Polly Morgan's choir

What is this choir of possibilities you offer me? Where can it take us? What tragic song may be ours, what sort of future may a non-future contain? Then again, isn't it just a question of measure? Stop here. Stop here. The still. The gesture, frozen, with the impossible life no less possible than any other still. Still. Hold it more gently. Don't make your hand into a fist. Let them be flowers, let them be flowers, singing flowers, watching singing flowers, for just another, for just another still.

You can purchase this exclusive Polly Morgan print at murmurart. If you dare hang this on a wall. Read more "Polly Morgan's choir..."

In Hiding

Works by Janine Antoni (the first one is a sculpture - a cast of the artist - and not a photo of a performed action, as is the case with the second one).
And as a bonus, a work by her called Umbillical (2000), made of a "sterling silver cast of family silverware and negative impression of artist's mouth and mother's hand".

Read more "In Hiding..."

DETAILS (A TAXONOMY FOR BEGINNERS)

Here's how it goes:

There are details that hum and details that sing. There are details that accumulate like silt when the artist isn't paying enough attention, and smother the picture.

Then there are details where artists with impeccable technique find refuge from questions of meaning and purpose.


Wrightson

There are details that are diamantiferous...


Briggs

all the way down to the subatomic level....







Then there are details so insanely disproportionate that we can only attribute them to the addiction to drawing (an addiction that has so far bested every methadone program offered by art schools).


Drucker

Of course, we are supposed to forgive the excessive details in Renaissance art; those details were created in an era of new enthusiasm for empirical facts and the physical world, after artists awakened from the long medieval obsession with the next world. Renaissance artists were entitled to their painstaking focus on the natural world, but you'd better have an equally good excuse if you want to get away with the same thing today.


Altdorfer

There are details which are just a playground for scamps.


Wood

Then there are sly details, the ones that seduce the artist with his own skill. Be on your guard, for these are the most dangerous details of all!


Frazetta

There are details that envelop you in a warm bath, and there are details that shimmer like phosphorescence in the sea at night and swirl around you, drawing you deeper into the picture to the place where mermaids whisper that answers do exist.

On those rare occasions when an artist exercises restraint, the few carefully selected details can acquire supernatural power. The single line of a stocking can inspire you to leave a bookstore and go looking for your wife.



Sometimes detail gets lucky and is given a starring role in a picture, as when an artist merges the background with the foreground, making the center of the picture everywhere at once.


Fawcett

Once upon a time, laborious detail was the cheapest and safest way to make sure a viewer valued a picture. Even if the art was no good, viewers were subconsciously flattered that the artist was willing to invest so many hours of his life to entertain them. But the muse became indignant that so many of her supplicants were abandoning her for the god of manual labor, so she invented photoshop. Now even the lure of cheap flattery is gone.


Nicolausson

Scientists report that fully 17% of the artistic details in the known universe are attributable to cowardice; there are artists who add detail to hedge their bets, believing that it is safer to draw lots of little lines than one big one. But artists who believe they can escape accountability by blurring their choices with three or four lines where one would have sufficed are wrong. The fatal flaw with their theory is what the economists call diminishing marginal utility: with each additional superfluous line the artist invests a little less thought or judgment (and adds less value to the picture).

So many lines-- hundreds of millions of them throughout history-- are conceived in hope, only to end up as part of an endurance test for crow quill pens. One can only ponder the wasted potential, the disappointed ambitions of these lines whose lives were stripped of individuality, personality, and any other trait that might have redeemed them. It is, my friends, a holocaust of mind numbing proportions. But who will hear their cry? Read more "DETAILS (A TAXONOMY FOR BEGINNERS)..."

Do You Believe In Magic? Grospierre vs. Radziszewski

a comparison of Karol Radziszewski's To Pee In a Bun and Nicolas Grospierre's Kunstkamera

The two recently* opened exhibitions at the main two contemporary art centers in Warsaw – Zachęta and the Contemporary Art Center – have some clear similarities.

Both exhibitions are witty, explicit dialogues with art history. They both play on the distance that separates contemporary art conventions from what has been somewhat recklessly left behind. Radziszewski exhibits works hidden in the depths of the national gallery’s archives. Some are excruciating to look at, others are curious discoveries or brilliant works. Grospierre goes back to the format of the Kunstkammer and does what he does best – plays with it.

