in human cadavers that Robert Louis Stevenson grew up among in Edinburgh, Darwin’s idea of the descent of man from beast, and early psychological theories of the two-sided brain manifesting itself with dual personalities. And later, substantially informing this film, Freud’s theory of the Id. Spencer Tracy’s Hyde chief malignity is his (implied) sexual violence towards Ingrid Bergman, his ‘evil’ unchecked masochistic libido. American Beauty screens December 7th, with a talk by Daniel Gilbert on happiness.

*******************************************************
Here are a few upcoming events of note.

John Picker, author of Victorian Soundscapes and an essay on Yankee Doodle and The Star-Spangled Banner in Harvard University Press’ recent tome A New Literary History of America, is delivering something called Transatlantic Acousmatics at MIT. I have no idea, but that only makes it more appealing.
Oct. 22, 5:00-7:00 p.m., MIT Bldg. 4-231

The Norton Lectures by Orhan Pamuk continue through November 3rd.
4:00 p.m., Harvard’s Sanders Theater
Oct. 26, Museum and Novels
Nov. 3, The Center

Shaun Donovan, United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, will speak at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Oct. 26, 6:00-7:00 p.m., Piper Auditorium

Harvard’s Carpenter Center current exhibition ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 has a bunch of associated events.

The new exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center Tobias Putrih & MOS: Without Out opens Oct. 23 and is also accompanied by a number of free talks.

Harvard’s Tanner Lectures by Jonathan Lear:
Lecture 1: Becoming Human Is Not That Easy, Nov. 4, 4:30 p.m., Lowell Lecture Hall
Lecture 2: Ironic Soul, Nov. 5, 4:30 p.m., Lowell Lecture Hall

MIT Communications Forum: Culture Beat and New Media: Arts Journalism in the Internet Era
Nov. 12, 5:00-7:00 p.m., MIT Bldg. 66-110
Boston’s own Bill Marx of Arts Fuse joins Doug McLennan of Arts Journal to discuss the changing face of arts journalism.

For more, keep an eye on The Harvard University Gazette calendar and Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum. And check the links in the appendix section of this site.

It all reminds one of the Golden Age of the public lecture:
lecture-poster

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (and Copyright)

I suppose I’m responding here more to activity in the local blogosphere (see Joel Brown and Thomas Garvey), than I am to the ongoing news of Shepard Fairey versus the AP and his recent statement that he knowingly falsified evidence, because I follow those blogs more closely than Shepard Fairey news and my problem with his work isn’t unoriginal images, but rather unoriginal ideas.

warhol-flowersDuring the Fairey exhibition, I felt Fairey was, albeit between the lines, inappropriately billed as some kind of new Warhol. Can you imagine Warhol reacting like Fairey did to this lawsuit? like a teenager getting caught with a bag of pot or someone who’s being sued by the RIAA for downloading the latest Godsmack album. Warhol was sued in 1966 by Patricia Caulfield, who took the picture he used for his Flowers (right). He ended up settling out of court, giving her a couple paintings and royalties on his profits (or cash and paintings or just money, depending on where you read about it). I can imagine Warhol replying to some of the questions Fairey has been asked with “God, but I love the AP, they can have the picture back” or “But, it’s just so much easier to get pictures from Google.” I actually don’t think Fairey was in the wrong by using the image (at least I hope not, because I steal pictures all the time for this blog), but he certainly is now for falsifying evidence, countersuing the AP, and threatening other artists for appropriating his work.

While certainly a comparison can be drawn in terms of their modes of appropriation, Fairey falls far short of Warhol in terms of the depth of that appropriation, though he is considerably more garrulous. I think a simple juxtaposition illustrates how different they are; mainly, how great Warhol was and how silly Fairey can be. Below are Fairey’s apology and the first few seconds of the excellent Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film.

STATEMENT ON ASSOCIATED PRESS FAIR USE CASE

In an effort to keep everyone up to date on my legal battle to uphold the principle of fair use in copyright laws, I wanted to notify you of a recent development in my case against The Associated Press (AP).

On October 9, 2009, my lawyers sent a letter to the AP and to the photographer Mannie Garcia, through their lawyers, notifying them that I intend to amend my court pleadings. Throughout the case, there has been a question as to which Mannie Garcia photo I used as a reference to design the HOPE image. The AP claimed it was one photo, and I claimed it was another.

The new filings state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong.

In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images. I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment and I take full responsibility for my actions which were mine alone. I am taking every step to correct the information and I regret I did not come forward sooner.

I am very sorry to have hurt and disappointed colleagues, friends, and family who have supported me in this difficult case and trying time in my life.

I am also sorry because my actions may distract from what should be the real focus of my case – the right to fair use so that all artists can create freely. Regardless of which of the two images was used, the fair use issue should be the same.

- Shepard

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

ICA, Do It Your Way

After seeing the Shepard Fairey exhibition at the ICA and witnessing all the hype drummed up by Fairey’s ‘arrest,’ I’ve felt that the museum, as an institution, has this very tangible presence in what it puts on. When you go see the Titians, or whatever, at the MFA you don’t get a sense of the MFA as an institution with an agenda and a marketing strategy. But, the ICA’s arms and hands seem to be right out in the open. Maybe this is because Renaissance art, for example, sells itself with big name artists, loans from big name museums, and high-value works, while contemporary art doesn’t. To get people to pony up the $15 admission to the relatively small museum to see an artist they’ve probably never heard of before takes a marketing miracle every time an exhibition comes to town.

