© Glenn Harper
2003 lecture prepared for Brooklyn College lecture, unpublished
Hands, art, sculpture
A few comments from others, on the hand:
Toland Grinnell on curators and dealers, “art-world figures with their hands on the levers of power…who just recently bought cell phones and don’t yet know how to use the speed dial.. They are still trying to impose rules and expectations on art.”
A 2001 Panelist in the Computers and Sculpture Forum said VR and CAD modelling gives him the ability to ignore gravity while creating his work. Audience member said, well, yeah, that’s drawing.
Tony Smith called in the specs to a steel manufacturer for Die—over the telephone.
Jacques Lipchitz was profiled for Life magazine late in his life, and they wanted to photograph him working on a monumental sculpture. They put him up in a bucket truck to chisel on the head, and in the resulting photograph, it’s obvious that he has neither been off the ground nor had a chisel in his hand in years.
One of the creators of a rapid prototyping machine told the Boston television news, on the occasion of the Boston Cyberarts Festival, “When I meet a sculptor, I’m fond of saying, Oh, You’re a sculptor? I thought there were machines for that now.”
The phenomenologists talk about the world “at hand,” and “grasping” as a notion of incorporating the material of the world into the understandable reality of everyday life--but everyday life is actually a mental construct rather than a material reality. I can give you an example from archaeology. The French anthropologist Emanuel Leroi-Gourhan was looking at the cave paintings in the south of France and elsewhere, and trying to make sense of the hand-prints that are on the walls along with the animal paintings. Some caves are mostly handprints rather than paintings. The handprints are made like stencils: a hand was placed against the wall and paint was sprayed (most likely spit) over the area, leaving a print when the hand was removed. Artists and others have usually understood the handprints as the primal gesture of the hand—I am here, I’m doing this and leaving a record of it. Some Neoexpressionist artists of the 1980s used the image explicitly, to portray themselves and their work as “genuine” or “authentic” in the same sense that outsider artists are often described using those words: there were several exhibitions subtitled with a description of the artist as a “paintspitter.” But Leroi-Gourhan wasn’t satisfied with that notion of a primal act, the prelinguistic, essential, I am here! Many of the handprints are missing fingers, and the usual explanation was animistic ritual mutilation rather than accidents, because of the frequency of missing fingers. But Leroi-Gourhan couldn’t understand why hunter-gatherers would have removed so essential a tool as a finger, regardless of the ritual significance. So he wondered, what if the hand wasn’t pressed against the wall palm first, but palm out. Raising the possibility that the fingers weren’t missing, they were simply shifted down out of the way. He did a statistical analysis of the hands and the various missing digits, in comparison to the distribution of animal species in the cave paintings, and found a direct correspondence between specific hand gestures and specific animals—and more than that, the hand gestures corresponded more or less with signals still used in Bushmen cultures to warn fellow hunters silently of animal ahead of the group. So the primal, authentic gesture of the hand is really already a complex system of metaphors: a language—it is already infected with the inauthenticity of the social rather than the solitary hunter, the very image of the solo artist in his garrett. The hand gesture already has what phenomenology calls intentionality: the embodiment (literally, em-bodiment or incarnation) of the mind’s intention, in the context of the social web of everyday reality.
Another notion from phenomenology more specific to aesthetics makes s further distinction: there is a difference in kind between the object and the art object, with any work of art. The object may be made through the engagement of the artist with both materials and ideas, but the final, material thing is merely the object. The art object is the idea or communication that emanates from the object, not the material thing itself. The art object is the intentionality of the object.
If you look at the hand in terms of the art object and its intentionality, the grasp of the artist always looks both ways, material and intentional, and what an artist grapples with now may be material of a different sort. What I mean is that what the artist manipulates (and the hand is there in that word, again) or the facture of the object (and facture is the root of the word manufacture, there’s the hand again) may be mediated not by a chisel but by a contemporary order of technology instead. Other than the form of the mediation, nothing essential is changed in the interaction between artist, object, and art object.
Craft, or hand-made consumer objects generally, have a different intentionality, a different frame of reference from the art world and the hand is still very important, very valuable (literally) in that context. (Grinnell uses this notion of value in his work, inserting a critical distance into the hand-work’s intentionality and bringing it into the art world.) In the art world, the hand is one tool. Karin Sander’s work makes that explicit, and comparison with Tomoaki Suzuki highlights the possible differences in the meaning and use of the hand.
In lieu of a conclusion, I want to quote from John Isherwood’s comments on the use of computer-numerically controlled technology because he is very explicit about the relation of the hand to the tool. (from Sculpture, volume 23 no.7, p. 44) “The hand, the grasp, the feel, the touch are essential. There are certain tools or extensions of the hands that make appropriate marks. But it is very easy to lose the sense of the hand in a sculpture. It’s not just marks, it’s the scale, the proportion, and many other things. Tools can go against the sensation of the hand. What looks right doesn’t feel right. Sometimes tools create marks that go against the intention of the hands. The machine can easily misinterpret the hand. I need to run my hands over a piece to determine if it is really finished. The sense of touch is crucial to the process, the circulation from hand to eye to brain.”
About Me
- Glenn Harper
- Washington, DC, United States
- I have been, among other things, a bookshop owner, counterintelligence agent, writer, art critic, and grad student (literature and art). One of my blogs includes some examples of my art writing, from the past decade, with some new pieces forthcoming. But my most frequent new posts are to my crime fiction blog, International Noir Fiction.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Interventions and Provocations
© Glenn Harper
Introduction to the volume of interviews published as Interventions and Provocations: Conversations on Art, Culture, and Resistance, State University of New York, 1998.
A number of artists have over the past two decades embraced a new relation to everyday life and public space. The work of these artists is political in its intentions or consequences, but they have adopted a different position with regard to political action than was the case with the historical avant-gardes in the first half of the 20th century. The political interventions and social provocations exemplified by the artists in this collection of interviews demonstrate an attitude toward art and form that can be characterized as "tactical," adopting a term used by Michel de Certeau, or "postutopian," a term used by Boris Groys to describe the unofficial art of the late Soviet Union.
The concept of artistic form in both the making of such art and the discussions surrounding such art suggests the use of the word "form" by the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz in his novels and diaries from the 1930s to the 60s. Gombrowicz uses form in a double sense, to refer to aesthetic form and to social form, by which he means the social masks that we create to give others the impression of a unified subject and which we ultimately come to believe in ourselves. That is to say, form is both aestheticization and socialization, and the social agent and the artist both are form-makers and both are prisoners of form. Gombrowicz is both seduced and repelled by form, which he associates with maturity, and the only alternative he sees to form or maturity is the equally ambiguous category of youth or immaturity. Youth in his sense is the embodiment of the violent, messy, temporary, energetic, diverse, and chaotic.
A very substantial and important segment of the contemporary arts community has in fact consciously embraced impropriety with respect to social and aesthetic form, while at the same time maintaining a Gombrowiczean skepticism about both form and any alternative disruption of it.
The postutopian artists have adopted a "tactical" approach to political and social interventions that may be seen to be grounded in the work of Michel de Certeau, who made a distinction between strategy and tactics in the practice of everyday life (and de Certeau also singles out Gombrowicz as the creator of the hero of the fleeting politics and pleasures of tactics). de Certeau says that, "a strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper…Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this model." "a 'tactic,' on the other hand,…cannot count on a 'proper.'…A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance." "a tactic…is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 'on the wing' Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities." (p. ) For de Certeau, tactics are the means by which the consumers at the receiving end of social production manipulate everyday life for their own purposes. The artists of tactics are in solidarity with the marginality of these tactical consumers, with respect to central power structures, and also with their relation to daily life.
The art of tactics seeks a new relation to everyday life; sometimes that relation takes the form of collaboration with communities beyond the art world, sometimes the form of political intervention of a distinctly postutopian character (sometimes provocations that are not overtly political but have political consequences, and sometimes simply new forms of public address). Suzanne Lacy, an artist who has worked extensively in the new public art, says in her introduction to a collection of essays on the subject (Mapping the Terrain) that the form is being developed by artists who have been marginalized in one way or another, by class, gender, sexual preference, or, within the art world itself, by their way of approaching the art object per se. I would go further, to say that these artists embody and even embrace the marginalization that is actually the case for all artists here and now, even if that fact is repressed by ideology or masked by commercial success. I am not speaking of the marginalization or self marginalization of the bohemian artist-in-a-garrett stock figure. I am referring to a social position that artists share with anyone who thinks, who thematizes or problematizes social realities.
For tactical artists, daily life is a contested territory, not a taken-for-granted horizon for their life or work. But they do not project a global, ideological alternative life-world through their work. In a similar way, according to Boris Groys, the "sots art" of Komar and Melamid and other manifestations of late Soviet-era Russian art achieve their unique character by rejecting the utopian claims of both the classical Russian avant-garde and Stalinist social realism. But Groys does not see the work of Komar and Melamid, Ilya Kabakov, or Erik Bulatov as apolitical or solipsistic (as some poststructuralist or postmodern positions might be characterized, due to a paralyzing skepticism about authenticity, the genuine, or political action). Their own skepticism about authenticity and action and subjectivity impels them toward a comic or frivolous though nonetheless serious engagement with contemporary life. Kabakov in particular exhibits a profound engagement with homo sovieticus, and the situation in which his characters find themselves has not disappeared with the decline of the Soviet state itself. His work, as Groys suggests, emphasizes individual voices rather than collective ideologies of the right of the left. The same might be said of other artists, whose work derives from Western rather than Soviet sources. Fred Wilson, for instance, is known for his installations critiquing museums and museuology, but his work also gives voice to the stories of individuals silenced by racism and colonialism. Wilson does not simply speak for them, he finds ways to bring these individuals forward to speak for themselves. (See, for example, the interview with Wilson in this collection.)
Some other contemporary artists in the West are taking up a similar position by locating art in communication and social interaction rather than the enclosed space of the self, which has historically been projected into social space by artists only in the enclave of the gallery. The artists in this collection of interviews have all sought, through interventions into political space or provocations directed at social space, to create a disorder, impropriety, or interaction directed toward social change that is real, if not revolutionary. All of the artists in this collection have exhibited an effective resistance to the numbing force of mass society, and all of them have also proposed active alternatives, countervisions of human life at the end of the industrial age. But shifts in tactics make it possible to group the participants in two categories: the artists interviewed in the first section have chosen to address social concerns through direct confrontations with issues, practices, and contradictions raised by the society at large; the second section, includes artists whose work may not in all cases be explicitly political in content but nevertheless constitutes a challenge to society’s norms through strategies that are provocative in the use of sexuality, religion, race, or gender.
Art's social role has been actively contested in the United States in the 1980s and '90s. The assumptions underlying attacks on political art and government arts funding, mostly from the right wing of the political spectrum, are that art has an active influence on the fabric of society—thus the importance of art has thus been emphasized rather than diminished in the public controversies surrounding the National Endowment for the Arts and a number of provocative artists (often those using homosexual themes or explicit sexuality). This backhanded endorsement of the power of art has occurred within a climate in which political forces of the right and the left have frequently hoped for an art that would be a passive reflection of social goals rather than an active force in its own right, and in which the broad audiences for art has often gravitated toward work that is decorative and optimistic rather than political and aggressive. The artists in the first section of this volume, on the other hand, assert the vitality of art as a political act, yet they achieve in their work an art that cannot be described as simple didacticism. They appropriate the power of art and they project the depth of their political convictions at the same time. Guillermo Gomez-Peña states (in the conversation included in this volume) that “in the ’90s we as artists can conquer more central spaces to speak from, and function as cross-cultural diplomats, as counter-journalists, as border pirates, as experimental activists.” All of the artists and theorists interviewed in this volume operate in the simultaneously central and marginal zone described by Gomez-Peña: all of them have contested mainstream culture at its very base, in the imagination and vision that makes culture itself possible.
Gomez-Peña himself has created a wild conflation of popular media and border cultures, projecting a mestizo culture for the next millennium. His work is a subversive vision that provides a vital critique of the racial and political injustices of the dominant, privileged culture of white, male, middle-class "America." Martha Rosler, on the other hand, has for 20 years been attacking the assumptions of contemporary society and its media culture on its own terms: her documentary installations, artist's books, and videos have been at the forefront of political and feminist art, and her more recent installation/exhibitions have been a vital part of the development of a new, engaged public art.
Group Material has also been involved in curating as a form of making art. Their collective identity has itself served as a critique of the commodity culture, in which the heroic (male) artist achieves stardom and wealth, and in their projects and exhibitions they have consistently refused to limit themselves to the art world as the focus or the intended audience for the work. This volume includes a conversation between Doug Ashford of Group Material and Steve Kurtz, who is a member of another artists' collective involved in political tactics, Critical Art Ensemble.
Tim Miller has adopted the double stance of public activism concerning AIDS and attacks on homosexuality along with art activity that asserts the reality of gay people's lives. His performances are vivid, funny, and political, and they address the audience directly and emotionally. His work was attacked by the right wing anti-gay and anti-art forces in the famous case of the NEA Four, artists whose grants were denied by the NEA's politically appointed hierarchy after being approved by the original peer panel review system. (Another of the NEA Four, Karen Finley, also appears in this volume.)
Jimmie Durham is an artist of Cherokee heritage (who refuses to adopt the title of "Native American Artist" because of new legislation defining who can call themselves "Indian artists"). Durham is known for provocative and often funny installations that address the reality of Native American life in the U.S. today. Durham has critiqued the mainstream assumptions about continuing colonialism in the U.S. so strongly and effectively that no one who has seen this artist's work can continue to view Native American populations as the Other, as historical artifacts or temporary interlopers irrelevant to today's culture.
Carrie Mae Weems has mined the resources of her family history and the history of African American culture in order to present a counter-history that confronts and engages the official, white/middle-class culture of the U.S. Her work includes photography, installations, ceramics, and historical research, all of which is aimed at refusing the public silences about African-Americans in the life of this country.