They both focus on the structure of an exhibition, and make it an essential aspect, a sort of a meta-work which goes far beyond the classical idea of curator and uses the ambiguity of this function to the utmost. It is impossible to say where the curator’s role stops and the artist’s begins. This goes far beyond the inclusion of the curator’s own works in the exhibition, or his manipulation of the showing. We never know when the appreciation of the shown works is genuine, and when it is ironic. And because of the artists’ works being part of the selection, the self-irony is, as always, disarming.

However, each artist enacts the role of contemporary art trickster in a different way. Beyond questions of scale, budget and context of production, the two exhibitions are at two opposite sides of an old aesthetic debate. They present two different approaches to the question of value in aesthetics. But first, let me give you a brief description of each of the exhibitions.

Karol Radziszewski’s exhibition To Pee in a Bun, is grandiose. It is a personal take on the collection of Poland’s most renowned and respected public gallery of Modern Art (charmingly called The Encouragement for Fine Art).
In it, he acts “merely” as curator, and also as one of the numerous exhibited artists. Here is what the curator had to say in a conversation with himself as artist :

C: Curators are the ones who make the artists conscious of
‘what’ they have created and ‘why’; often, they also manipulate the
works being displayed, creating their own narratives from pre-existing
works, at the same time disregarding their previous context.
A: Like you did in this exhibition?
C: Yes. (laughs)
A: Why?
C: I treat other artists’ works as elements of a larger whole, like
tubes of paint, from which I have to squeeze out colours in order
to paint one complex painting.
A: That’s a very colourful metaphor . . .
C: Thank you.

We could say that Nicolas Grospierre creates a similar procedure of remixing curator and artist when in the Kunstkamera installation, (which is the size of one of the smaller rooms in Radziszewski’s exhibition), he hangs mainly pictures of objects and photos created by other people, and signs the whole as his piece.
Yet the vectors, here, point elsewhere. Instead of spreading the works and opening, if not exploding, them, he seems to move inwards, closing the space and folding it yet again. Upon entering the "room", we discover a game of images reproducing images reproducing the same space with other images. The game goes on, like a play with mirrors, ad infinitum. The "meaning" is still ambiguous - yet it concentrates, thickens, moves toward inhabiting the space instead of abandoning it.


So what does all of this have to do with philosophical debates?

In an article published in 1936, Stanisław Ossowski, one of Poland’s most notable thinkers from the famous Lvov-Warsaw school of thought, argued against aesthetics understood as the “construction of value systems”. The generalizing of arbitrary aesthetic feelings and opinions to the level of theory should, in his opinion, give way to a sociological perspective on art and the aesthetic, one which would embrace the richness of opinions and points of view instead of imposing them.
This bold proposal was answered the same year by another great mind, Henryk Elzenberg, who argued that no matter how weak and prone to error, our aesthetic judgments remain anchored in value systems that can and should be discussed – as we cannot speak of aesthetics without referring to value, and values are open to discussion.

To put it bluntly: in Radziszewski’s exhibition I see Ossowski’s distancing from aesthetics as a system of values, while Grospierre’s installation follows Elzenberg’s ideals.

These are really two different ways of approaching the world.

Ossowski claims that any discussion about aesthetic values comes down to a power struggle. And this overpowering does not go through a sharing of enthusiasm or disgust, but goes through the attribution of value. Why? Elzenberg explains:

Apparently [the value-based aestheticist] lacks qualifications: he does not have the authority, or the suggestive strength, or the capacity to contaminate others with his feeling. And he is overfilled with the will to rule. Thus, he tries to convince the victim that if this victim feels the same things he does, the victim will be right, he will be somehow objectively correct; and he will be wrong if he dares otherwise.

Hence the need for distance.
It seems Radziszewski claims it on every single step. On one hand, his collection is a moving away from an engaged position, it is rather a questioning of our aesthetic values, of their ever-astounding relativity and apparent insignificance. Who are we to say that this is pretty, and this isn’t? How are we to judge the works that a mere 30 years ago were judged outstanding, while today they’re hidden away in a museum cellar?

