ART008: Week 8 Readings

Week 8, MOCA Latte, +Redcat & Chinatown

MOCA | Kippenberger:

One of two retrospectives featured at MOCA, the Kippenberger occupied the greater volume. There was a great variety of works being exhibited from a synthetic forest installation to a series of postcard size works, and everything in between. I gravitated to two, similarly themed pieces of mannequins standing in corners each having a “naughty habit” embedded in them that had caused them to be bad and forced to stand in the corner.

MOCA | Bourgeoise

The other retrospective that had a far greater impact and intimacy this day. The Bourgeoise retrospective was being touted as spanning nearly 100 years of art history since she was 97 years old and still a working artist. A bit of hyperbole, but an immense body of work that saw her vomiting and then commenting on various issues she had faced throughout her life in regards to men, her family and sexuality.

+Redcat:

Seemingly an afterthought for the Disney Concert hall, Redcat occupies a side stretch of space between the parking structure and the street – neither place you want to spend time loitering in looking at art, no matter how upscale. The locale seems like nothing more than afterbirth and comes across with as much appeal. I passed the exhibition area a number of times before I was able to identify my classmates sitting at several listening /viewing stations for an exhibit of a politically-motivated peace meant to draw attention to the inmates at Guantanamo Bay and their plight. It seemed unsuccessful as there wasn’t enough attention being drawn to the space.

Chinatown Gallery:

A lovely hole-in-the-wall place (literally, there were holes in the walls) located so far off the beaten track that we may have been the first one to beat it. On the ground floor were a series of pieces evoking native folk-art pieces produced by indigenous peoples but further modernized to attribute meaning and commentary to the interplay of high-art principles and low-art crafts. There were a number of “eye of God” yarn sculptures that were beyond the normal 2-d framework. Several planes of varying colors were interwoven to push the vernacular into the outer world and dialogue with itself.

On the upper floor there was a bathroom that I seriously had to wonder if it was meant to be a restroom or if it was some kind of participation installation since it had the distinct appearance of something out of the Saw movie franchise. Several pieces were interspersed on the upper level, each representing various contemporary movements ranging from abstract expressionism to post-modern transparency photography.

ART006: Week 10 Readings

Berger, “Ways of Seeing” Ch. 6-7

• We see publicity images every day
• The publicity image belongs in the moment and impacts us briefly every time
• They must be continually renewed to remain in the moment
• They refer to the past to speak of the future
• We accept the totality of publicity images as part of the climate
• Publicity, it is thought, equals choice and freedom
• Every publicity image confirms and enhances every other
• Publicity proposes that we transform ourselves or our live by buying something
• Publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour, is effective because it feeds on the real, is always about the future buyer, is about social relations, not objects
• Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance
• The envied are like bureaucrats
• The purchase of the product will make the purchaser envied by others
• The publicity image steals the love of oneself as one is and offers it back for the price of the product
• A quoted work of art in publicity denotes wealth and spirituality
• Publicity speaks in the same language and about the same things as oil paintings
• Publicity is the culture of the consumer society
• Oil painting was first a celebration of private property
• Publicity has to use the language of the spectator-buyer to achieve its ends
• Oil painting reflected the life of the spectator-owner whereas publicity seeks to make the spectator-buyer dissatisfied with their life
• All publicity works on anxiety
• The power to spend money is the power to live
• The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generation the notion of glamour.
• The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be.
• Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy
• Publicity is essentially eventless.
• Publicity recognizes nothing except the power to acquire

Wired, “Art Attack”

• Banksey as an art terrorist and culture jammer
• Held a gallery show in a train tunnel
• Alias to escape prosecution for past “works”
• Art as the last of the great cartels: made by a few, bought by a few and shown by a few
• Banksey began as a standard graffiti artist
• His pieces are more accessible than modern art
• Uses animals as stand-ins for humans
• Seeks to carve art out of a sterile environment

Abrupt, “Culture Jamming”

• Change will come if enough people understand the problem rationally and intellectually
• Advertising imagery is has not been rational for a long time
• Culture Jamming is the viral introduction of radical ideas, using the enemies resources against itself which causes damage to blind belief
• Culture Jamming takes the form of “subvertisements”, reclaims public spaces

ART008: Week 7 Readings

“The Baudouin/Boudwijn Experiment” and “24^th Foucalt”

How does one get in touch with one’s self? Take a break. Take a moment, a day, to deviate from the norm, your routine, and just be. Think about who you are and what defines you. Determine what you want to define you and what you don’t want to define you. Holler’s piece was about just that very process. Through deviation it is possible to find yourself.