Carmen Lomas Garza is both an artist and an activist in the Mexican-American community, and in the conversation in this volume she addresses the pressures put on artists by the expectations of community groups and funding agencies that they perform social services rather than to do their own work as artists. She addresses the social and political aspirations of her own work as well as the history of Chicano art and activist groups in the Southwest and in California.
Juan Sanchez has also combined activism and art, in his case in the service of Puerto Rican nationalism and the rights of Americans of color. His work presents the lives and aspirations of the Puerto Rican community in installations and exhibitions that provoke insight, laughter, and new perspectives on the part of the audience.
Conrad Atkinson is a British artist now living in California. His works bring social thought, activism, and artistic insight together in such a dynamic fashion that they often have been successful as political as well as cultural action. His famous exhibition, "Strike," has been a touchstone for the possibility of the political influence of artists, and his work since has consistently been a virtual definition of an interventionist art.
Another prominent element in the demolition work performed by contemporary artists is work that is primarily provocational rather than political. Artists like Karen Finley, Andres Serrano, and Kathy Acker do not have a specific political agenda, but they share a mission of challenging or rejecting important elements of the dominant culture. Some artists, like David Hammons, attack contemporary society at the weak point of continuing racism, privilege, prejudice, and oppression. Hammons' work is intensely political without addressing specific political programs: rather, he encapsulates racial prejudice and social injustice in images that powerfully indict those facts while achieving artistic completeness and provocative humor.
Kathy Acker is the only fiction writer included in this volume; her work has often been associated with ideas and tactics circulating in the visual arts world rather than in literary circles. Her strategy of plagiarism owes much to Situationism (originally a movement of visual artists) and prefigures the appropriationism so prominent in the art of the '80s. The violence, sexuality, and textual disturbance in her works remain unsettling and subversive years after their original publication, and the novels she has published since this 1986 interview have retained the force and originality of the earlier works.
Andres Serrano's beautiful and unsettling photographs question social assumptions about the body and sexuality, as well as social issues like homelessness and the hold that religion retains on our consciousness. His works set off the current round of right-wing attacks on art and arts funding, with the famous Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine that was included in an exhibition honoring the winners of the "Awards in the Visual Arts" fellowships, a now-dead program partially funded by the NEA. Karen Finley has also stormed the high ground of middle class sexual and moral assumptions, and in so doing has also reaped the wrath of the defenders of the status quo and those involved in the attack on government arts funding. Finley's trance-like performances include nudity, stories of abuse and violence, and indictments of intolerance and indifference.
Three filmmakers are included in this collection: Yvonne Rainer, Nina Menkes, and Barbara Hammer. Their work is very different, but each has achieved a unique perspective that embodies unsettling formal strategies and bold assertions of social realities. Rainer's and Menkes' films aggressively work against the formal assumptions of narrative film, seeking to disorient audiences. Their works also address the position of women in contemporary culture, as well as other oppressed peoples. Hammer's works are the most powerful assertions of lesbian identity in contemporary film and video. Through formal invention, theoretical sophistication, and unceasing projection of the living presence of homosexual women, she has achieved a power and integrity in her work that asserts the undeniable reality of lesbian women's lives.
All of these interviews appeared originally in Art Papers, a magazine founded in 1977 as the newsletter of the Atlanta Art Workers Coalition. Although Art Papers was in the beginning a local publication, it has always looked to the art world as a whole, rather than a local community, for the work of challenging artists. Since 1980, Art Papers has increasingly emphasized contemporary art as a whole, rather than a specific regional perspective. Although the magazine has from its inception covered the work of artists from the entire spectrum of contemporary art (from the political to the formal to the philosophical), the activism inherent in the name of its original parent organization has remained a vital element of the magazine. Through three shifts in the position of editor-in-chief, through shifts in the orientation of art in three succeeding decades, the writers and artists involved in the production of Art Papers have remained dedicated to a basic opposition to the anti-intellectual, socially regressive, and politically repressive forces in the art world and in society at large.
The artists in this collection recognize some hard truths. There has to be a communication with a public that we know is not interested in difficult ideas, and we know easy ideas can't convey difficult truths, and we know image-saturated culture overwhelms critical thought, and nothing but critical thinking can keep us alive from the neck up, and we know outrageous art can only reinforce the arguments of the cultural cleansers, but only outrageous art can bring critical thought to the attention of a public who's not interested in difficult ideas. We have to be tentative and unrelenting, we have to do serious work on culture by communicating with everyday life, in ways that won't earn us a living. Those are the contradictions that make Gombrowicz's comedy compelling, and make contemporary art challenging.
The work of artists concerned with a tactical position resonates with the situation of any agent in society—that is in fact the postutopian moment Groys finds in the work of Kabakov. These artists' work, whether confrontational or community-based in its particular expression, embodies a solidarity with social groups that are the target of authoritarian strategies, as well as embodying action oriented toward bringing social relations to consciousness. The forms in which their tactics are expressed are constantly absorbed into the mainstream arts, media, and culture, the total system of the information age. But the tactics themselves remain peripheral, seeking to express not an outside so much as an everywhere always particular position: a position that retains critical thought and skeptical perspective with relation to globalizing social forms.
Glenn Harper
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, University of California Press 1984).
Nina Felshin, ed. But is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995).
Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Suzanne Lacy, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995).
Lucy Lippard, The Pink Glass Swan (NY The New Press, 95)
Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit (Cambridge: Zone Press, 1994).
Introduction to the volume of interviews published as Interventions and Provocations: Conversations on Art, Culture, and Resistance, State University of New York, 1998.
A number of artists have over the past two decades embraced a new relation to everyday life and public space. The work of these artists is political in its intentions or consequences, but they have adopted a different position with regard to political action than was the case with the historical avant-gardes in the first half of the 20th century. The political interventions and social provocations exemplified by the artists in this collection of interviews demonstrate an attitude toward art and form that can be characterized as "tactical," adopting a term used by Michel de Certeau, or "postutopian," a term used by Boris Groys to describe the unofficial art of the late Soviet Union.
The concept of artistic form in both the making of such art and the discussions surrounding such art suggests the use of the word "form" by the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz in his novels and diaries from the 1930s to the 60s. Gombrowicz uses form in a double sense, to refer to aesthetic form and to social form, by which he means the social masks that we create to give others the impression of a unified subject and which we ultimately come to believe in ourselves. That is to say, form is both aestheticization and socialization, and the social agent and the artist both are form-makers and both are prisoners of form. Gombrowicz is both seduced and repelled by form, which he associates with maturity, and the only alternative he sees to form or maturity is the equally ambiguous category of youth or immaturity. Youth in his sense is the embodiment of the violent, messy, temporary, energetic, diverse, and chaotic.
A very substantial and important segment of the contemporary arts community has in fact consciously embraced impropriety with respect to social and aesthetic form, while at the same time maintaining a Gombrowiczean skepticism about both form and any alternative disruption of it.
The postutopian artists have adopted a "tactical" approach to political and social interventions that may be seen to be grounded in the work of Michel de Certeau, who made a distinction between strategy and tactics in the practice of everyday life (and de Certeau also singles out Gombrowicz as the creator of the hero of the fleeting politics and pleasures of tactics). de Certeau says that, "a strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper…Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this model." "a 'tactic,' on the other hand,…cannot count on a 'proper.'…A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance." "a tactic…is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 'on the wing' Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities." (p. ) For de Certeau, tactics are the means by which the consumers at the receiving end of social production manipulate everyday life for their own purposes. The artists of tactics are in solidarity with the marginality of these tactical consumers, with respect to central power structures, and also with their relation to daily life.
The art of tactics seeks a new relation to everyday life; sometimes that relation takes the form of collaboration with communities beyond the art world, sometimes the form of political intervention of a distinctly postutopian character (sometimes provocations that are not overtly political but have political consequences, and sometimes simply new forms of public address). Suzanne Lacy, an artist who has worked extensively in the new public art, says in her introduction to a collection of essays on the subject (Mapping the Terrain) that the form is being developed by artists who have been marginalized in one way or another, by class, gender, sexual preference, or, within the art world itself, by their way of approaching the art object per se. I would go further, to say that these artists embody and even embrace the marginalization that is actually the case for all artists here and now, even if that fact is repressed by ideology or masked by commercial success. I am not speaking of the marginalization or self marginalization of the bohemian artist-in-a-garrett stock figure. I am referring to a social position that artists share with anyone who thinks, who thematizes or problematizes social realities.
For tactical artists, daily life is a contested territory, not a taken-for-granted horizon for their life or work. But they do not project a global, ideological alternative life-world through their work. In a similar way, according to Boris Groys, the "sots art" of Komar and Melamid and other manifestations of late Soviet-era Russian art achieve their unique character by rejecting the utopian claims of both the classical Russian avant-garde and Stalinist social realism. But Groys does not see the work of Komar and Melamid, Ilya Kabakov, or Erik Bulatov as apolitical or solipsistic (as some poststructuralist or postmodern positions might be characterized, due to a paralyzing skepticism about authenticity, the genuine, or political action). Their own skepticism about authenticity and action and subjectivity impels them toward a comic or frivolous though nonetheless serious engagement with contemporary life. Kabakov in particular exhibits a profound engagement with homo sovieticus, and the situation in which his characters find themselves has not disappeared with the decline of the Soviet state itself. His work, as Groys suggests, emphasizes individual voices rather than collective ideologies of the right of the left. The same might be said of other artists, whose work derives from Western rather than Soviet sources. Fred Wilson, for instance, is known for his installations critiquing museums and museuology, but his work also gives voice to the stories of individuals silenced by racism and colonialism. Wilson does not simply speak for them, he finds ways to bring these individuals forward to speak for themselves. (See, for example, the interview with Wilson in this collection.)
Some other contemporary artists in the West are taking up a similar position by locating art in communication and social interaction rather than the enclosed space of the self, which has historically been projected into social space by artists only in the enclave of the gallery. The artists in this collection of interviews have all sought, through interventions into political space or provocations directed at social space, to create a disorder, impropriety, or interaction directed toward social change that is real, if not revolutionary. All of the artists in this collection have exhibited an effective resistance to the numbing force of mass society, and all of them have also proposed active alternatives, countervisions of human life at the end of the industrial age. But shifts in tactics make it possible to group the participants in two categories: the artists interviewed in the first section have chosen to address social concerns through direct confrontations with issues, practices, and contradictions raised by the society at large; the second section, includes artists whose work may not in all cases be explicitly political in content but nevertheless constitutes a challenge to society’s norms through strategies that are provocative in the use of sexuality, religion, race, or gender.
Art's social role has been actively contested in the United States in the 1980s and '90s. The assumptions underlying attacks on political art and government arts funding, mostly from the right wing of the political spectrum, are that art has an active influence on the fabric of society—thus the importance of art has thus been emphasized rather than diminished in the public controversies surrounding the National Endowment for the Arts and a number of provocative artists (often those using homosexual themes or explicit sexuality). This backhanded endorsement of the power of art has occurred within a climate in which political forces of the right and the left have frequently hoped for an art that would be a passive reflection of social goals rather than an active force in its own right, and in which the broad audiences for art has often gravitated toward work that is decorative and optimistic rather than political and aggressive. The artists in the first section of this volume, on the other hand, assert the vitality of art as a political act, yet they achieve in their work an art that cannot be described as simple didacticism. They appropriate the power of art and they project the depth of their political convictions at the same time. Guillermo Gomez-Peña states (in the conversation included in this volume) that “in the ’90s we as artists can conquer more central spaces to speak from, and function as cross-cultural diplomats, as counter-journalists, as border pirates, as experimental activists.” All of the artists and theorists interviewed in this volume operate in the simultaneously central and marginal zone described by Gomez-Peña: all of them have contested mainstream culture at its very base, in the imagination and vision that makes culture itself possible.
Gomez-Peña himself has created a wild conflation of popular media and border cultures, projecting a mestizo culture for the next millennium. His work is a subversive vision that provides a vital critique of the racial and political injustices of the dominant, privileged culture of white, male, middle-class "America." Martha Rosler, on the other hand, has for 20 years been attacking the assumptions of contemporary society and its media culture on its own terms: her documentary installations, artist's books, and videos have been at the forefront of political and feminist art, and her more recent installation/exhibitions have been a vital part of the development of a new, engaged public art.
Group Material has also been involved in curating as a form of making art. Their collective identity has itself served as a critique of the commodity culture, in which the heroic (male) artist achieves stardom and wealth, and in their projects and exhibitions they have consistently refused to limit themselves to the art world as the focus or the intended audience for the work. This volume includes a conversation between Doug Ashford of Group Material and Steve Kurtz, who is a member of another artists' collective involved in political tactics, Critical Art Ensemble.
Tim Miller has adopted the double stance of public activism concerning AIDS and attacks on homosexuality along with art activity that asserts the reality of gay people's lives. His performances are vivid, funny, and political, and they address the audience directly and emotionally. His work was attacked by the right wing anti-gay and anti-art forces in the famous case of the NEA Four, artists whose grants were denied by the NEA's politically appointed hierarchy after being approved by the original peer panel review system. (Another of the NEA Four, Karen Finley, also appears in this volume.)
Jimmie Durham is an artist of Cherokee heritage (who refuses to adopt the title of "Native American Artist" because of new legislation defining who can call themselves "Indian artists"). Durham is known for provocative and often funny installations that address the reality of Native American life in the U.S. today. Durham has critiqued the mainstream assumptions about continuing colonialism in the U.S. so strongly and effectively that no one who has seen this artist's work can continue to view Native American populations as the Other, as historical artifacts or temporary interlopers irrelevant to today's culture.
Carrie Mae Weems has mined the resources of her family history and the history of African American culture in order to present a counter-history that confronts and engages the official, white/middle-class culture of the U.S. Her work includes photography, installations, ceramics, and historical research, all of which is aimed at refusing the public silences about African-Americans in the life of this country.
Carmen Lomas Garza is both an artist and an activist in the Mexican-American community, and in the conversation in this volume she addresses the pressures put on artists by the expectations of community groups and funding agencies that they perform social services rather than to do their own work as artists. She addresses the social and political aspirations of her own work as well as the history of Chicano art and activist groups in the Southwest and in California.