On the other hand though, Radziszewski’s approach differs from Ossowski’s philosophy in one respect: being an artist, and not a social scientist, he does not feel the need to eradicate the position of power. To the contrary, he exposes it by exploring it to the fullest. Why bring a porn film into the gallery? Because it’s shocking, and attracts audiences. The aestheticist’s position allows him to create values arbitrarily:

A: You’re a curator — does that mean power?
C: Absolute power! (laughs)
A: Most people believe curators are unfulfilled artists.
C: I think that does hold true for me. Besides, to quote Krasiński
yet again, ‘Art is too serious a business to be left in artists’ hands.’

Grospierre is at a very different point. He does not feel the necessity to question everything – art history has done it sufficiently. Instead, he looks for ways of exploring the place of art today while not undoing it all yet again. Romantic? Certainly. It is a self-ironic romanticism, one that takes great effort in presenting itself as distanced and eye-winking. No wonder Grospierre cites Italo Calvino and Borges: this is the romantic universe that leads the battle for saving beauty. It is not, however, an intuitive aesthetic experience kind of beauty. The Kunstkamera is all about unending layers of initiation. It is a dive into the possibility of image, the possibility of the reflection of things, of some sort of hidden and evolving harmony between the object and the subject.

It reminds one of Heidegger’s conception of art as a window to some other realm we can in no other way describe. Here, this realm always crosses first an image of the reality we know – and so, we never know if this is the level of work-of-art, or it is only a description thereof. Fittingly, the exhibition flyer (a photocopy with clear photocopy marks) explains it all, and more. It seems to impose its vision of the work before we even get to see it.
Take, for instance, the “Trophies” section.

Trophies represent four dog muzzles, belonging to the commonest of mongrels. Bolek, Majka, Eryk and Gucio are four doggies among thousands. In the old Wunderkammer we would find extraordinary or unique natural objects: the horn of a unicorn, huge crystals, stuffed reptiles and other monstrosities. The idea was to show nature in the most surprising forms. Today the world seems devoid of the mysteries and much simpler than in the sixteenth century: the monsters disappeared from biology books. Might it be that the world is less poetic, more prosaic? I don’t think so. Even if science discovered many of nature’s secrets, for me poetry and mystery are still present in nature – we can find them in the most common species, such as house dogs.

The two positions can be called “metaphisical” and “positivist”. Elzenberg’s metaphisicist is

quite aware that there are hundreds of traps on his way; that his individual chances of error are bigger than his chances of winning; he feels that his results are to the highest degree uncertain, endangered by others’ critique and by his own. He feels the constant risk. Yet this risk is also his joy, since, as a psychological type, he has in him – and indeed needs to have – a little bit of a man of adventure and his attitude towards the “positivist” is somewhat like the attitude of a sailor that knows he can drown, towards the landlubber, who has no such fiercely unpleasant risk awaiting. It gives him a sort of satisfaction, but that is not what decides about his behavior in terms of acquiring knowledge; the decisive factor is that he does not want to drown. And that is why he is first and foremost careful. The “Metaphisicist” – or rather, to put it in more serious terms, the valuing aestheticist – knows well that his subject is unclear and unattainable and that what he discovers in it flees any adequate descriptions. Thus, although he is a sui generis racionalist to start off, it is nonetheless easy to discover a trait in him that is the contrary of a strict rationalism: the tendency to treat concepts and judgments as merely a type of highly uncertain symbols of a reality that resists human thought. Thus, he will not suggest that the chiaroscuro in which he sees the thing is full light, nor will he bond himself till death due him part with this or that linguistic formula or even this or that discursive elaboration of his intuition. He – yes he! - has something in him of the spirit of empiricism, as he understands his moving into the subject as a multiplicity of attempts and returns, as the entering in contact, as a progressive bonding with reality. Hence, he has the quality of being critical towards his own achievements, he consciously softens the edges of his statements, and is ready for changes and corrections, and, generally speaking, is moderate and more moderate even.

So do you believe in magic? In the aesthetic wonder of art, that keeps evolving beyond all expectations, that is in some strange way always related to beauty, and maintains some sort of objective common ground, some platform of shared values?
Or did the whole building of aesthetics collapse, leaving us in a void where any new creation of value is so easily ridiculed, art may at best be looked from a great distance, with an ironic, witty, sensitive yet unaffirming stance?