Hirschhorn, a devotee and fan club president of Michael Foucault, sought through Foucault’s philosophy to achieve the same goal. Use of group therapy in an art setting, the collective works of Foucault in its various forms and experiential acts would unlock the mind and achieve a great understanding of oneself and of society for all the participants. The use of art in philosophy and philosophy in art,

ART 008: Week 6, Rarefied and Dry Air

Noah Purifoy Foundation:

The Purifoy “collection” seemingly strewn haphazardly across the desert floor in an inconsequential patch of land, inspires even as it criticizes the society from whose detritus it sprang forth. The pieces range from scathing to playful. All are impressive for their insightful and inspired use of “ready-mades” no doubt found foraging the local landscape and businesses. The ubiquitous array of bowling balls and pins calls forth the most likely form of entertainment in a region where such may be hard to come by. So one either bowls or makes art – depending on where the beer and the girls are going to be.

Advice in the Desert:

The exodus to the site was equal to the Promised Land we reached. We even had our own Moses and some “priests” to guide our Art 8 nation to God. Though the “piece” had to be activated by our involvement, it seemed the landscape was already active and waiting for us – waiting for any and all to step into this alternate realm. The site had an energy independent and yet connective to us. All of us felt buoyed by the location and embraced its “otherworldliness”. The presence of others seemed to detract from the location for me and I found myself seeking my own locations to commune with the real spirit of the place that gave itself over willingly to our unworthy feet.

Pioneer Town:

Felt like a hybrid of a western movie and a gang shooting “Drive-by”.

Motel California?:

Death is everywhere. Gram Parson died in as banal a location as you could probably find. The recreation of the room was unsettling yet arbitrary. It could’ve been anyone who died there (and probably more than a few have) but a semi-famous musician gave it enough of a draw for a certain generation that a so-far perpetual interest is maintained for fear of relinquishing his name to the ether and correspondingly the generation who were attracted by him as well.

ART 8: Week 6 Readings

“Ten Appearances” and “Notes on Funk”

Both these pieces speak to the act of “becoming” as the primary focus of participation. For “Ten Appearances”, the participants first head away from their center, their directed and established identity, towards the forest, the unknown, the wild. They carried a line of thread, a lifeline, a ancestral linkage to their community. Upon entering the forest and gathering up their individual lines, they found they weren’t connected any longer – to each other or their source community. They were given no further instructions, no societal influence or conventions to prod and funnel the any particular direction and then they had to determine their next course of action without guidance save their own minds’. For those that returned to their origin point they were documented in their emergent state – their “becoming – and handed a photograph of another who had traversed the same life rite cycle. At that point, they had become aware of their own becoming and transcendence of themselves, baptized by the pure, driven snow.

Adrian Piper’s piece also functions in the becoming of those ignorant to educated, from prejudiced to enlightened – of growth. Piper in sense was seeking her own becoming through the instruction and dissemination of the gospel of funk on those heathens not indoctrinated to the primal and syncopated forms of the genre. As one caught between the two worlds of white and colored herself, she sought to forge for herself an identity even as she imparted the manna of funk from on high to the acolytes entwined in the emotive and profound rhythms of the ages past brought into the post-modern world.

ART006: Week 8, 11/19 Readings

Palmer, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism for Beginners: Saussere”

• Plato argued that it was impossible to name everything, only the essences which are “real” for Plato, not just abstractions
• Words name ideas not things
• Saussere: what defines a word is the relation which it stands in to other words in the system
• Different languages produce different concepts
• Ready-made ideas do not exist before words
• Signified (concept) | Signifier (sound image)
• Signs are arbitrary, there is no natural connection between the signifier and the signified
• Onomatapoeia: words that imitate sounds in Nature
• Plato felt that all words emulated reality
• Saussere: the conventions between signifier and signified are arbitrary also
• Language is the whole system, Speech is the actual act of sounds
• Things are defined by what they are not
• 2 studies of language: 1) Synchronic: the study of all relations among the different parts of a linguistic system at any given moment in time and 2) Diachronic: the study of the evolution of a language and its history’s impact on linguistic events
• Associative Relations (Paradigms) and Syntagms
• The mind is a system of operations that generate structures of similarity and differentiation in terms of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships
• Language cannot be interfered with by individuals

Palmer, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism for Beginners: Barthes”

• Essentialism is a belief in the priority of essences, of Platonic form
• Sartre: existence precedes essence
• Barthes: Essentialism is a bourgeoisie ideology attempting to form reality
• There are no unities, only pluralities
• The tendency of dominant forces to define reality in such a way that their way is the “natural way”
• The world of fashion as a system of signs
• The food industry as a semiological system
• Myth is a form of discourse that tries to make cultural norms appear as facts of nature
• Only revolutionary language escapes myth
• Text as a “linguistic spectacle”
• No text can have only one meaning, the more meanings the better
• Literature is the critique of meaning

Barthes, “Myth Today”