Juan Sanchez has also combined activism and art, in his case in the service of Puerto Rican nationalism and the rights of Americans of color. His work presents the lives and aspirations of the Puerto Rican community in installations and exhibitions that provoke insight, laughter, and new perspectives on the part of the audience.
Conrad Atkinson is a British artist now living in California. His works bring social thought, activism, and artistic insight together in such a dynamic fashion that they often have been successful as political as well as cultural action. His famous exhibition, "Strike," has been a touchstone for the possibility of the political influence of artists, and his work since has consistently been a virtual definition of an interventionist art.
Another prominent element in the demolition work performed by contemporary artists is work that is primarily provocational rather than political. Artists like Karen Finley, Andres Serrano, and Kathy Acker do not have a specific political agenda, but they share a mission of challenging or rejecting important elements of the dominant culture. Some artists, like David Hammons, attack contemporary society at the weak point of continuing racism, privilege, prejudice, and oppression. Hammons' work is intensely political without addressing specific political programs: rather, he encapsulates racial prejudice and social injustice in images that powerfully indict those facts while achieving artistic completeness and provocative humor.
Kathy Acker is the only fiction writer included in this volume; her work has often been associated with ideas and tactics circulating in the visual arts world rather than in literary circles. Her strategy of plagiarism owes much to Situationism (originally a movement of visual artists) and prefigures the appropriationism so prominent in the art of the '80s. The violence, sexuality, and textual disturbance in her works remain unsettling and subversive years after their original publication, and the novels she has published since this 1986 interview have retained the force and originality of the earlier works.
Andres Serrano's beautiful and unsettling photographs question social assumptions about the body and sexuality, as well as social issues like homelessness and the hold that religion retains on our consciousness. His works set off the current round of right-wing attacks on art and arts funding, with the famous Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine that was included in an exhibition honoring the winners of the "Awards in the Visual Arts" fellowships, a now-dead program partially funded by the NEA. Karen Finley has also stormed the high ground of middle class sexual and moral assumptions, and in so doing has also reaped the wrath of the defenders of the status quo and those involved in the attack on government arts funding. Finley's trance-like performances include nudity, stories of abuse and violence, and indictments of intolerance and indifference.
Three filmmakers are included in this collection: Yvonne Rainer, Nina Menkes, and Barbara Hammer. Their work is very different, but each has achieved a unique perspective that embodies unsettling formal strategies and bold assertions of social realities. Rainer's and Menkes' films aggressively work against the formal assumptions of narrative film, seeking to disorient audiences. Their works also address the position of women in contemporary culture, as well as other oppressed peoples. Hammer's works are the most powerful assertions of lesbian identity in contemporary film and video. Through formal invention, theoretical sophistication, and unceasing projection of the living presence of homosexual women, she has achieved a power and integrity in her work that asserts the undeniable reality of lesbian women's lives.
All of these interviews appeared originally in Art Papers, a magazine founded in 1977 as the newsletter of the Atlanta Art Workers Coalition. Although Art Papers was in the beginning a local publication, it has always looked to the art world as a whole, rather than a local community, for the work of challenging artists. Since 1980, Art Papers has increasingly emphasized contemporary art as a whole, rather than a specific regional perspective. Although the magazine has from its inception covered the work of artists from the entire spectrum of contemporary art (from the political to the formal to the philosophical), the activism inherent in the name of its original parent organization has remained a vital element of the magazine. Through three shifts in the position of editor-in-chief, through shifts in the orientation of art in three succeeding decades, the writers and artists involved in the production of Art Papers have remained dedicated to a basic opposition to the anti-intellectual, socially regressive, and politically repressive forces in the art world and in society at large.
The artists in this collection recognize some hard truths. There has to be a communication with a public that we know is not interested in difficult ideas, and we know easy ideas can't convey difficult truths, and we know image-saturated culture overwhelms critical thought, and nothing but critical thinking can keep us alive from the neck up, and we know outrageous art can only reinforce the arguments of the cultural cleansers, but only outrageous art can bring critical thought to the attention of a public who's not interested in difficult ideas. We have to be tentative and unrelenting, we have to do serious work on culture by communicating with everyday life, in ways that won't earn us a living. Those are the contradictions that make Gombrowicz's comedy compelling, and make contemporary art challenging.
The work of artists concerned with a tactical position resonates with the situation of any agent in society—that is in fact the postutopian moment Groys finds in the work of Kabakov. These artists' work, whether confrontational or community-based in its particular expression, embodies a solidarity with social groups that are the target of authoritarian strategies, as well as embodying action oriented toward bringing social relations to consciousness. The forms in which their tactics are expressed are constantly absorbed into the mainstream arts, media, and culture, the total system of the information age. But the tactics themselves remain peripheral, seeking to express not an outside so much as an everywhere always particular position: a position that retains critical thought and skeptical perspective with relation to globalizing social forms.
Glenn Harper
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, University of California Press 1984).
Nina Felshin, ed. But is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995).
Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Suzanne Lacy, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995).
Lucy Lippard, The Pink Glass Swan (NY The New Press, 95)
Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit (Cambridge: Zone Press, 1994).
Technology and art
© Glenn Harper
An unpublished 1999 essay
Art Papers magazine, while I was the editor, did an interview with a puppeteer who had taught puppetry for years, to people from school age to retirement age. He said that he first assigns the class to make a single puppet, from whatever material is at hand, and the results are widely diverse in what the puppets are made of and what they can do. But he said that when he has the class make a second puppet, whether the student is 14 or 84, the results are always the same: first the two puppets fight, and second, they have sex. Then they can go on to perform the eerie magic of puppets in a broader range of action. The fascination with technology today is, I think, related to the fascination that puppets have for us. A thing is acting like us. A puppet is a surrogate or a cyborg that can act out for us in a way we can't do in our everyday lives—and their uncanny nature can permit us to see through their actions to the truth of our own.
And as with puppets, technology gave us first violence, from computer games to Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories, and then sex, from virtual sex to Web porn, to Laura Kikauka's copulating robots or the Center for Metahuman Exploration's "Paradise" project, which I'll talk more about in a minute. What we can expect beyond violence and sex can be glimpsed across a broad range of what is called "new media": robots, video installation and projection, net.art, computer-aided design and production of both two-dimensional, virtual objects and environments and three-dimensional, tangible objects—and also a range of community-interaction projects that, although they may depend on non-technological means (including puppets in some cases), are often lumped in with new media and do often use technological means.
But is "new technology" really something new rather than just new packaging and marketing, as Randal Walser argues in an article, "Elements of a Cyberspace Playhouse," in Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice and Promise, ed. Sandra K. Helsel and Judith Paris Roth (Westport, Ct: Meckler, 1991, p. 53)—a typical example of web "research;" I got the quote from Walser, by the way, not from the original text but from an article by new media artist Nancy Paterson in an on-line magazine named Massage, which republished it from the Canadian magazine Fuse. Packaging and marketing are at the very least a substantial part of technological advance, as anyone knows who has ever tried to throw away the MSN icon on their Windows desktop. The two larger arguments that Paterson is making are also interesting, especially in the light of the claims for a difference in embodiment as well as gender and race in a technological realm: "Whatever our class, race or gender, we all take our bodies with us as we approach the millennium." (Massage 2, www.nomadnet.org/massage2/). Our interface with technology IS the body—virtual reality technology depends on the body, on the sense apparatus, stereo vision and hearing, and so forth—virtual reality only works by fooling the body, not eliminating it. And our interface with technology is imperfect. I recently got a notice from my bank that they are now offering an internet service: "Pay all your bills on-line, without ever leaving your desk. To sign up, drop by one of our branches to pick up an application."
In fact, what we are calling new media resembles very closely the individual and collaborative work of the 1950s and '60s by Jean Tinguely and EAT (for an interesting survey of EAT, see the article by Billy Kluwer in an interesting Dia Foundation collection,
To suggest what is new or not new about new technology, I want to offer a few quotations or comments from other people. First, from "Mr. Cogito on Magic," by Zbigniew Herbert:
fortunes grow out of this
branches of industry
branches of crime
industrious ships sail to bring new spices
engineers of visual debauchery
toil without rest
breathless alchemists of hallucination
produce
new thrills
new colors
new moans
and an art is born
of aggressive epilepsy
It's interesting to note that at least two artists, Simon Penny and Jennifer Hall, have created high-tech machines that simulate epileptic seizures. But Herbert's poem is from a collection published in Polish in 1974. And Herbert's metaphors draw on the technological advances of earlier eras, from the spice trade and world exploration to more recent hallucinatory change. We have to remember that our current rush to the millennium is within and not beyond history. And that history is leading us as artists or an art audience not toward participation, but toward mass manipulation. Robert Morgan recently pointed out (in Review, a low-tech, photocopied art magazine distributed almost exclusively in New York City), "One cannot presume that a public space is also a social one. (Americans are too agitated, too hyper-mediated by electronics to exist as a real social group…)" (Jan. 15, 1999, p. 6)
Walter Banjamin pointed out that technology is in itself a privatizing force. From public festivals or drama or a storyteller we move to smaller and smaller movie theaters, VCR movies, and finally to the one-person-at-a-time experience of the virtual reality mask and glove. The Irish fiddle player John Doherty once offered to allow a musicologist to make a recording of his music, with the condition that the tape not be copied or published or released as an album. Why? Because for Doherty, music was a social relation, a face to face encounter. Years later, the recording was released as a CD, and Doherty is dead, so the social relation is lost but technology has preserved something of it for private consumption.
What artists are or are not doing to address the loss of a "public" (in the larger sense and in the sense of a public for art) can be seen in the kinds of work being done in new media, across the spectrum I mentioned earlier, from robotics to community projects. I originally thought I would not show any projections of artists' work, because a large percentage of the projects being done in new media don't actually give you very much to look at. But I decided to show some slides (very low-tech), to illustrate the range of work.
Many artists, like Alan Rath (who has been working with new technologies for a number of years and whose influences go back to EAT among others, demonstate simultaneously a fascination with new media and a nostalgia for old technologies. These works are elaborate visual puns that mix in an uncanny manner video bodies and old-fashioned tools and technologies. Other artists working in this area include Arthur Ganson, who tends to emphasize technological nostalgia in his Tinguely-esque machines, and the very eerie and puppet-like projections of Tony Oursler.
Marshall McCluhan in the 1960s said that human beings are the reproductive organs of technology (it's only through us that technology advances or regenerates). The Center for Metahuman Exploration's "Paradise" project for the ISEA 97 conference turns the insight inside-out. The installation consists of two aluminum isolation booths and a cylindrical chamber connectied by video and telephone cabling. Each isolation booth contains the interface, a television and a telephone. The ringing telephone beckons exhibit patrons to enter the booth. After answering the telephone, participants will receive brief introduction and instructions. The cylindrical aluminum chamber contains the synthetic garden paradise that can only be experienced through telepresence: participants may direct the naked couple in the chamber to touch the grasses, the flowers, and each other:
“The objective of telepresence is to experience a remote location without being there, often through the use of telerobotics and communications technologies. Though suitable for remote labor, inspection and exploration, such remote experiences often lack sensory input and emotional content to make them believable as 'real' experience. To provide adequate sensory input is primarily a technical challenge, however, to provide emotional content requires the projection of the feelings of the observer to connect with objects and beings at the remote site. This emotional connection may then augment sensory input provided by purely technical means. An experience of remote emotional connection requires an avatar through which a remote user may project and receive emotional content from the remote site. This avatar must afford control to the remote user, yet personify the user in order to convey feelings of empathy. Ideally this empathetic avatar would be part human, to convey emotion, and part machine, to respond to user control. This mechanically augmented human is the Cyborg Surrogate Self.
By pressing buttons on a telephone, you may caress, via a proxy arm that extends in first-person pespective into the video space, the naked body in view. The remote arm is robotically connected to your keypad, and also contains a video camera. The gender of the arm and the displayed body are arbitrarily related to the sex of the phone-booth participant.”
A few other works related to ISEA 98 can illustrate briefly some of the other tendencies of new media art.
Luke Jerram, Retinal Memory, constructed in the viewer's optical nerve. In a dark room, you are exposed to flashes of light that illuminate first the chair in which you are to sit and a vacant space to one side. By means of the retained retinal image, you can "place" the empty chair (in which you are actually now sitting) into the space of the "real" room.
Kristin Lucas combines notions of "compression" and interaction. In a very small room, the viewer is projected into an illusory space along with images of the artist as a young girl and a grown woman, and the viewer can manipulate the environment by gradually learning how the pressure sensitive floor controls the cameras and the projections.
Nigel Helyer brought harbor sounds back to a gentrifying harbor area, through buoys and radio broadcasts—to the dismay of the residents who were disturbed by the recurrence of the harbor's earlier function as it intruded on their now-quiet waterside enclave.
Neila Justo combines technological materials torn from their intended uses in a reminder of the earliest computers, used in weaving machines. The work is a weaving and sound installation (the sound was very quiet, requiring the audience to lean over very close to the work). Works by Keith Piper and the team of Imanol Atorrasagasti and Yan Duyvendak, illustrate a more formal exploration of video installation and virtual space.
A mixing of media can be seen in the work Sue Williamson created an installation in the visiting area of a former prison on Robben Island in South Africa, exploring institutional frameworks of incarceration and surveillance with broad implications beyond the history of her own country. And Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes created an installation that combined languages, cultures, materials, and the intersection of the public and the private, including the opportunity for anonymous viewers to post confessions over the internet that could be included in the installation.