I must say I prefer Grospierre's installation: it's discursive and communicative, inquiring and playful, desperately searching for beauty, or maybe: aiming at beauty. This is a work of a believer. And although I'm not exactly a believer, I can repeat after one of my favorite characters, Samuel Hamilton: I don't really believe in it save that it works.

*It took me some time to write this... and tomorrow is the last day of Kunstkamera! Hurry if you want to see it. Read more "Do You Believe In Magic? Grospierre vs. Radziszewski..."

Lightness is Difficult

As a wise man once said, life is serious, art is lighthearted. And this very description is what I find the most difficult about creating art. There is a tremendous distance between the seriousness of living a life (yes, even an artist's life...), and the light that the art requires.
Or is it the heart?

Both works are by Collier Schorr. Read more "Lightness is Difficult..."

Cattelan vs. Woodman

Looking for the above gorgeous image by Francesca Woodman, I came across Lucilees post where she asks the ever-recurring question about appropriation vs. plagiarism, in the context of the two works below:

Cattelan's installation, untitled, from 2007.

Woodman's photo, untitled, 1977.

The work seemed like a clear quote to me, but I searched a bit more.
Cattelan presented the installation in 2008 at his Bregenz Kunsthalle (the site seems to have almost no working pages) exhibition. It was on the highest floor of the building, and it looked like this:


Impressive. It's quite interesting, though, to see to what extent the presentation of a work can obscure/transform its dynamics. The first picture of Cattelan's piece without this second one creates a significantly different framework. (According to one commentator, this was the first time Cattelan used someone else's architecture to stage his piece.)
My Polish coleagues have linked Cattelan's work to feminism and eschatology. Crucifiction, yes, but what is beyond? Also, the white nightgown suggests a patient, eternal patient, hysteric person...
Although Iza Kowalczyk is right to point out that this work stresses the crucifiction more than the hanging in Woodman's version (where the chair in the front created a classic reference to this way of committing suicide), there is something in both these installations that I found crucial, and missing in the comments: the portrayed woman is not crucified. She is suspended by her own arms. It is a very uncomfortable position and requires significant effort.
There is a play going on here between victimization, self-victimization and empowerment. The subject self-objectifies thus getting higher.
One other thing, concerning a discussion on one of the sites, about eroticism. Is this too pure to be erotic? To me it seems to bring about the right amount of frustration by being so unbearably decent, and yet stretched to the limits . This is much more explicit in Cattelan's work - an installation, bringing about a specific, ambiguous visual perspective. This frustration of power, which plays namely on the the relation between the viewer and his subject, is a trademark of many of Cattelan's works. It's what often irritates me. And what makes me come back. Read more "Cattelan vs. Woodman..."

Higher

Beautiful Steps #2, by Lang/Baumann at the Utopics exhibition in the Swiss city of Biel. Read more "Higher..."

A moment to cherish, although you're not there

(thanks Maria!) Read more "A moment to cherish, although you're not there..."

A GIANT: BERNARD FUCHS (1932-2009)

Bernie Fuchs started out in a most unlikely place and time.

Born in a tiny rural town in the heart of the Great Depression, he grew up with no father, no assets or connections, no art training, and no prospects. He was even missing three fingers on his drawing hand (the result of an accident in his youth).



Yet, Fuchs was quickly swept to the top of his profession on a wave of talent and personal quality. The New York Artists Guild named him "Artist of the Year" by the time he was thirty; he became the youngest illustrator ever elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame; and for over forty years, his sleek, sophisticated, beautifully designed work was selected by one jury after another at the Society as among the best of the year. (Try to think of another illustrator who has been as influential to the field in the latter half of the 20th century.) As Walt Reed wrote, Fuchs' pictures "are probably more admired-- and imitated-- than those of any other current illustrator."

I met Bernie Fuchs a few years ago when he reluctantly agreed to be interviewed for an article I wrote about him. As much as I admired his work, I grew to admire him as a person even more. I never heard him utter an unkind word about anyone; he was humble and sincere to a fault, always quick to give credit to his colleagues, or to anyone who extended a helping hand along the way. But as generous as he was to others, he held his own work to the toughest standards, decade after decade, right up to the end.