To me, the success of an ICA exhibition, now that most interested New Englanders have seen the place at least once, comes down to that one picture that saturates the local media in advertising and reviews, serving as a single frame trailer to the entire exhibition. With Fairey, we of course had the Obama OBEY poster, and now although Obama’s countenance is a tough act to follow, we have the dismantled VW Beetle Cosmic Thing.

Contemporary art is a really tough sell. It doesn’t benefit from a popular cannon of famous artists or pictures of inordinately high value. Instead, to most, it’s obscure, inaccessible, and well removed from any kind if popular aesthetic. It engenders reactions like, well, I could do that, and questions of its aesthetic worth, price tag, and place in a museum. When I visit the ICA, there’s always a crowd around the TV in the mediatheque, while the iMacs remain unoccupied except for tour groups and bored children, of people seeking meaning in the looped videos the ICA assembles and produces. I don’t think the ICA anticipated the popularity of that space, or they would have replaced the computers with benches facing a larger screen.

Elote_clasificadoMost visitors require some sort of justification of the exhibition’s status as art and video provides that, as well as some level of meaning and analysis and it serves to authenticate, by showing on a screen, whatever is occupying the gallery space.  It’s also simply something to do, a way to occupy a block of time, because if you’re not really that interested, you could probably see Damián Ortega: Do It Yourself in about 15 minutes. It’s only 19 works. Many patrons need to justify their $15 and trek down to Courthouse Station. A quick stroll around a relatively small gallery space doesn’t do that, at least for tourists and locals used to the MFA. Of course keeping people in isn’t really the ICA’s problem, it’s getting them there. A contemporary art somebody doesn’t bring in crowds. It takes an image powerful enough to, though media saturation and local ubiquity, become iconic. Is Ortega’s Elote clasificado (2005, right) eye-catching enough to hook Web browsers or Globe and Phoenix readers? I don’t think so. But Cosmic Thing (2002, below) certainly is.

Ortega's 'Cosmic Thing' (Melissa Ostrow for The Phoenix) and an example of the technical assembly diagrams it recalls

Ortega's 'Cosmic Thing' (Melissa Ostrow for The Phoenix) and an example of the technical assembly diagrams it recalls

Curator Jessica Morgan speaks on ‘Cosmic Thing’

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Bug is iconic in America. We’re drawn to the cars even when fully assembled. When one’s strung up like this, I don’t think we can resist. Cosmic Thing doesn’t even seem foreign, it looks American and it’s as hip and aesthetically sensible as the Obama OBEY poster. The thing could be an advertisement for Volkswagen. In fact, similar stuff was. VW was years ahead of its time and famously off-beat in its advertising. Have a look at some of the old Beetle ads below and see Roy’s VW Ad Archive for more. See a resemblance? They remind me not only of Cosmic Thing itself, but also the press and advertisements for the exhibition.

Beetle Ads from the 1960s

Beetle ads from the 1960s

Now, the power Cosmic Thing‘s image in ICA marketing campaigns shouldn’t detract from its power as art. Plenty of canonical American art relies entirely on popular icons; Warhol, Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman’s Complete Untitled Film Stills. Cosmic Thing (and the Bug) are actually iconic for very different reasons in Mexico. First, the car is still widely in use, and second, as we hear from Jessica Morgan’s commentary, most Mexican Beetle’s are assembled from junk yard parts, very much in the DIY spirit. Cosmic Thing becomes a sculptural assembly manual, an illustrated diagram translated into a 3-dimensional gallery space, so that one may walk amongst the parts ‘pictured.’ Other than being visually arresting without any context and as cool to look at as a good VW ad, that’s what Cosmic Thing does for me. I’m sure IKEA would be interested in commissioning a few sculptures.

skin Do It Yourself is unfortunately weighed down by the metaphors we’re expected to see and the mealy-mouthed critical rhetoric used to describe them in the the audio commentary and wall-text. Authoritative talk of deconstructed systems, the dynamism of the everyday, and subversion through the ephemeral, doesn’t really ring as true as one would expect. The art isn’t as conceptual as it would like to be. References to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom seem superficially applied, and like the captions of New Yorker cartoons we just don’t get. As has been widely discussed, Orterga’s previous occupation was as a political cartoonist and I think it’s due to this that some of the work breaks the rule they teach you on the first day of art school: don’t make one-liner art. For example, Skin (2007, right). Here Ortega hired a saddle maker to emboss the blueprints of three modernist apartment complexes on leather. The plans hang fragmented from the ceiling in strips. OK, utopian modernist housing goes flop, I get it. Or, False Movement (Stability and Economic Growth) (1999) precariously stacks 3 rusty oil drums atop a spinning platform. If only we had only seen this one last September!

A highlight of the exhibition is 120 Days (2002, below). I think it’s best viewed sans the Marquis de Sade reference. Going off of the feminine form of the Coca-Cola bottle, he had Italian glass blowers distort the familiar basic bottle shape into all sorts of positions that are meant to resemble Marquis de Sade-esque sexual positions, while at the same time contrast artisan glass blowing with mass production and celebrate the diversity of the female figure. I was struck by some of the bottles’ resemblance to the reproductive organs of flowers. I thought of some of the more rudimentary glass flower models at The Harvard Museum of Natural History.

'120 Days' (2002) and a flower diagram

'120 Days' (2002) and a flower diagram

I would still recommend everyone go. You have until January 18th and it’s certainly better than seeing Harry Potter props at the Museum of Science. It is one of the few big exhibitions of the year, and that’s probably why so many, including myself, are hard on it. But, unless you’re an ICA member or college student that receives free admission, I might think about going on Target’s dime some Thursday evening. Because, when one visits a museum, he really shouldn’t feel obligated to get his money’s worth.