During the technological boom of the middle of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger said that we are only engulfed by technology if we regard it as something neutral, and Jacques Ellul warned that the logic of technology is that technical problems have only technical solutions, removing the public as well as any ethical or political concerns from the loop. At the end of the century, artists have a potential role, as Nancy Paterson points out, in contradicting the seeming transparency and inevitability of technology: "We can only buy so much technological confidence. The rest must come from art and artists…who critically envision a creative future in which we will all take part." (Massage 2, www.nomadnet.org/massage2/) Can new media art projects, like puppets, capitalize on their uncanny character to defamiliarize (Viktor Shklovsky's early 20th-century term for what effective art does) the technological everyday world with its aura of inevitability and its isolating, disempowering effects—can technological art defamiliarize us or foreground the technological environment, make it strange so that we can see what is going on rather than becoming fascinated by the shining surface, like deer in the headlights. Some artists are using the Internet like 'zines and other alternative networks, to circumvent the hierarchies of art and society. I recently received a "Net Project" from Slovenia—a nice little "artists' book" that actually is a promotional flyer for their high-tech art site, sponsored by the Soros Foundaton. The artists of Slovenia have been at the forefront of using new technologies (along with humor, a keen sense of history, and a willingness to provoke) in getting their art to new audiences. Martha Wilson, the director of Franklin Furnace, moved her institution entirely onto the World Wide Web, abandoning her non-electronic exhibition space. She recently reported that her audience for a performance piece on the Web was in the hundreds (not the thousands or millions, as the hype suggests)—but since a performance in the Franklin Furnace building would have had an audience of twenty people on folding chairs, she counts the change as progress.
It's worth quoting the end of Zbigniew Herbert's poem:
but this is still a vision
of a better future
for the time being
magic
flourishes
as never before
(From Mr. Cogito, tr. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter. New York, Ecco, 1993. (original 1974)
References:
Jennifer Hall, "Out of Body Theatre," robotic performances with a marionette interacting with computer animations, video projections, shadow puppets and peformers, leading through the experience of an epileptic seizure.
Nancy Paterson, Stock Market Skirt, old saw that women's hemlines are linked to the rise and fall of the stock market. The skirt length varies automatically according to the market link.
Donna Harraway, "The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment."
Mark Pauline, Survival Research Laboratories
Laura Kikauka and Norman White, Them Fuclking Robots, found object robots that interact sexually.
Sarah Waterson, Mapping E-motion, robotic breast that interacts with the audience according to an environmental sensing system that mimics pheromones.
An unpublished 1999 essay
Art Papers magazine, while I was the editor, did an interview with a puppeteer who had taught puppetry for years, to people from school age to retirement age. He said that he first assigns the class to make a single puppet, from whatever material is at hand, and the results are widely diverse in what the puppets are made of and what they can do. But he said that when he has the class make a second puppet, whether the student is 14 or 84, the results are always the same: first the two puppets fight, and second, they have sex. Then they can go on to perform the eerie magic of puppets in a broader range of action. The fascination with technology today is, I think, related to the fascination that puppets have for us. A thing is acting like us. A puppet is a surrogate or a cyborg that can act out for us in a way we can't do in our everyday lives—and their uncanny nature can permit us to see through their actions to the truth of our own.
And as with puppets, technology gave us first violence, from computer games to Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories, and then sex, from virtual sex to Web porn, to Laura Kikauka's copulating robots or the Center for Metahuman Exploration's "Paradise" project, which I'll talk more about in a minute. What we can expect beyond violence and sex can be glimpsed across a broad range of what is called "new media": robots, video installation and projection, net.art, computer-aided design and production of both two-dimensional, virtual objects and environments and three-dimensional, tangible objects—and also a range of community-interaction projects that, although they may depend on non-technological means (including puppets in some cases), are often lumped in with new media and do often use technological means.
But is "new technology" really something new rather than just new packaging and marketing, as Randal Walser argues in an article, "Elements of a Cyberspace Playhouse," in Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice and Promise, ed. Sandra K. Helsel and Judith Paris Roth (Westport, Ct: Meckler, 1991, p. 53)—a typical example of web "research;" I got the quote from Walser, by the way, not from the original text but from an article by new media artist Nancy Paterson in an on-line magazine named Massage, which republished it from the Canadian magazine Fuse. Packaging and marketing are at the very least a substantial part of technological advance, as anyone knows who has ever tried to throw away the MSN icon on their Windows desktop. The two larger arguments that Paterson is making are also interesting, especially in the light of the claims for a difference in embodiment as well as gender and race in a technological realm: "Whatever our class, race or gender, we all take our bodies with us as we approach the millennium." (Massage 2, www.nomadnet.org/massage2/). Our interface with technology IS the body—virtual reality technology depends on the body, on the sense apparatus, stereo vision and hearing, and so forth—virtual reality only works by fooling the body, not eliminating it. And our interface with technology is imperfect. I recently got a notice from my bank that they are now offering an internet service: "Pay all your bills on-line, without ever leaving your desk. To sign up, drop by one of our branches to pick up an application."
In fact, what we are calling new media resembles very closely the individual and collaborative work of the 1950s and '60s by Jean Tinguely and EAT (for an interesting survey of EAT, see the article by Billy Kluwer in an interesting Dia Foundation collection,
To suggest what is new or not new about new technology, I want to offer a few quotations or comments from other people. First, from "Mr. Cogito on Magic," by Zbigniew Herbert:
fortunes grow out of this
branches of industry
branches of crime
industrious ships sail to bring new spices
engineers of visual debauchery
toil without rest
breathless alchemists of hallucination
produce
new thrills
new colors
new moans
and an art is born
of aggressive epilepsy
It's interesting to note that at least two artists, Simon Penny and Jennifer Hall, have created high-tech machines that simulate epileptic seizures. But Herbert's poem is from a collection published in Polish in 1974. And Herbert's metaphors draw on the technological advances of earlier eras, from the spice trade and world exploration to more recent hallucinatory change. We have to remember that our current rush to the millennium is within and not beyond history. And that history is leading us as artists or an art audience not toward participation, but toward mass manipulation. Robert Morgan recently pointed out (in Review, a low-tech, photocopied art magazine distributed almost exclusively in New York City), "One cannot presume that a public space is also a social one. (Americans are too agitated, too hyper-mediated by electronics to exist as a real social group…)" (Jan. 15, 1999, p. 6)
Walter Banjamin pointed out that technology is in itself a privatizing force. From public festivals or drama or a storyteller we move to smaller and smaller movie theaters, VCR movies, and finally to the one-person-at-a-time experience of the virtual reality mask and glove. The Irish fiddle player John Doherty once offered to allow a musicologist to make a recording of his music, with the condition that the tape not be copied or published or released as an album. Why? Because for Doherty, music was a social relation, a face to face encounter. Years later, the recording was released as a CD, and Doherty is dead, so the social relation is lost but technology has preserved something of it for private consumption.
What artists are or are not doing to address the loss of a "public" (in the larger sense and in the sense of a public for art) can be seen in the kinds of work being done in new media, across the spectrum I mentioned earlier, from robotics to community projects. I originally thought I would not show any projections of artists' work, because a large percentage of the projects being done in new media don't actually give you very much to look at. But I decided to show some slides (very low-tech), to illustrate the range of work.
Many artists, like Alan Rath (who has been working with new technologies for a number of years and whose influences go back to EAT among others, demonstate simultaneously a fascination with new media and a nostalgia for old technologies. These works are elaborate visual puns that mix in an uncanny manner video bodies and old-fashioned tools and technologies. Other artists working in this area include Arthur Ganson, who tends to emphasize technological nostalgia in his Tinguely-esque machines, and the very eerie and puppet-like projections of Tony Oursler.
Marshall McCluhan in the 1960s said that human beings are the reproductive organs of technology (it's only through us that technology advances or regenerates). The Center for Metahuman Exploration's "Paradise" project for the ISEA 97 conference turns the insight inside-out. The installation consists of two aluminum isolation booths and a cylindrical chamber connectied by video and telephone cabling. Each isolation booth contains the interface, a television and a telephone. The ringing telephone beckons exhibit patrons to enter the booth. After answering the telephone, participants will receive brief introduction and instructions. The cylindrical aluminum chamber contains the synthetic garden paradise that can only be experienced through telepresence: participants may direct the naked couple in the chamber to touch the grasses, the flowers, and each other:
“The objective of telepresence is to experience a remote location without being there, often through the use of telerobotics and communications technologies. Though suitable for remote labor, inspection and exploration, such remote experiences often lack sensory input and emotional content to make them believable as 'real' experience. To provide adequate sensory input is primarily a technical challenge, however, to provide emotional content requires the projection of the feelings of the observer to connect with objects and beings at the remote site. This emotional connection may then augment sensory input provided by purely technical means. An experience of remote emotional connection requires an avatar through which a remote user may project and receive emotional content from the remote site. This avatar must afford control to the remote user, yet personify the user in order to convey feelings of empathy. Ideally this empathetic avatar would be part human, to convey emotion, and part machine, to respond to user control. This mechanically augmented human is the Cyborg Surrogate Self.
By pressing buttons on a telephone, you may caress, via a proxy arm that extends in first-person pespective into the video space, the naked body in view. The remote arm is robotically connected to your keypad, and also contains a video camera. The gender of the arm and the displayed body are arbitrarily related to the sex of the phone-booth participant.”
A few other works related to ISEA 98 can illustrate briefly some of the other tendencies of new media art.
Luke Jerram, Retinal Memory, constructed in the viewer's optical nerve. In a dark room, you are exposed to flashes of light that illuminate first the chair in which you are to sit and a vacant space to one side. By means of the retained retinal image, you can "place" the empty chair (in which you are actually now sitting) into the space of the "real" room.
Kristin Lucas combines notions of "compression" and interaction. In a very small room, the viewer is projected into an illusory space along with images of the artist as a young girl and a grown woman, and the viewer can manipulate the environment by gradually learning how the pressure sensitive floor controls the cameras and the projections.
Nigel Helyer brought harbor sounds back to a gentrifying harbor area, through buoys and radio broadcasts—to the dismay of the residents who were disturbed by the recurrence of the harbor's earlier function as it intruded on their now-quiet waterside enclave.
Neila Justo combines technological materials torn from their intended uses in a reminder of the earliest computers, used in weaving machines. The work is a weaving and sound installation (the sound was very quiet, requiring the audience to lean over very close to the work). Works by Keith Piper and the team of Imanol Atorrasagasti and Yan Duyvendak, illustrate a more formal exploration of video installation and virtual space.
A mixing of media can be seen in the work Sue Williamson created an installation in the visiting area of a former prison on Robben Island in South Africa, exploring institutional frameworks of incarceration and surveillance with broad implications beyond the history of her own country. And Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes created an installation that combined languages, cultures, materials, and the intersection of the public and the private, including the opportunity for anonymous viewers to post confessions over the internet that could be included in the installation.
During the technological boom of the middle of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger said that we are only engulfed by technology if we regard it as something neutral, and Jacques Ellul warned that the logic of technology is that technical problems have only technical solutions, removing the public as well as any ethical or political concerns from the loop. At the end of the century, artists have a potential role, as Nancy Paterson points out, in contradicting the seeming transparency and inevitability of technology: "We can only buy so much technological confidence. The rest must come from art and artists…who critically envision a creative future in which we will all take part." (Massage 2, www.nomadnet.org/massage2/) Can new media art projects, like puppets, capitalize on their uncanny character to defamiliarize (Viktor Shklovsky's early 20th-century term for what effective art does) the technological everyday world with its aura of inevitability and its isolating, disempowering effects—can technological art defamiliarize us or foreground the technological environment, make it strange so that we can see what is going on rather than becoming fascinated by the shining surface, like deer in the headlights. Some artists are using the Internet like 'zines and other alternative networks, to circumvent the hierarchies of art and society. I recently received a "Net Project" from Slovenia—a nice little "artists' book" that actually is a promotional flyer for their high-tech art site, sponsored by the Soros Foundaton. The artists of Slovenia have been at the forefront of using new technologies (along with humor, a keen sense of history, and a willingness to provoke) in getting their art to new audiences. Martha Wilson, the director of Franklin Furnace, moved her institution entirely onto the World Wide Web, abandoning her non-electronic exhibition space. She recently reported that her audience for a performance piece on the Web was in the hundreds (not the thousands or millions, as the hype suggests)—but since a performance in the Franklin Furnace building would have had an audience of twenty people on folding chairs, she counts the change as progress.
It's worth quoting the end of Zbigniew Herbert's poem:
but this is still a vision
of a better future
for the time being
magic
flourishes
as never before
(From Mr. Cogito, tr. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter. New York, Ecco, 1993. (original 1974)
References:
Jennifer Hall, "Out of Body Theatre," robotic performances with a marionette interacting with computer animations, video projections, shadow puppets and peformers, leading through the experience of an epileptic seizure.
Nancy Paterson, Stock Market Skirt, old saw that women's hemlines are linked to the rise and fall of the stock market. The skirt length varies automatically according to the market link.
Donna Harraway, "The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment."
Mark Pauline, Survival Research Laboratories
Laura Kikauka and Norman White, Them Fuclking Robots, found object robots that interact sexually.
Sarah Waterson, Mapping E-motion, robotic breast that interacts with the audience according to an environmental sensing system that mimics pheromones.
A Voyage Around Art Criticism
© Glenn Harper
(published in Art Papers, 1995, in that magazine's anniversary issue)
A Voyage Around Art Criticism
(one of my more personal essays)
My commission for this article was to address the question of how someone becomes an art critic. (What art criticism is is another question that we'll have to deal with in due course.) The route to criticism is often, as it was in my own case, a series of accidents and wrong turns that, to follow the traffic metaphor to its absurd conclusion, is something like the scenario of Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend: the film follows a French middle-class couple along a drive in the country—except that every other French couple has had the same idea, and the countryside has become a huge traffic jam, during which civilization crumbles into, first, brutality; then, philosophy; and finally anarchy and cannibalism. Where along that route art criticism lies, you will have to judge for yourself.