I recently made a pilgrimage to Bernie's hospital bed. He was pale, gaunt and under heavy sedation. He could no longer eat or breathe except through tubes. He had lost the ability to speak so he used a little notebook for scribbling short messages to his family, who had gathered around him for the end. I looked down at his notebook and saw he had been sketching a human ear. I said, "Wow-- still drawing? You don't give up easily, do you?" He gave me a tight lipped smile and with a tough, defiant look in his eye shook his head no, he didn't give up easy and he was damn proud of it. That attitude, which was the core of his greatness, was still inside him then and would be the last part to leave.

The expression in his eyes alone was worth the trip to Connecticut.

Last night, Bernie's work was done. The wave that took him to the pinnacle of success in his field swept him onward to another shore.


From The Wolves, 1996
Read more "A GIANT: BERNARD FUCHS (1932-2009)..."

LOVE IS A STAR-GUIDED BRICK

In one of his most famous sonnets, Shakespeare claims that true love is the permanent thing, the polar star by which we can all guide our ship. Love, he explains, never alters its path no matter what kind of impediment it encounters:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark [ship]....

But here is an opposite view from Yeats. For him, love is crooked and bewildering. And you can forget about that polar star business, love will continue to drive us nuts until those stars have all gone out:

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.

The following episode from the ongoing love/hate saga of Krazy Kat and Ignatz mouse shows Ignatz determined to overcome all obstacles and consummate a brick toss:



Notice how Herriman has provided us with a polar star to make sense of the visual pandemonium. That sun appears to bounce up and down on the horizon, but we soon realize that it is the horizon (along with everything else in the picture) that is bouncing around. The sun is the only thing that remains constant. It is the fixed reference point that gives these drawings the continuity necessary for us to figure out what the heck is going on:











Herriman doesn't side with either Shakespeare or Yeats. Artists speak in pictures rather than words, so Herriman does not need to worry about reconciling the two conflicting texts. Leave that dirty work to poets and lawyers. Pictures enjoy an ambivalence (and a truth) that words can't match; Herriman depicts an undeterrable Ignatz and a polar star such as Shakespeare might expect, but any love that involves being brained by a brick probably belongs on one of those crooked corners Yeats describes.

Herriman does contribute the insight that sometimes the only resolution of conflicts is found in the limp exhaustion of the couple (whether from happy activity or sad).

Read more "LOVE IS A STAR-GUIDED BRICK..."

Don't you hate it when big commerce does something real good

See Sprint's Plug Into Now project (launched about a year ago and created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners). Get impressed. And then goddamn it, move forward, do things no commerce can think of. Because it does have the feel of some excellent live art that's been around in the recent years. And let's say it feels just a tad late (and shallow, and not moving forward - but it's selling a product, for chrissakes!). Just late enough to feel that artists can still handle the commercial pressure.
Yes, they've been counting on viral marketing.
Yes, they think they might tap into a blog like this one.
Yes, they just did.
Because they're good. Is it a sin for a commercial enterprize to be good?
Well, they have the means. Get it while it's now. They play around with this idea, and they do it well.
I'm glad they do - it's an inspiring project. It makes me want to move beyond this. Now.
Read more "Don't you hate it when big commerce does something real good..."

Moebius Bach

Read more "Moebius Bach..."

FLAGS: ART ON A STICK

Putting an image on the end of a stick and waving it around adds emphasis that you don't get when the same image is lying flat on paper.

For example, soldiers aren't likely to follow a nice lithograph into battle no matter how tastefully it is framed. They would not die fighting to keep their enemies from taking down their country's oil painting. And while composers have written stirring songs to the "star spangled banner," no one seems to have been similarly moved by a star spangled silk screen print.

I don't know if this is due to the fact that moving images attract more attention than static ones, or that graphic symbols typically serve different functions when they are placed on a flag, or just the excitement of marrying a picture with the wind. But somehow images are a totally different artistic experience when they are placed on a banner in a parade, or a flag leading a charge, or a tapestry wafting in the breeze.

Here are some designs on flags and banners that I think are really splendid:

It would be hard to appreciate-- or even see-- the subtleties of these lovely designs once these banners are in use. You just have to remember what they looked like. In that sense, loose cloth is an odd medium for visual art. But I suppose the wind contributes its own designs; it may sacrifice detail but it gains a lot of drama.


. Read more "FLAGS: ART ON A STICK..."