I realize that I have been dormant for so long and part of that is a lot of work coming up over the last few months as far as museum installation gigs go, but this lag in activity is also due to a roadtrip I took. In many of the art magazines lately I have been seeing adevertisements for a place called Paducah,KY. Since I had some down time coming up and was going to Chicago I thought that I would road trip it with my girlfriend and see what Paducah is all about. Many small towns and some large cities, like Detroit, have been turning their broken down neighborhoods over to artists in order to revitalize these areas and give the local economy a shot in the arm. Well, after a little tour around Paducah and talking to people who came down under such an idea as cheap homes & land, I have basically found this out. The game plan works much like this: the towns offer the land and buisness spaces to artists for cheap (yeah, its about time), in turn the artists have to come armed with checks and bank standings close to $500,000.00 in liquid assets, along with a buisness plan for the local community that is traditional and not necessarily arts related. After talking to one shop owner, I came to find out that many of the first people to undertake this to set up galleries had to shut up shop. As to why these people shut up shop and left, that was not really clarrified but one can only imagine that a serious lack of support from the community probably was a big help to that.
In my own walking around the area, I could not see much support for the arts other than the performing arts. The visual arts in the area seemed to be second if not third fiddell to commerce. The most upsetting thing is that when we walked around the town to check out the "gallery" spaces it turns out that the display spaces for the art was over tables in resturaunts, behind the counter at a chocolate shoppe, and in back rooms of a convenience store.
This is a point that many of us in the art world are completely aware of, that in the view of the public we are just picture makers, that what we do is just decorate the living room, but as artists we make the investment in excavating the soul for meaning for years, moving to urban centers which are far from families and friends. When we attend higher education for years, sometimes as many as a decade learning the history of visual culture, learning how to read and interpret images and learning how to push our own visual culture forward, we are left still to the mis-conception that we are decore makers. This is not the case. Ever. So, cities and towns like Paducah and Detroit, before you decide to make an offer to basically give land to artists in exchange for us to revitalize your shattered images, ask yourself what you are giving us to help you out. A little advertising in a couple of magazines is not enough and if you can't figure it out, then hire someone who knows what is happening in the arts and can get the ideas right.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Guard Talk
I want to say thank you to Whitney Gardener, creator of HeyWhitney@blogspot.com , for brainstorming with me and helping me come up with this idea for the blog.
While at the Met for the closing weekend of the Francis Bacon show we were able to start this out. "Guard Talk" is a section of the blog that is going to be dedicated to the people who have to live with the work day in and day out in the institutions, the guards. Those people who tell you to step back and that there are no photos in the museum finally are going to freely voice their opinions. Which is great because there are a lot of guards in this town who are artists to begin with. Some famous artists started out as museum guards, like Brice Marden who used to guard at the Jewish Museum. He said he learned so much from looking at a show of Jasper Johns' work in the 60's. Without that time to just sit and look at the art who knows what he would have done.
"Guard Talk" presents: Met Museum guard Carl and his opinion of the Francis Bacon show as well as a candid point of view about another favorite spot for him to guard. He had this to say, and I am paraphrasing, that the "Bacon show is a great and fun exhibition but dark and disturbing at the same time. There is probably no better time for this show to be up." As for Carl's most favorite place to guard at the Met, it is the roof garden. The current sculpture installation is a work by the artist Roxy Paine. You can see an installation video on the Met's YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/metmuseum). Carl said that he likes it up there because of the view and fresh air but he had to, on opening night, tell people who had a little too much to drink not to do chin ups on the sculpture. Lesson one for all sculptors: make sure that your work can with stand a lawyer in tux on his third martini trying to impress his date by showing her/him how strong they are. Thanks Carl for the great story.
While at the Met for the closing weekend of the Francis Bacon show we were able to start this out. "Guard Talk" is a section of the blog that is going to be dedicated to the people who have to live with the work day in and day out in the institutions, the guards. Those people who tell you to step back and that there are no photos in the museum finally are going to freely voice their opinions. Which is great because there are a lot of guards in this town who are artists to begin with. Some famous artists started out as museum guards, like Brice Marden who used to guard at the Jewish Museum. He said he learned so much from looking at a show of Jasper Johns' work in the 60's. Without that time to just sit and look at the art who knows what he would have done.
"Guard Talk" presents: Met Museum guard Carl and his opinion of the Francis Bacon show as well as a candid point of view about another favorite spot for him to guard. He had this to say, and I am paraphrasing, that the "Bacon show is a great and fun exhibition but dark and disturbing at the same time. There is probably no better time for this show to be up." As for Carl's most favorite place to guard at the Met, it is the roof garden. The current sculpture installation is a work by the artist Roxy Paine. You can see an installation video on the Met's YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/metmuseum). Carl said that he likes it up there because of the view and fresh air but he had to, on opening night, tell people who had a little too much to drink not to do chin ups on the sculpture. Lesson one for all sculptors: make sure that your work can with stand a lawyer in tux on his third martini trying to impress his date by showing her/him how strong they are. Thanks Carl for the great story.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Iconography Obsession
Iconography Obsession: A Response to Ken Johnson’s “A Museum’s Mission in Artists’ Statement”
In a recent article in the New York Times, Ken Johnson wrote about an exhibition at the Newark Museum entitled Unbounded: New Art for a New Century. He begins with a truth that I see a lot in the museums that I work in which is collecting contemporary art from collectors who might not be getting the best advice on what to buy leads to contemporary collections made up of bad art. Mr. Johnson begins his article as such “For museums, collecting contemporary art is a crapshoot.” With that statement I am in total agreement. Who knows if the artists that are getting big gallery shows are going to have a lasting importance upon the history of art or if they are just fashion plates representative of a timed aesthetic? The critic then continues on to make a comparison based upon geography that:
“Just across the river, several big museums collect and exhibit contemporary art for a huge, international audience that is interested in all things new, experimental and provocative. Not to know the once proud, now down-at-the-heels city of Newark, but why would anyone come here to see cutting edge art when it’s so easy to do in Manhattan?”