In any case, the final stage of my typically indirect route to criticism began when Alan Sondheim (a filmmaker, artist, and writer who spent a couple of years in Atlanta in the '80s that were extremely productive for the Atlanta arts community) sat me down with Xenia Zed (then editor of Art Papers) and suggested we find something I could write about. I hadn't written anything since graduate school and had only written about art for seminars on Renaissance and Baroque Italian art, but it happened that I was interested in Kathy Acker, whose work bridges the visual and literary arts in interesting ways.1 Let's see, I've kind of lost my thread during that footnote…I offered to write about Acker, which led to Xenia contacting the author, bringing her to Atlanta for a reading, publishing an excerpt of her upcoming novel, etc. And leading to me beginning to write art reviews and articles on contemporary art.2
The popular image of the art critic is pretty awful. A recent crime novel of some literary ambition is titled Killing Critics (by Carol O'Connell). Aside from the wish-fulfillment fantasy implied by the novel's title (which got the novel featured in a prominent art site on the World Wide Web, artnetweb), critics are portrayed in the persona of a man with "a limited range of expression, devoid of emotion even when he smiled, only communicating cool indifference and élan." In or out of the art world, the critic's image doesn't get much better: Elizabeth Hess recently referred, in her Village Voice column, to a 1946 horror film with the unique premise that a deranged artistmass serial killer is out to get the critics that have caused him to remain among the starving classes. Another thriller, the estimable Charles Willeford's Burnt Orange Heresy, portrays a critic as ruthlessly ambitious, to the point of murder (and Willeford was a critic himself). Artists seem often to see critics simultaneously as a.) in existence to provide PR for them and their galleries; and b.) arrogant pests standing in their way.
In fact, most critics I have met in my double life as a critic and editor have been interested in promoting communication about art, for the benefit of everybody concerned or potentially concerned with art: the artist, the curator or gallery, the art world, and the public (which has a tendency to be mythical rather than actual—see Grant Kester's scathing "Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public," in Afterimage, January 1993). At a recent round-table discussion on criticism convened by curator Mary Jane Jacob and critic Michael Brenson for the "Conversations in the Castle" project of the Arts Festival of Atlanta, all the clichés and prejudices about criticism were raised (by both artists and critics), but there was a refreshing openness and seriousness about what art criticism can accomplish in its intermediate role (existing, as it does, in a network of artists, the art world, the general public, cultural history, political reality, and journal deadlines). That group reinforced my experience that critics come to the job with a commitment to art, a writer's desire to accomplish as much as possible within a clearly defined genre, and an openness to a wide range of aesthetic and non-aesthetic ideas.
My own oblique route to art criticism is rather more typical than atypical. Art critics (both memorable and unmemorable) typically are poets, philosophers, journalists, curators, artists, or anybody who can move a pencil or a cursor across a page in such a way that the result holds someone else's attention for a moment. And it really is only a moment: the character and strength of art criticism is that it is immediate, of the moment, and engaged with a contemporary artifact and readership. What is called "criticism" in art history classes is actually something else: art criticism as a discipline or a practice is actually based in consumer guides to 19th Century European Salon exhibitions, private letters to patrons (cf. Diderot, the originator of modern art criticism), and the popular press—not in the descriptions of actual works of art that punctuate art historical arguments. The essays produced by the practice of art criticism may contain (and in many remarkable instances do contain) philosophy, aesthetics, dialogue with artists, and distinctive style—but they are essentially temporal and temporary. Art criticism has occasionally produced memorable texts qua texts (cf. Baudelaire), but is normally referred to, after the cover date of the magazine in which it appeared, mainly as an invaluable source of data on the art of the day.
That is to say, art criticism is a "minor" literature, in the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari's very interesting little book on Kafka. The art critic is a minor or regional writer (in analogy with D&G's use of those words), speaking in terms of someone else's work even while exploring his/her own concerns and ideas. The art critic is engaged with both an artist and a reader (who are often, of course, the same person), and, for a writer, some of the most remarkable engagement with readers comes in writing for daily newspapers (your aunt Betty reads it, and you run into the artist you wrote about when you're in line at the Kroger). Art criticism is journalism, not philosophy, and it accomplishes more when it embraces that immediacy rather than pretending to a more solitary and Olympian3 position or discourse. As John Perrault has suggested, writing about art is a very effective and enlightening way to look at art, and we should continually remind ourselves that writing about art is about looking at art. I am reminded of Wendy Steiner's chiding comment on Arhur Danto's criticism, in which she mocks his position that the meaning or content of art is theory; like Steiner, I believe that we as art critics have to remind ourselves that the meaning of art is expressed as art,4 not as an encoded text.5
Another question is what qualifies us to be critics, in the absence of any universally accepted accreditation or college major6 or graduate program? In my case, perhaps it was a background in literary criticism, a postgraduate disillusionment with academia as the fountainhead of and podium for intellectual discourse, or perhaps my brief military experience (during which another book, like the works of Kathy Acker, changed the course of my life: How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, by Lenny Bruce7 In the months after reading Bruce's autobiography, spent in ostensibly studying to be a Counterintelligence Agent,8 pretending to study the Vietnamese language, and actually folding sheets in the base laundry while waiting for my application for discharge from the military to be processed, Lenny's dirty talk sustained me like the voice of an AA devotee's higher power. I guess the point is that an art critic is best qualified by being a member of the audience, with the privilege of talking back to the artist and (we can hope) the perspective on life and art that will make a valuable response possible.
If we can't say much with any precision about who the art critic is, can we be any more precise about how to do it? There are a few things that, as an editor, I can tell you not to do. Don't begin with an epigraph or a quote. Those are the first things I will lop off, with all the pleasure of the guy in the funny hat with his hand on the lever of the guillotine. In fact, don't lard a review with quotes at all, whether from Homi Baba or the artist you are writing about: you are supposed to be the one writing the review. And don't constantly compare an artist, whether fresh out of art school or well into a career, to Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Rembrandt, or Picasso. Only refer to other artists' work if it gives you a shorthand that will give a reader some idea of what is going on, never to insert the artist under discussion into art history (remember, art history knows nothing about criticism, and usually vice versa). Pay special attention to your opening paragraph: that is to say, it usually stinks, and is the second thing I will lop off after the epigraph. Many writers use the first paragraph to get themselves cranked up; the wise ones go back and delete it once they've decided what they're going to say.
What you should do most of all (and most clearly based on my own prejudices about what criticism is and does, prejudices that many or most other critics and editors may not share) is remember that description is the most important part of art writing. Not simple description, the anthropoligical cliché popularized by Clifford Geertz is apt here: it is "thick" description that you should practice, drawing into your evocation of the work in the gallery whatever context in life or art will be important for a reader to understand what is going on in the work. No matter what journal you are writing for, no matter what audience, most of the people reading your article will never see the work you are writing about. You owe the audience and the artist some translation into a written form of the experience of seeing the work, whether it is ultimately a personal response or an explicit description (happily, it is possible to do both at the same time, without descending into the bathos of Walter Pater's famous description of the Mona Lisa).
And it is possible to accomplish a great deal in art criticism, both in the furthering of communication about art and artists and in the unique opportunity that the medium allows for bringing together cultural, personal, global, and local matters of interest. It is not, however, very easy to make a living. Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding that artists have about art critics is that they fail to grasp the fact that almost all critics, like almost all artists, do not make a living from their work. We share a way of life in respect to low income as well as commitments and interests. Most critics, like most artists, do what they do from inner necessity as well as love and admiration for art—rather than from the naked arrogance and ambition of the clay-footed critics of the popular imagination.
I owe a great deal to Art Papers, and to the long-suffering staff who shared with me the nine+ years I was editor, and to Xenia, the long-suffering editor who hacked up my articles before I became an editor and had the chance to pass the favor along to others. Let the useful information in this article stand as a tribute to those who have taught and assisted me in the craft and profession of art criticism and art publishing. I also take no responsibility for the digressive and useless information, which is due to the recent influence of Xavier de Maistre's Shandean Voyage Round My Room, which thanks to New Directions is back in print in English, and for which you can blame the concluding epigraph that I plan to squeeze into the space below (unless the editors delete it). De Maistre, also described a particular work of sculpture "is the tuning fork according to which I adjust the variable and discordant assortment of sensations and perceptions that make up my existence," succinctly rendering the power of art in everyday life.
Imagination, realm of enchantment!—which the most beneficent of beings bestowed upon man to console him for reality. –Xavier de Maistre
Glenn Harper is the former editor of Art Papers, current editor of Sculpture, and a contributor to numerous journals, including Art Papers, for whose editors he has enormous respect and sympathy.
1. I once removed what I considered to be digressive material from an article by Alan Sondheim to a series of footnotes that ultimately were longer than the article to which they were appended—it seems only fair to do the same with my own digressions. Kathy Acker's recent novel Pussy, King of the Pirates, offers me an excuse to revisit the work of that remarkable writer. Whe has written several books and brought several earlier works out in new editions since my last article on her work, and the additional material has changed my ideas somewhat about what she is doing in her writing. One factor is that the work is extremely repetitive, with the same themes coming back to the surface over and over again in each text and among all the texts (particularly a family scenario of abandonment, abuse, suicide, and this yacht that keeps bobbing up into the picture). There is not actually any narration or dialogue: the texts consist of outbursts from a complex narrative voice in several, variously gendered personae, shifting from breathless descriptions of destructive daily life within the family to passages of brisk and not particularly erotic pornography to hortatory philosophical statements that derive from thinkers like Luce Irigaray (whose influence I emphasized in my earlier articles on Acker), Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Antonin Artaud (whose name is used several times for characters in the books), Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Genet, and so forth. Curiously, Acker's splintered narrative style has been praised by current proponents of hypertext media (like Arthur and Mary Louise Kroker) as cyber-writing, when in fact the models for her work are almost without exception writers from the near or distant past, and the frequent illustrations in her work by her own hand and others as well as the often striking cover art for her books are without exception based on retro styles derived from German dada and expressionism (particularly Georg Grosz) and comic books. When she reads from her work (and excerpts of her readings of Pussy, King of the Pirates can be heard on the very interesting collaborative CD based on the novel and performed by Acker and the English political-punk band, the Mekons), her voice is both matter of fact and securely placed culturally and geographically in New York City and environs. She does not indulge in the '80s performance art strategies of Karen Finley (trance-like recitative) or Eric Bogosian (theatrical impersonation of characters). She reads the text in her own voice, flatly and with little intonation, recalling authors reading in bookstores or university auditoriums rather than performance artists in galleries or virtual authors in cyberspace. She writes books, and though the books are really exploring (as she says at a crucial point in Pussy) the discovery of the visual, her influences, her style, and her medium are all archaically literary. That literacy, in spite of the often unlettered quality of the voices in the text, is one of her substantial conributions to "postmodern" art and writing. With her obsessive and limited stock of narrative material, her insistence on originary literary texts (such as her ostensive thefts from Dickens, Cervantes, William Gibson, and Robert Louis Stevenson [whose pirate book is the supposed source of Pussy, though Acker's book bears less resemblance to the original than does Muppet Treasure Island]), and the obsolete visual and textual style of work (even when thrust into contemporary media like a punk-rock CD, an underground film [Bette Gordon's ?] or a multi-media "opera" [Empire of the Sensless?]) is personal and direct, even though fragmented and inconclusive. Acker is ultimately a writer, an artist of an old-fashioned sort, rather than a MUDDer, MOOer, hypertexter, or cyberpunk. Her "authorized" World Wide Web page has more the quality of a book jacket than a video game.
2.Fortunately for me, contemporary art was at that time undergoing a process of theoretical introspection that was basically literary in character, and the importance of literary critical discussions (much of my education was in literary criticism) for the visual arts gave me a foothold in the dialogue of the day in the visual arts. Fortunately for me, I became disillusioned with the literary character of much of the discussion at about the same time the art world as a whole did, and moved on to other forms of inquiry better suited to the visual material that is, after all, the object of study in the visual arts.
3. Pardon the reference to the Olympics; I wasn't there and didn't watch on TV. It just feels so satisfying to use an Olympic-related term without prior approval from the Committee.
4. My favorite quote from the very quotable Ad Reinhardt is that "art is not the spiritual side of business," and it is equally true that art is not the illustrative side of philosophy.
5. Steiner's comment on Danto also reminds me of another chiding commentary, spoken by the editors of Serpent's Tail Press, who publish a very good series of crime novels under the banner "Mask Noir;" Serpent's Tail's editors proclaim that there mission in publishing crime novels about working class and out-class people is to refute the amazing comment by well-known crime writer P.D. James that crime novels must ba about the middle class, because "only the middle class is capable of moral judgment."!
6. Does anyone think it simply accurate or somehow more culturally incisive that the head of the "department of unemployment" on the Public Radio Program Car Talk (known for its list of parodic department heads and technicians) is "Art Majors"?
7. I read this book while riding the Long Island Railroad from Manhattan to Stony Brook, to meet my brother at an Astrophysics conferenfe (his conference, not mine), while on leave from the Army. As I sat on the wooden bench, next to the wood-framed window on the old rail car (the cars at that time on the LIRR were more like the trains in Doctor Zhivago than the sleek, graffiti-resistant cars of today), which was standing still because the tracks had washed away on the rail bed ahead of us (we ultimately reached Stony Brook by bus). In that context, Lenny Bruce's autobiography produced a Brechtian alienation that changed my perception of both where I sat and where I stood.