• Myth is a type of speech, a system of communication, a form
• Everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed in discourse
• Social usage added to pure matter
• Objects are not inevitably a source of suggestiveness for myth
• Human history converts reality to speech
• Message through odes of representation
• Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its material
• Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication
• Myth is a semiological system
• Semiology deals with meaning and value, forms, significations apart from their content
• All criticism must consent to the ascesis, to the artifice of analysis
• The more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism
• Semiology postulates a relation between three terms: a signifier, the signified and the sign
• Myth as a 2^nd order semiological system
• Myth has 2 semiological systems: 1) a linguistic system and 2) myth as a meta-language

Barthes, “Empire of Signs”

• The dinner tray as a definition of a painting, but subject to recomposition due to eating
• By composing your choices you make what you eat
• Rice as a clump of a whole yet made up of much smaller constituent pieces
• Soup as aquatic, an elixir
• Japanese food as a “written” food
• Writing as the act which unites the same labor what could not be apprehended together in the mere flat space of representation
• The smallness of the food as emblematic of clarity of purpose
• The chopsticks as metaphor for purpose
• Subiyaki stew as an event, a minor odyssey, the Twilight of the Raw
• Japanese cooking as tutelage of Rawness

ART008: Week 5 Readings

“Project for the Experimental Art Series, Rosario, 1968” and

“I am searching for a Field Character”

We are all living in a world of art with everyone as artists – we just know it yet. These two artists would have us believe that to understand our role as artists – all of us, every one – would allow some grand unification of humanity and usher in the Age of Aquarius. All we have to do is identify our innate creative powers and express them and utopia will well up from the overwrought minions of society. So why not lock all of us in little rooms until we discover these fundamental truths and we’ll let ourselves out.

I find the views expressed in these 2 articles to be both naïve and distinctly dangerous. In their own heads, under their own ideologies and influences, things may seem oh so simple. In Beuys’ case, his idealism is both endearing and tragic but Carnevale’s just sets us up to be continued victims of violence that we continue to perpetuate ourselves. I fail to see any distinction between Carnevale’s “artistic” act and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Nor do I feel that Carnevale is doing much more than Mengele did in service to the Third Reich – another well known “progressive” movement. The intent may seem “artistic” in comparison to previously denounced social experiments, but that doesn’t lead people anywhere but Hell.

Art006: Week 8, 11/17 Readings

Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”

• Every work is art is a child of its time
• The art a culture produces can never be repeated
• However, the same goals may be striven for generation after generation
• The awakening soul is under the influence of materialism
• The movement toward the primitive must be short
• The spiritual life as a triangle going from a wide base of “today” and narrowing to a point where only a single man may be
• In every division, artists dwell and produce art comprehensible to his companions at their level
• The spiritual triangle moves slowly forward and upward
• The largest of the lower division are Marxists who are dragged upward by those above them but are unable to fathom the work performed by them
• The next lowest division also gets dragged upward but resist the efforts
• The higher divisions use the words of others to justify their atheism
• In the higher divisions other disciplines emerge: science and art, literature and music
• In the higher level, the fear exists that the man revered today was ridiculed yesterday, and the higher one goes, the sharper the fear
• External principles of art can only be valid for the past and not for the future
• The spirit that will lead us into the realms of tomorrow can only be recognized through feeling to which the talent of the artist is the path.
• Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive realms where spiritual change becomes noticeable in real form.
• The arts have never in recent times been closer to one another than in this latest period of spiritual transformation
• 2 effects when viewing color on a palette: 1) the physical effect of being charmed by the color itself and 2) the psychological effect and contemplation
• “tasting of colors” in highly developed spiritual people
• All senses may be interconnected
• Color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul

Rothko, “The Romantics were prompted”

• The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places.
• Not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental
• The unfriendliness of society can act as a lever for true liberation for the artist
• Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur
• The most important tool the artist fashions is his ability to produce miracles when they are needed
• Shapes: are unique elements in a unique situation, are organism with volition and a passion for self-assertion, move with internal freedom, have no direct association with any particular visible experience
• The archaic artist, as part of a ore practical society, was acknowledged as needing to create intermediaries to interact with the ordinary
• Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama

Newman, “The Sublime is Now”

• The beauty of the Greeks has been the bugbear of European art and aesthetic philosophies
• The European artist has been continually involved in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity
• Longinus, Kant and Hegel each built theories of beauty from the Greek ideal
• Greek art is an insistence that the sense of exaltation is to be found in the perfect form
• The goal of the Renaissance artist was to make a cathedral out of man
• The Impressionist set to destroy the established rhetoric of beauty by the insistence on a surface of ugly strokes
• The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.
• Instead of evoking a new way of experience life they were able only to make a transfer of values
• The failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to the blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation and to build an art within a framework of pure plasticity
• Modern art, caught without a sublime content was incapable of creating a new sublime image and unable to move away from the Renaissance imagery
• We are asserting man’s natural desire for the exalted for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.
• The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.