This statement made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. In hearing a lot lately about unique architecture along with biographies on the radio of Merce Cunningham and Andy Warhol, these stories have just really brought into sharp focus the driving force of the ambitions of this city: iconography. New York City itself is an icon on numerous facets, from Elise Island to the WTC, from the Yankees to Lincoln Center. This is a city obsessed with iconography. Many of the buildings listed in a recent article on cutting edge architecture were in Manhattan, the Guggenheim and the New Museum both, being raved about for their iconic additions to the architectural fabric of Manhattan. While listening to a biography on Andy Warhol, there was a statement made about how he arrived at the Campbell’s soup can works. Basically he was in search of something in front of him to give him some inspiration. Leave it to a designer turned “artist” to lock on to Campbell’s soup. For someone who later would outshine his own work it is fitting that Warhol built his ladder of fame out of the iconic status of an already American icon.
With all of these collisions coming to a head right now, seeing New York City’s obsession with being an icon of culture in America has just never been clearer. This city collects and lays ownership over icons in a manner similar to kids going after baseball cards of players like Sammy Sosa, Derek Jeter or Babe Ruth. Even when they can’t have the iconic person themselves they retain the object that makes the icon an icon. Where would the Met be with out Hirst’s “Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”? It would still be an icon of cultural collecting but now it spans all of time from the ancient to the contemporary.
If New Yorkers are only obsessed with the fashionably avant-garde then where does the real thought provoking work end up?
In a recent article in the New York Times, Ken Johnson wrote about an exhibition at the Newark Museum entitled Unbounded: New Art for a New Century. He begins with a truth that I see a lot in the museums that I work in which is collecting contemporary art from collectors who might not be getting the best advice on what to buy leads to contemporary collections made up of bad art. Mr. Johnson begins his article as such “For museums, collecting contemporary art is a crapshoot.” With that statement I am in total agreement. Who knows if the artists that are getting big gallery shows are going to have a lasting importance upon the history of art or if they are just fashion plates representative of a timed aesthetic? The critic then continues on to make a comparison based upon geography that:
“Just across the river, several big museums collect and exhibit contemporary art for a huge, international audience that is interested in all things new, experimental and provocative. Not to know the once proud, now down-at-the-heels city of Newark, but why would anyone come here to see cutting edge art when it’s so easy to do in Manhattan?”
This statement made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. In hearing a lot lately about unique architecture along with biographies on the radio of Merce Cunningham and Andy Warhol, these stories have just really brought into sharp focus the driving force of the ambitions of this city: iconography. New York City itself is an icon on numerous facets, from Elise Island to the WTC, from the Yankees to Lincoln Center. This is a city obsessed with iconography. Many of the buildings listed in a recent article on cutting edge architecture were in Manhattan, the Guggenheim and the New Museum both, being raved about for their iconic additions to the architectural fabric of Manhattan. While listening to a biography on Andy Warhol, there was a statement made about how he arrived at the Campbell’s soup can works. Basically he was in search of something in front of him to give him some inspiration. Leave it to a designer turned “artist” to lock on to Campbell’s soup. For someone who later would outshine his own work it is fitting that Warhol built his ladder of fame out of the iconic status of an already American icon.
With all of these collisions coming to a head right now, seeing New York City’s obsession with being an icon of culture in America has just never been clearer. This city collects and lays ownership over icons in a manner similar to kids going after baseball cards of players like Sammy Sosa, Derek Jeter or Babe Ruth. Even when they can’t have the iconic person themselves they retain the object that makes the icon an icon. Where would the Met be with out Hirst’s “Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”? It would still be an icon of cultural collecting but now it spans all of time from the ancient to the contemporary.
If New Yorkers are only obsessed with the fashionably avant-garde then where does the real thought provoking work end up?
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Introduction
Artchek is a space meant for an open discussion about the state of the visual arts. Granted that there are a lot of people out there writing about art, but a discussion about art is not just supposed to engage in discussions around techniques used to create images. A discussion about art is meant to engage the viewer with a contemporary discussion about the state of the culture and the art is meant to spur on this discussion by acting as a catalyst for this back and forth to take place. Artchek is an open space free of institutional allegiances and all the other areas that tie up tongues when talking about the art world, or any world for that matter. The exhibitions that are discussed will be as varied as they can possibly be, hopefully bringing a well rounded look at the arts at a variety of levels.
Throughout my study of art, art history and art criticism, many ideas have been tossed across my field of vision. For myself, one particular notion introduced by Noel Carroll has stuck with me through the last decade of study, Neo-Wittgensteinianism. Inside this sometimes convoluted introduction to post-modernism is a very simple concept which makes sense, especially now. Art is an open concept. Restricting it to disciplines and visual language is counter-intuitive to the nature of being creative. With this simple idea Artchek begins.
Throughout my study of art, art history and art criticism, many ideas have been tossed across my field of vision. For myself, one particular notion introduced by Noel Carroll has stuck with me through the last decade of study, Neo-Wittgensteinianism. Inside this sometimes convoluted introduction to post-modernism is a very simple concept which makes sense, especially now. Art is an open concept. Restricting it to disciplines and visual language is counter-intuitive to the nature of being creative. With this simple idea Artchek begins.
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