8. This experience was excellent training for art criticism, better than graduate school to the extent that it involved interviewing skills, typing skills, keeping your audience in mind, and constant confrontation with absurdity. I've told these stories so many times they seem more like oral tradition than autobiography, but perhaps they are relevant here, or at least digressively relevant. After arriving at Baltimore's Fort Holabird as a PFC in 1969, I spent several weeks on temporary duty while waiting for Counterintelligence classes to begin. We would stand in formation in the cold morning air, which stank of the primary sources of nearby Colgate Creek: Colgate Palmolive, the Shaeffer brewery, and General Anodine and Foundry—on good days the creek looked like a cesspool, on bad days like a tarpit). We would be picked out of line like migrant workers, to perform duties like pretending to be taxi drivers in hostile countries (actually we were pretending to be taxi drivers who were pretending to be taxi drivers but were actually agents working for U.S. military intelligence—an oxymoron if ever there was one). We would cruise around Baltimore until the officer (we usually taxied around officers who were in Interrogation classes, for some reason) we were assigned to flagged us down and repeated their bona fides (look it up in your LeCarré), and then we would take them out to an old gun emplacement that was built to protect the Chesapeake Bay from Nazi invasion, where other volunteers (often PFCs who had finished Interrogation classes) would interrogate the officers who were taking Interrogation classes (to give them first-hand experience of the procedure: the PFCs had a great time stripping the officers naked, tying them up, and threatening them). Sometimes we would ferry the officers out to Fort Mead, which was substituting for the rural area of this hypothetical foreign country (all this was before "Mission Impossible," but just as hokey), where the officer was supposed to instruct us in where to drive to meet his contact while avoiding the hostile military or police. Of course, if we managed to get the officers picked up by the hostile forces, we could spend the rest of the day parked in an empty field, doing nothing, so we would talk the officers into getting out of the taxi when we saw a car coming that we recognized from previous trips to Fort Mead as the pastel Plymouth with Pennsylvania license plates that the hostile forces always used. One night after dumping a Lieutenant and a couple of Captains in this manner, I picked the wrong spot to park and was nearly flattened by a tank that suddenly reared up out of a gully and slammed down onto the road right in front of me.
After getting into a class, we would line up every morning in fatigues, each PFC with hos own Samsonite briecase at present arms, and then march off to class across the Colgate Creek bridge. In class, we studied the techniques of picking locks (though with little hands-on practice), the variety of night-vision devices, the means to sabotage a car without blowing it up (some of which we Southern boys in the class already knew), how to type on old manual typewriters, and how to interview the neighbors of people applying for security clearances. Most of the classes were occupied by this latter course of study, since Counterintelligence Agents stationed in the U.S. would generally be interviewing neighbors or taking down the names of war protesters, a skill they didn't see the need to teach in school. The questioning technique was rigorously limited to devices to extract information without influencing the subject, a style of questioning invaluable for interviewing artists in later life. If you veered away from the predetermined path, tha actors portraying the target's neighbors would make merciless fun of you. These were ultimately to be the most hair-raising encounters of my entire military career. These interviews and the field exercises in surveillance (much more fun) were the subject of a book on World War II era Fort Holabird's role in training the famous OSS, You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger. Fortunately for general readers, though perhaps not for serious spy aficianados, the Counterintelligence course described in You're Stepping is just as funny and hapless as my own experience in the course would prove to be.
Just to give the flavor of the experience: real surveillance isn't one guy following another guy. We would always be in groups of three, following a single "rabbit." All of us, of course (this was the miliatary, after all) be dressed identically, in "civilian" attire: identical white shirts, black ties, black pants, army haircuts, and spitshined shoes. (Reportedly, the same logic of civilian dress was followed in Saigon, where the outfits immediately marked the wearers as Intelligence officers and, therefore, marked men. The response was to put them back in uniform, but instead of wearing the normal collor insignia of U.S. on one side and the Intelligence "sub rosa" emblem on the other, they would wear a brass U.S. on both lapels—which of course immediately identified them as Intelligence agents.) If the rabbit went into a restaurant, all but one of the surveillance team was supposed to go in and order something. So three or four of the rabbits would get together and agree to meet in a 10-seat diner. Six or eight of the surveilors would go in and order something, while three or four would mill around outside. All 12-16 of them in white shirts, black ties, black pants, military haircuts, and spit-shined shoes. Earlier classes at Fort Holabird had caused the students to be banned from downtown department stores, because they had been using the elevators, starting keystone-kops elevator chases. The keystone influence remained, however: one day, three of us were following someone through the streets of Baltimore, aNd the rabbit turned a corner quickly. The three of us spilled around the corner in sequence, careening into one another as we abruptly stopped at the top of a steeply descending street, empty save for an old man in coveralls sweeping the streets. He looked over at us, bunched stupidly at the corner, and slowly raised his arm to point in the direction our quarry had gone.
Auto surveillance was just as sophisticated. One rabbit car, with a driver and no passengers, was to be followed by three surveillance cars, each with a driver and three passengers (there were not enough vehicles for each student to drive a separate car): each car a pastel Plymouth with Pennsylvania license plates. On one occasion, three of the rabbits drove to an out-of-season, nearly deserted fishing camp on the Bay; nine identical cars followed them in, and 39 young men in military haircuts, white shirts, black ties, black pants, and spitshined shoes milled around in front of the bait shack for half an hour, trying to look inconspicuous. Naturally, all of this experience has been invaluable for getting in and out of galleries before the owner or executive director notices that a critic is in the place, and bends your ear with an hour's marketing speech for the artist of the day.
(published in Art Papers, 1995, in that magazine's anniversary issue)
A Voyage Around Art Criticism
(one of my more personal essays)
My commission for this article was to address the question of how someone becomes an art critic. (What art criticism is is another question that we'll have to deal with in due course.) The route to criticism is often, as it was in my own case, a series of accidents and wrong turns that, to follow the traffic metaphor to its absurd conclusion, is something like the scenario of Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend: the film follows a French middle-class couple along a drive in the country—except that every other French couple has had the same idea, and the countryside has become a huge traffic jam, during which civilization crumbles into, first, brutality; then, philosophy; and finally anarchy and cannibalism. Where along that route art criticism lies, you will have to judge for yourself.
In any case, the final stage of my typically indirect route to criticism began when Alan Sondheim (a filmmaker, artist, and writer who spent a couple of years in Atlanta in the '80s that were extremely productive for the Atlanta arts community) sat me down with Xenia Zed (then editor of Art Papers) and suggested we find something I could write about. I hadn't written anything since graduate school and had only written about art for seminars on Renaissance and Baroque Italian art, but it happened that I was interested in Kathy Acker, whose work bridges the visual and literary arts in interesting ways.1 Let's see, I've kind of lost my thread during that footnote…I offered to write about Acker, which led to Xenia contacting the author, bringing her to Atlanta for a reading, publishing an excerpt of her upcoming novel, etc. And leading to me beginning to write art reviews and articles on contemporary art.2
The popular image of the art critic is pretty awful. A recent crime novel of some literary ambition is titled Killing Critics (by Carol O'Connell). Aside from the wish-fulfillment fantasy implied by the novel's title (which got the novel featured in a prominent art site on the World Wide Web, artnetweb), critics are portrayed in the persona of a man with "a limited range of expression, devoid of emotion even when he smiled, only communicating cool indifference and élan." In or out of the art world, the critic's image doesn't get much better: Elizabeth Hess recently referred, in her Village Voice column, to a 1946 horror film with the unique premise that a deranged artistmass serial killer is out to get the critics that have caused him to remain among the starving classes. Another thriller, the estimable Charles Willeford's Burnt Orange Heresy, portrays a critic as ruthlessly ambitious, to the point of murder (and Willeford was a critic himself). Artists seem often to see critics simultaneously as a.) in existence to provide PR for them and their galleries; and b.) arrogant pests standing in their way.
In fact, most critics I have met in my double life as a critic and editor have been interested in promoting communication about art, for the benefit of everybody concerned or potentially concerned with art: the artist, the curator or gallery, the art world, and the public (which has a tendency to be mythical rather than actual—see Grant Kester's scathing "Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public," in Afterimage, January 1993). At a recent round-table discussion on criticism convened by curator Mary Jane Jacob and critic Michael Brenson for the "Conversations in the Castle" project of the Arts Festival of Atlanta, all the clichés and prejudices about criticism were raised (by both artists and critics), but there was a refreshing openness and seriousness about what art criticism can accomplish in its intermediate role (existing, as it does, in a network of artists, the art world, the general public, cultural history, political reality, and journal deadlines). That group reinforced my experience that critics come to the job with a commitment to art, a writer's desire to accomplish as much as possible within a clearly defined genre, and an openness to a wide range of aesthetic and non-aesthetic ideas.
My own oblique route to art criticism is rather more typical than atypical. Art critics (both memorable and unmemorable) typically are poets, philosophers, journalists, curators, artists, or anybody who can move a pencil or a cursor across a page in such a way that the result holds someone else's attention for a moment. And it really is only a moment: the character and strength of art criticism is that it is immediate, of the moment, and engaged with a contemporary artifact and readership. What is called "criticism" in art history classes is actually something else: art criticism as a discipline or a practice is actually based in consumer guides to 19th Century European Salon exhibitions, private letters to patrons (cf. Diderot, the originator of modern art criticism), and the popular press—not in the descriptions of actual works of art that punctuate art historical arguments. The essays produced by the practice of art criticism may contain (and in many remarkable instances do contain) philosophy, aesthetics, dialogue with artists, and distinctive style—but they are essentially temporal and temporary. Art criticism has occasionally produced memorable texts qua texts (cf. Baudelaire), but is normally referred to, after the cover date of the magazine in which it appeared, mainly as an invaluable source of data on the art of the day.
That is to say, art criticism is a "minor" literature, in the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari's very interesting little book on Kafka. The art critic is a minor or regional writer (in analogy with D&G's use of those words), speaking in terms of someone else's work even while exploring his/her own concerns and ideas. The art critic is engaged with both an artist and a reader (who are often, of course, the same person), and, for a writer, some of the most remarkable engagement with readers comes in writing for daily newspapers (your aunt Betty reads it, and you run into the artist you wrote about when you're in line at the Kroger). Art criticism is journalism, not philosophy, and it accomplishes more when it embraces that immediacy rather than pretending to a more solitary and Olympian3 position or discourse. As John Perrault has suggested, writing about art is a very effective and enlightening way to look at art, and we should continually remind ourselves that writing about art is about looking at art. I am reminded of Wendy Steiner's chiding comment on Arhur Danto's criticism, in which she mocks his position that the meaning or content of art is theory; like Steiner, I believe that we as art critics have to remind ourselves that the meaning of art is expressed as art,4 not as an encoded text.5
Another question is what qualifies us to be critics, in the absence of any universally accepted accreditation or college major6 or graduate program? In my case, perhaps it was a background in literary criticism, a postgraduate disillusionment with academia as the fountainhead of and podium for intellectual discourse, or perhaps my brief military experience (during which another book, like the works of Kathy Acker, changed the course of my life: How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, by Lenny Bruce7 In the months after reading Bruce's autobiography, spent in ostensibly studying to be a Counterintelligence Agent,8 pretending to study the Vietnamese language, and actually folding sheets in the base laundry while waiting for my application for discharge from the military to be processed, Lenny's dirty talk sustained me like the voice of an AA devotee's higher power. I guess the point is that an art critic is best qualified by being a member of the audience, with the privilege of talking back to the artist and (we can hope) the perspective on life and art that will make a valuable response possible.
If we can't say much with any precision about who the art critic is, can we be any more precise about how to do it? There are a few things that, as an editor, I can tell you not to do. Don't begin with an epigraph or a quote. Those are the first things I will lop off, with all the pleasure of the guy in the funny hat with his hand on the lever of the guillotine. In fact, don't lard a review with quotes at all, whether from Homi Baba or the artist you are writing about: you are supposed to be the one writing the review. And don't constantly compare an artist, whether fresh out of art school or well into a career, to Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Rembrandt, or Picasso. Only refer to other artists' work if it gives you a shorthand that will give a reader some idea of what is going on, never to insert the artist under discussion into art history (remember, art history knows nothing about criticism, and usually vice versa). Pay special attention to your opening paragraph: that is to say, it usually stinks, and is the second thing I will lop off after the epigraph. Many writers use the first paragraph to get themselves cranked up; the wise ones go back and delete it once they've decided what they're going to say.
What you should do most of all (and most clearly based on my own prejudices about what criticism is and does, prejudices that many or most other critics and editors may not share) is remember that description is the most important part of art writing. Not simple description, the anthropoligical cliché popularized by Clifford Geertz is apt here: it is "thick" description that you should practice, drawing into your evocation of the work in the gallery whatever context in life or art will be important for a reader to understand what is going on in the work. No matter what journal you are writing for, no matter what audience, most of the people reading your article will never see the work you are writing about. You owe the audience and the artist some translation into a written form of the experience of seeing the work, whether it is ultimately a personal response or an explicit description (happily, it is possible to do both at the same time, without descending into the bathos of Walter Pater's famous description of the Mona Lisa).
And it is possible to accomplish a great deal in art criticism, both in the furthering of communication about art and artists and in the unique opportunity that the medium allows for bringing together cultural, personal, global, and local matters of interest. It is not, however, very easy to make a living. Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding that artists have about art critics is that they fail to grasp the fact that almost all critics, like almost all artists, do not make a living from their work. We share a way of life in respect to low income as well as commitments and interests. Most critics, like most artists, do what they do from inner necessity as well as love and admiration for art—rather than from the naked arrogance and ambition of the clay-footed critics of the popular imagination.
I owe a great deal to Art Papers, and to the long-suffering staff who shared with me the nine+ years I was editor, and to Xenia, the long-suffering editor who hacked up my articles before I became an editor and had the chance to pass the favor along to others. Let the useful information in this article stand as a tribute to those who have taught and assisted me in the craft and profession of art criticism and art publishing. I also take no responsibility for the digressive and useless information, which is due to the recent influence of Xavier de Maistre's Shandean Voyage Round My Room, which thanks to New Directions is back in print in English, and for which you can blame the concluding epigraph that I plan to squeeze into the space below (unless the editors delete it). De Maistre, also described a particular work of sculpture "is the tuning fork according to which I adjust the variable and discordant assortment of sensations and perceptions that make up my existence," succinctly rendering the power of art in everyday life.
Imagination, realm of enchantment!—which the most beneficent of beings bestowed upon man to console him for reality. –Xavier de Maistre
Glenn Harper is the former editor of Art Papers, current editor of Sculpture, and a contributor to numerous journals, including Art Papers, for whose editors he has enormous respect and sympathy.