Gottlieb, “Statement”

• The ole of the artist has always been that of image-maker
• Different times require different images
• Abstraction is the realism of our times

Newnan, “The Ideographic Picture”

• The abstract shape the artist used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding
• Shape as a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex
• The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea, the only thing that has meaning

Newman, “The First Man was an Artist”

• It is not enough for the artist to announce with arrogance his invincible position, but to also fashion it
• The sciences rushing in to claim the non-material world
• Science found the drive to conquer to protect the security of its own state of physics
• The dominance of science over the mind of modern man has been accomplished by the simple tactic of ignoring the prime scientific quest; the concern with its original question what?
• The importance of “what” in scientific inquiry
• The first man was an artist
• The aesthetic act always precedes the social one
• The necessity for dream is stronger than any utilitarian need
• Speech was of the first act at expressing man’s knowledge of his situation
• Language as an animal power
• The human in language if literature, not communication
• The myth came before the hunt
• Man built an idol before fashioning a tool
• The god image was the first manual act
• The artistic act is man’s personal birthright
• In our inability to live the life of a creator can be found the meaning of the fall of man

Lucie-Smith, “Abstract Expressionism”

• Abstract Expressionism had its roots in Surrealism which was rooted in Dadaism
• Internal strife weakened the movement
• European exiles established their presence and attracted converts in New York
• The Surrealists provided the catalyst for the birth of Abstract Expressionism
• The idea of a continuous dynamic was to play an important part
• To role of connecting to the wholeness of thought to be able to produce art
• The work of Pollack was trimmed down after completion to the desired dimensions, not pre-determined
• Inner reality as the only reality
• The artist being tortured with self-doubt and tormented by anxiety
• 2 sorts of abstract expressionism: 1) involving figuration and 2) purely abstract and tranquil
• The painting becomes both a focus for the spectator’s meditations and a screen before a mystery
• The bold central imagery became one of the trademarks of the new American painting
• Rhetoric in painting: the deliberate use of vague, expansive, generalized forms
• The significance in recognition of the symbol and its historical connection
• White writing: a way of covering the picture surface with an intricate network of signs
• The success of the Abstract Expressionists was to have important global consequences
• The faith in paint and canvas to communicate is being questioned, nothing further evolved
• The effect of the new American art on Europe was not altogether happy.
• Europeans misunderstood it
• The importance of Abstract Expressionism was arguably more to culture as a whole than to painting in particular.

ART008: Week 4 Screening

Joseph Beuys: “Healing of the Western Mind

The artist as shaman and healer. Beuys’ belief in art to affect change and healing for society was total. His “performance” from arriving in an ambulance to living in a cage with a fox for a week and then departing in an ambulance, was overt and blunt even as those bearing witness struggled to comprehend the why of his act. The why’s certainly outnumbered the answers for the audience, even when it shouldn’t have. The weeklong incarceration alludes to the captivity of the flesh for the shaman who seeks to transcend the material plane to communicate with the sacred. That Beuys as the shaman resides in the same cell with a captive animal reads to the viewer as the modern entrapping both the sacred and the ancient manner of accessing it. Newspapers, or dialogue, from the “real” world were brought in each day as parishioners climbing into the confessional to offer up their daily penance for absolution, The shaman took the secular prayers and put them to good use as a repository for his own fecal transmissions. Beuys survives the weeklong event and exits in the same emergent mode illustrating the precipitous and life-threatening state of the spiritual communication of the world towards the sacred – if only if the message is recognized and heeded.

ART008: Week 4 Readings

“Notes on Elimination of the Audience” and “Letters”

I don’t believe it is possible for non-partisan participation in art in the strict, academic sense. In “Notes”, Kaprow elucidates this position and I side with him. To make art with non-participants is a contradiction in terms. It is simply not possible. If you try, you won’t get art, you’ll get reality with no more meaning that any other random acts that occur throughout the world that never amount to anything or have any meaning imparted or available to them. The act may have meaning for one or more participants but it is not possible for all present to engage or establish a context for all. Thus, it is not a matter of getting those outside your sphere to enter in and engage in it, but that the sphere must be expanded to include others as factions in the act.

Killing the audience seems a bit melodramatic and certainly counter-productive. It is the role of the audience that must be deconstructed and redefined and repurposed. To engage in activities that by design are meant to impart some method to the madness yet ignore the mad seems, well, mad. If nothing else, it would have all the significance of masturbating in the shower singing love songs to your soap. Does it have any meaning outside your shower? Do you long for the sensuous curves of your Zest? Would others think you insane for your soapy lover? Not if you build a shower big enough with soap for all that they ay engage in and truly participate in a frothy lovefest. Sudsensational!