1. I once removed what I considered to be digressive material from an article by Alan Sondheim to a series of footnotes that ultimately were longer than the article to which they were appended—it seems only fair to do the same with my own digressions. Kathy Acker's recent novel Pussy, King of the Pirates, offers me an excuse to revisit the work of that remarkable writer. Whe has written several books and brought several earlier works out in new editions since my last article on her work, and the additional material has changed my ideas somewhat about what she is doing in her writing. One factor is that the work is extremely repetitive, with the same themes coming back to the surface over and over again in each text and among all the texts (particularly a family scenario of abandonment, abuse, suicide, and this yacht that keeps bobbing up into the picture). There is not actually any narration or dialogue: the texts consist of outbursts from a complex narrative voice in several, variously gendered personae, shifting from breathless descriptions of destructive daily life within the family to passages of brisk and not particularly erotic pornography to hortatory philosophical statements that derive from thinkers like Luce Irigaray (whose influence I emphasized in my earlier articles on Acker), Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Antonin Artaud (whose name is used several times for characters in the books), Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Genet, and so forth. Curiously, Acker's splintered narrative style has been praised by current proponents of hypertext media (like Arthur and Mary Louise Kroker) as cyber-writing, when in fact the models for her work are almost without exception writers from the near or distant past, and the frequent illustrations in her work by her own hand and others as well as the often striking cover art for her books are without exception based on retro styles derived from German dada and expressionism (particularly Georg Grosz) and comic books. When she reads from her work (and excerpts of her readings of Pussy, King of the Pirates can be heard on the very interesting collaborative CD based on the novel and performed by Acker and the English political-punk band, the Mekons), her voice is both matter of fact and securely placed culturally and geographically in New York City and environs. She does not indulge in the '80s performance art strategies of Karen Finley (trance-like recitative) or Eric Bogosian (theatrical impersonation of characters). She reads the text in her own voice, flatly and with little intonation, recalling authors reading in bookstores or university auditoriums rather than performance artists in galleries or virtual authors in cyberspace. She writes books, and though the books are really exploring (as she says at a crucial point in Pussy) the discovery of the visual, her influences, her style, and her medium are all archaically literary. That literacy, in spite of the often unlettered quality of the voices in the text, is one of her substantial conributions to "postmodern" art and writing. With her obsessive and limited stock of narrative material, her insistence on originary literary texts (such as her ostensive thefts from Dickens, Cervantes, William Gibson, and Robert Louis Stevenson [whose pirate book is the supposed source of Pussy, though Acker's book bears less resemblance to the original than does Muppet Treasure Island]), and the obsolete visual and textual style of work (even when thrust into contemporary media like a punk-rock CD, an underground film [Bette Gordon's ?] or a multi-media "opera" [Empire of the Sensless?]) is personal and direct, even though fragmented and inconclusive. Acker is ultimately a writer, an artist of an old-fashioned sort, rather than a MUDDer, MOOer, hypertexter, or cyberpunk. Her "authorized" World Wide Web page has more the quality of a book jacket than a video game.
2.Fortunately for me, contemporary art was at that time undergoing a process of theoretical introspection that was basically literary in character, and the importance of literary critical discussions (much of my education was in literary criticism) for the visual arts gave me a foothold in the dialogue of the day in the visual arts. Fortunately for me, I became disillusioned with the literary character of much of the discussion at about the same time the art world as a whole did, and moved on to other forms of inquiry better suited to the visual material that is, after all, the object of study in the visual arts.
3. Pardon the reference to the Olympics; I wasn't there and didn't watch on TV. It just feels so satisfying to use an Olympic-related term without prior approval from the Committee.
4. My favorite quote from the very quotable Ad Reinhardt is that "art is not the spiritual side of business," and it is equally true that art is not the illustrative side of philosophy.
5. Steiner's comment on Danto also reminds me of another chiding commentary, spoken by the editors of Serpent's Tail Press, who publish a very good series of crime novels under the banner "Mask Noir;" Serpent's Tail's editors proclaim that there mission in publishing crime novels about working class and out-class people is to refute the amazing comment by well-known crime writer P.D. James that crime novels must ba about the middle class, because "only the middle class is capable of moral judgment."!
6. Does anyone think it simply accurate or somehow more culturally incisive that the head of the "department of unemployment" on the Public Radio Program Car Talk (known for its list of parodic department heads and technicians) is "Art Majors"?
7. I read this book while riding the Long Island Railroad from Manhattan to Stony Brook, to meet my brother at an Astrophysics conferenfe (his conference, not mine), while on leave from the Army. As I sat on the wooden bench, next to the wood-framed window on the old rail car (the cars at that time on the LIRR were more like the trains in Doctor Zhivago than the sleek, graffiti-resistant cars of today), which was standing still because the tracks had washed away on the rail bed ahead of us (we ultimately reached Stony Brook by bus). In that context, Lenny Bruce's autobiography produced a Brechtian alienation that changed my perception of both where I sat and where I stood.
8. This experience was excellent training for art criticism, better than graduate school to the extent that it involved interviewing skills, typing skills, keeping your audience in mind, and constant confrontation with absurdity. I've told these stories so many times they seem more like oral tradition than autobiography, but perhaps they are relevant here, or at least digressively relevant. After arriving at Baltimore's Fort Holabird as a PFC in 1969, I spent several weeks on temporary duty while waiting for Counterintelligence classes to begin. We would stand in formation in the cold morning air, which stank of the primary sources of nearby Colgate Creek: Colgate Palmolive, the Shaeffer brewery, and General Anodine and Foundry—on good days the creek looked like a cesspool, on bad days like a tarpit). We would be picked out of line like migrant workers, to perform duties like pretending to be taxi drivers in hostile countries (actually we were pretending to be taxi drivers who were pretending to be taxi drivers but were actually agents working for U.S. military intelligence—an oxymoron if ever there was one). We would cruise around Baltimore until the officer (we usually taxied around officers who were in Interrogation classes, for some reason) we were assigned to flagged us down and repeated their bona fides (look it up in your LeCarré), and then we would take them out to an old gun emplacement that was built to protect the Chesapeake Bay from Nazi invasion, where other volunteers (often PFCs who had finished Interrogation classes) would interrogate the officers who were taking Interrogation classes (to give them first-hand experience of the procedure: the PFCs had a great time stripping the officers naked, tying them up, and threatening them). Sometimes we would ferry the officers out to Fort Mead, which was substituting for the rural area of this hypothetical foreign country (all this was before "Mission Impossible," but just as hokey), where the officer was supposed to instruct us in where to drive to meet his contact while avoiding the hostile military or police. Of course, if we managed to get the officers picked up by the hostile forces, we could spend the rest of the day parked in an empty field, doing nothing, so we would talk the officers into getting out of the taxi when we saw a car coming that we recognized from previous trips to Fort Mead as the pastel Plymouth with Pennsylvania license plates that the hostile forces always used. One night after dumping a Lieutenant and a couple of Captains in this manner, I picked the wrong spot to park and was nearly flattened by a tank that suddenly reared up out of a gully and slammed down onto the road right in front of me.
After getting into a class, we would line up every morning in fatigues, each PFC with hos own Samsonite briecase at present arms, and then march off to class across the Colgate Creek bridge. In class, we studied the techniques of picking locks (though with little hands-on practice), the variety of night-vision devices, the means to sabotage a car without blowing it up (some of which we Southern boys in the class already knew), how to type on old manual typewriters, and how to interview the neighbors of people applying for security clearances. Most of the classes were occupied by this latter course of study, since Counterintelligence Agents stationed in the U.S. would generally be interviewing neighbors or taking down the names of war protesters, a skill they didn't see the need to teach in school. The questioning technique was rigorously limited to devices to extract information without influencing the subject, a style of questioning invaluable for interviewing artists in later life. If you veered away from the predetermined path, tha actors portraying the target's neighbors would make merciless fun of you. These were ultimately to be the most hair-raising encounters of my entire military career. These interviews and the field exercises in surveillance (much more fun) were the subject of a book on World War II era Fort Holabird's role in training the famous OSS, You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger. Fortunately for general readers, though perhaps not for serious spy aficianados, the Counterintelligence course described in You're Stepping is just as funny and hapless as my own experience in the course would prove to be.
Just to give the flavor of the experience: real surveillance isn't one guy following another guy. We would always be in groups of three, following a single "rabbit." All of us, of course (this was the miliatary, after all) be dressed identically, in "civilian" attire: identical white shirts, black ties, black pants, army haircuts, and spitshined shoes. (Reportedly, the same logic of civilian dress was followed in Saigon, where the outfits immediately marked the wearers as Intelligence officers and, therefore, marked men. The response was to put them back in uniform, but instead of wearing the normal collor insignia of U.S. on one side and the Intelligence "sub rosa" emblem on the other, they would wear a brass U.S. on both lapels—which of course immediately identified them as Intelligence agents.) If the rabbit went into a restaurant, all but one of the surveillance team was supposed to go in and order something. So three or four of the rabbits would get together and agree to meet in a 10-seat diner. Six or eight of the surveilors would go in and order something, while three or four would mill around outside. All 12-16 of them in white shirts, black ties, black pants, military haircuts, and spit-shined shoes. Earlier classes at Fort Holabird had caused the students to be banned from downtown department stores, because they had been using the elevators, starting keystone-kops elevator chases. The keystone influence remained, however: one day, three of us were following someone through the streets of Baltimore, aNd the rabbit turned a corner quickly. The three of us spilled around the corner in sequence, careening into one another as we abruptly stopped at the top of a steeply descending street, empty save for an old man in coveralls sweeping the streets. He looked over at us, bunched stupidly at the corner, and slowly raised his arm to point in the direction our quarry had gone.
Auto surveillance was just as sophisticated. One rabbit car, with a driver and no passengers, was to be followed by three surveillance cars, each with a driver and three passengers (there were not enough vehicles for each student to drive a separate car): each car a pastel Plymouth with Pennsylvania license plates. On one occasion, three of the rabbits drove to an out-of-season, nearly deserted fishing camp on the Bay; nine identical cars followed them in, and 39 young men in military haircuts, white shirts, black ties, black pants, and spitshined shoes milled around in front of the bait shack for half an hour, trying to look inconspicuous. Naturally, all of this experience has been invaluable for getting in and out of galleries before the owner or executive director notices that a critic is in the place, and bends your ear with an hour's marketing speech for the artist of the day.
On Pluralism
© Glenn Harper
(An unpublished essay, 2002--some passages overlap with essays already posted)
As the editor of a magazine called Sculpture, capital S, the artist whose name I see referred to most often by our writers is probably Marcel Duchamp—he is usually standing in for the idea that anything can be art. But the movement that is referred to most often by far by writers and artists in our pages is without any doubt Minimalism. On the one hand, Minimalism is the most sculptural of styles: Donald Judd's boxes or Carl André's bricks are above all objects, sitting there in living 3D. But on the other hand, Minimalist objects have no meaning, refer to nothing, exhibit industrial material and processes, with no reference to the hand of the artist. They are simply objects, sitting their in the space we share with them.
The constant references to Minimalism indicate two things about the art world today: the first is that Minimalism was, in some senses, the last Art Movement (later movements were conceived as marketing, as “brands”); the second is that the Minimalist object, with its plain and simple quality of being there, is still out there, as the source of everything from Rachel Whiteread's water tower in New York or her plinth on a plinth in London, to Matthew Barney’s vaseline sculpttures, to Damien Hirst's animal carcases. Robert Storr is quoted in a recent New York Times article as saying that the use of animals and other non-sculptural materials has followed a general "shift to literalism." "By the 1960's a painting was just paint and canvas. Sculpture went the same way. A steel box was a steel box. A stone was a stone."
Is the end of Art Movements, or the literalism or the object the End of Art, which is something Arthur Danto has proclaimed? And if sculpture ultimately is just whatever is put out in that name by the artist, the gallery, the museum, and the magazine, has the expanded field of sculpture grown so large that it encompasses everything and therefore signifies nothing? Is this the death of Art , or the Death of “Sculpture,” capital S, as a panel I was on recently proclaimed?
Over the years, we’ve repeatedly heard of the death of art, or the death of painting, or the death of sculpture. Mike Bidlo says that in the '70s, he saw that "the system [was] closed…Everything exciting had been done." (Reenactment/Rapprochement flyer) But, Bidlo, of course went on to make art for the next 30 years and counting, including a series of drawings of Duchamp’s readymades. A quote that keeps coming back to me when I think about art today comes from the end of Beckett’s The Unnameable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
What is more pertinent to artists today is not the death of art or the death of sculpture but the open-endedness, the lack of an end or a goal or a common sense of what we are working with or what we are talking about when we use the word art or the word sculpture. Maybe we need a new language to categorize art or even to talk about it. The only word currently in use that desribes the situation of art today is “pluralism.”
Finnish critics writing in a recent issue of Nu say that there are "No trends, no schools, nothing really to get a grip on," (Tuva Korström) and that the consequence of that is "that there is no school to [react] against, it is almost impossible to be in opposition—everything gets accepted." (Pelle Andersson) In the face of what might be seen as a "repressive tolerance," or an indifference to art on the part of society in general and even an art audience that is only left with momentary taste to base its judment on, art is granted permission but no value in the culture.
Another aspect of the problem relates to the question of Art Movements and the notion of Art History. I was recently in Houston, in the Menil Collection, and in the face of that definitive collection of Modernist art, the thought occurred to me, will it be possible for a wealthy collector to create that kind of institution out of a collection of '80s art, or '90s art. If not, what ceased to be possible after the '70s—since it is surely not that money is less important now, what has changed? In the '60s and '70s, as in earlier decades, it was possible to identify, or at least argue, who the major artists were, and collectors like the Menils reinforced that story of art by buying the work and exhibiting it, as did the museums and the commercial galleries, and the magazines and the critics. But now, do the glamor curators on the Biennial circuit, or the Saatchi collection, or shows like "Sensation" that came from the Saatchi collection create a history of art, or just a hype for the art market? When we talk about the art world today, are we in fact talking about art or the market?
On the other hand, has technology dissolved sculpture into cyberspace and virtual reality? At the sculpture conference that was the reason for my being in Houston, a large group of artists spent several days arguing that, indeed, "virtual sculpture" is the future of art. At one panel, one of the artists ecstatically proclaimed that he can now make sculpture in a computerer environment without having to worry about gravity. A woman in the audience piped up, "Well, yeah! That's called drawing." What the speakers on the panel had done, in their enthusiasm for a medium, was forget what had been done before, in other media. Alfred North Whitehead said that before you can create something new, you have to make a clearing. And you can’t just push everything out of the way, you have to make a place among what has happened before and what is happening already now. It would be better for all of us if we stepped back to look at what we are actually doing, rather than worrying about either labels or notions of dominating what can be called art or significant art or avant garde art.
Nonethelss, there are no rules, no hierarchies, no form, and no dominant style. Since Minimalist sculpture killed off the striving toward transcendence that had characterized art until modernism, in favor of simple presence or theatricality, new art isn't just made now, it's about here and now, not about transcendent ideas or forms or essences, whether aesthetic or spiritual.
And as André-Louis Paré said in the Canadian magazine Espace last summer, " It is in sculpture that art and life meet, that ethics joins with aesthetics." That is to say, even if sculpture is just what it is, sitting there in the room with us, not pretending to represent some other absent reality or transcendent truth, it forces us to deal with that space in which we live, which puts us back into the ethical, social, political world, regardless of the content or intention of the particular sculpture we are looking at. The challenge is for the artist, either in the specialized space of the art world or the social space of public art, to engage that ethical dimension, as Paré calls it, with whatever object they are putting into the world. Robertson Davies has one of his characters say that art is both carnal and intellectual, it not only comes from the action of the body as well as the mind, it is a body, a thing, an ethical reality, in Paré’s sense. Art is the One that Gilles Deleuze refers to when he says that “One is always the index of a multiplicity: an event, a singularity, a life.” (p. 30) The singular art object implies the multiplicity and the plurality of life, and it is at the same time “a life,” not a simple projection of the artist’s life or biography, but a particularity that draws attention to life in its own combination of particularity and multiplicity.
One way of characterizing how art works to rearrange the world of the viewer can be seen in Deleuze’s notion of a “being of sensation,” which John Rajchman says is best seen in art: “artworks just are sensations connected in materials in such a way as to free aesthesis [perception?] from the assumptions of ‘common sense’.” (a life, p. 9) That’s certainly the goal of art, especially in pluralism: to Make You Look, and maybe at the same time to make you look at the world again in a different way, for a moment at least. But in the current situation, such a work of art is, as Adorno says, a “bottle thrown into the sea of communication.” (life 19) In the world of communications glut and information overload, art can be just another “repressive tolerance,” a carnival to keep a segment of the population quiet. The alternative is not necessarily to make art noisier but to remember that art is “a life,” to remember the ethical dimension of sculpture in particular, and not to limit art’s scope artificially or ideologically: Juan Munoz, in a late interview, said that there are "millions of stories we have not allowed ourselves to tell during the last ten years because of our ‘suspicions,’ incredulity, etc. regarding expression or the notion that art has an expressive rather than conceptual core.”
Art enters the messy interchange of everyday life as a conversation: art isn't just the object, not even in Minimalism: it's the dialogue around the object. Otherwise, we are just decorating rich people's houses, and maybe making rich collectors’ reputations, whether it's the Menils or the Saatchis. If art is a conversation, then art is engaged in making culture, or resisting the numbing mass culture that bombards us in a one-way stream from on high—because conversation can be multi-vocal, and either widely distributed, or local. It's also ephemeral—although a more permanent object can be the instigator or the occasion, conversation requires a living response to a live statement. But a vehicle for that coversation is being shrunk—the art is losing its press: the magazines are disappearing: Art & Text, New Art Examiner, and Art Issues recently folded, Contemporanea, On View, and Stroll folded a few years ago, and a number of regional magazines have ceased publication.
What seems new, and is perhaps a harbinger of the future in art, is an exuberant multiplicity, a polymorphous plurality. The steady timeline of art from representation to abstraction and from hand tools to industrial methods was shattered in the late 1960s. By the end of the century, it was obvious that notions of a linear progress or an increasing rationalization of form had faded out in a haze of the perpetual present, a permissive environment in which everything is available to artists, and nothing is privileged—steel is not a "higher" or "nobler" material than sheetrock or cardboard. Iron or marble or wood share the sculptural field with a vast array of possible choices that confronts any sculptor every time he or she crosses the threshhold of the studio. The future of art: the encounter with the everyday, the reengagement of both viewer and artist in the ephemera as well as the solidities of life, virtual as well as tangible reality.
Art can no longer be passive, since no one can any longer claim a universal language which should (with all the moral and hierarchical implications that have been attached to that "should") be understandable by everyone. The sculpture of today and the future starts from the ground up, speaking to viewers on their own turf. The artists bring the history of sculpture into the dialogue, but without assuming the viewer's foreknowledge—the resulting conversation carries that history, as well as the immediate concerns of the individual artists and works of art, into the future.
In a recent book, Hal Foster begins his discussion of contemporary art by telling a story: “Not long ago I stood with a friend next to an art work made of four wood beams laid in a long rectangle, with a mirror set behind each corner so as to reflect the others. My friend, a conceptual artist, and I talked about the minimalist basis of such work: its reception by critics then, its elaboration by artists later, its significance for practitioners today...we hardly noticed his little girl as she played on the beams...we looked up to see her pass through the looking glass. Into the hall of mirrors...she moved farther and farther from us...Yet suddenly there she was right behind us: all she had done was skip along the beams around the room. And there we were, a critic and an artist informed in contemporary art, taken to school by a six-year-old, our theory no match for her practice.” Foster’s story is the reverse of the cliché that “my six-year-old granddaughter could do that.” Neither Foster’s story nor the glib put-down quite capture the reality of contemporary art and its audience, but that six-year-old is clearly onto something that we need to consider. If art isn’t lived, both by the artist and the audience, it isn’t fully part of our shared experience, our life-world.
Arthur Danto commented, a propos of the most recent Whitney Biennial, that "Not knowing what we are looking at is the artistic counterpart of not altogether knowing who we are." Danto may not have been intending to praise the art on view, but his comment nonetheless points out that art is not about reassuring us falsely that we do know who we are. Art is not about reassurance, it’s about challenging about who we are.
However, Art in the hypersaturated visual environment must rely on something other than shared symbols, which would have been the basis of a common culture in earlier civilizations, to establish a relation to the public. The relation of art to a public today requires something you could call education but more often resembles publicity—something that has been investigated in 2 interesting books. The first is Beatriz Colomina’s “Privacy and Publicity,” which examines the discovery of architecture’s true field as publicity rather than buildings. That discovery is based on architects’ realization that most of their projects are never built, they circulate instead in the journals. We can see an exaggerated example of what she’s talking about in the Gehry-mania around the world, and in the drive by museums to get signature buildings from famous architects. In art, Vito Acconci’s unbuilt projects and unsuccesful competition entries are as important for his reputation as the actual works visible in the civic realm or the gallery. Going back to the ‘80s, Publicity was directly engaged as art by the famous ads that Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis ran in Artforum. More recently, the entire career of Jeff Koons revolves around publicity. But publicity is a problem for artists and arts administrators with smaller budgets than Frank Gehry can command and with more difficult problems of public space than the erection of a tourist attraction-museum.
The second book on publicity is Alexander Alberro’s “Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity,” which draws attention to the dual nature of a dematerialized, conceptual art--the drive to bring art to the public and the need to find a way to sell art that has been deprived of the art object. Again, publicity is the key--both to getting the word out and in providing a kind of authenticity that a collector may be willing to buy, when a certificate of ownership may be the only physical object that is delivered at the end of the financial transaction. Although conceptual art was a creature of a particular time, its resonance is still tangible in the art world, not least in the importance that publicity has for art. In a sense, as Colomina noted for architecture, the conceptual art “object” exists as publicity, and the exhibition of these works approaches the vanishing point of art. The completion of Roden Crater has been in the news lately, but how many people have actually seen it? Much less Spiral Jetty by Smithson or Lightning Field by Walter De Maria. And more recently, a lot of the most interesting public art, including Mel Chin’s Revival Field and other new genre projects, either operate outside the view of all but a few people who are either working on the project or attending temporary events. Some of the new genre projects raise Walter Benjamin’s question of the \withering away of the “artistic function,” which is a crisis in aesthetics and in the language with which we may even talk about art. And the area where this crisis may be seen most acutely is in public art.
Public Art:
A couple of years ago, Jeffrey Kastner sent out some survey questions that he proposed to use as the basis for an issue of Public Art Review. He never used the responses, whether because of the nature of the responses or the laziness of his respondents in honoring the deadline, but these were his first two questions: "What is the most significant trend or aspect of public art that will influence the future of the field? What is the single most critical issue facing artists working in the public art field today, and what will it likely be in the next century?" To the first of those questions, I responded then with a negative rather than a positive comment, that too often, public art projects subordinate the artist to a program that seeks either to symbolize a bland civic image of an actual (or even imaginary) community, or or reduce the art to architectural decoration. There have been laments that public art programs in art schools around the country are producing a generation of artists attuned to dealing with bureaucracies to get commissions, rather than doing art that challenges or surpasses a commission. The challenge for the future is to seek tougher art, better audience education, and more adventurous commissioning bodies.
I have been on a couple of panels for the Public Art Network, mostly attended by public art administrators. On the one hand, the discussion always revolves around publicity (how can we get the newspapers to cover public art when it’s NOT controversial), and on the other, the audience often responds much more positively to discussion of projects that ingratiate themselves into public space nearly invisibly, as lighting fixtures or fountains or design elements, and they respond much less positively to projects that thrust the “art” out into the face of the “public” in a blatant or obstreperous manner.
While the reality of the public sphere demonstrates little clarity and little of its ideological, "democratic" character of a forum for debate or political contest or social interaction, "art" is certifiably a contested territory, a forum for often vituperative debate. In fact, art may be standing in for a public forum that doesn't exist outside of art, which could be one explanation of why the debate about and within art, such as the furor over the "Sensation" exhibition, has been so intense. Why, for example, has the right wing been so intent on killing the NEA, once the source of ideas and money for public art? The agency itself seems hardly to warrant the uproar, based on budget, the vast majority of grants awarded, or the content of the art once rewarded with the individual artists' fellowships that the Congress purged. If the intensity of the debate over art gives rise to the idea that there is genuinely something at stake in contemporary art, an exciting idea, there is also a danger of reducing public art to a Roman arena rather than a public forum—to a site where proxy battles are fought before a passive public.
What is public space, anyway: a good deal of what we publish in Sculpture magazine as public art is actually funded by private interests and placed within private spaces, like corporate headquarters buildings or shopping malls that may imitate "public space" but do not permit some of the rights of a democratic public sphere: free speech, free access, and so on. Malcolm Miles refers to these sites as "spaces under surveillance." Even within space that is publicly owned, the artist creating public art is often restricted in terms of freedom of expression, by means of the layers of bureaucracy involved in the programs, the commissioning, the approval, and the construction of public art. That denial of free expression is based on a distrust of individual artistic creativity, and is the symptom of the restrictive definition of "public" and "public space" that we refer to when we use "public" as in opposition to "art." There are, of course, notions of the public and public space that may not be so easily placed in opposition to art, and we will look at some of those as we go along. But, using the narrower sense of the terms, in all aspects of the field, the public and the art are in some sense in opposition, and in a constantly shifting balance.
There's a lot about the "phantom public" in writing on public art and public space, and obviously the public in public art is often a phantom or a bureaucratically defined population. Some new genre public art seeks to confront or define an actual public, in small groups or communities, but we also need to address the urban mass public, in the context of contemporary public space, in order to get a grasp on the possibilities of public art. Science Fiction writer David Brin recently suggested, on the PBS program Beyond Human, that there will be a time when we will all wear glasses with a small monitor in the corner that will display information from a computer that will scan the faces of people we pass and read out their names personal data on them. That seemed to me a horrible vision of public space, and of the interrelations of the people in it, in the future, but it was proposed as a good thing, a utopian, high tech public sphere. Brin's idea reminded me of a description of the beginnings of modern life and modern public space in the development of the city and the crowd, inBatteries of Life, by Christof Asendorf. (Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, tr. Don Reneau, Univ. of California Press, p.92) He suggests that public space is visual: that we shifted to seeing rather than hearing people in public life because we simply cannot cope with the burden of information that hearing or overhearing the members of the crowd would provide. That overload, raised to a high-tech intensity, is what makes Brin's vision horrifying to me, possibly because it exemplifies the fact that the visual overload is now at least as insistent as the auditory. How does that overload of information and pure sight and sound impact public art now and in the future. Public art is of course primarily visual, and so should be well placed to take advantage of the visuality of public life, even in competition with frenetic commercial demands on our vision.
In the early 90s, there was a lot of talk about a “crisis…[of] the loss of convictions that once governed the practice of art and the interpretive enterprise associated with it.” John Gilmour, one of the people announcing the crisis, said that “We no longer feel sure of how to distinguish art from non-art, good from bad art, nor even how to identify what makes a work distinctively modern. Moreover, we hve doubts about whether the idea of the modern matters any longer in a culture championing, inthe broadest ways, the cult of the new. We discern artists and critics alike practicing their professions in an atmosphere of uncertainty about the directon the history of art is taking, and we seem forced to describe the dominant ethos as pluralistic.” (Fire on the Earth: Anselm Kiefer and the Postmodern World, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990) The key element in this “crisis” tends to be seen as the “pluralism” of the era, something bemoaned by many other writers and something that has puzzled me—I’ve found myself asking, what’s wrong with pluralism? Though perhaps there is a better term to explore the current situation. I’ve also recently heard a lot about the need for a new critical language in the field of public art, a language to describe what’s going on or analyze the logistics or judge the particular objects being presented. I think there is such a need, but I think the problem is more general. We need a new language to talk about art today. The old rhetoric of the shock of the new, or of creativity, novelty, and mastery doesn’t really apply very well to the art of today. We are in an age of multiplicities and particularities, each artist and each work of art struggling for space in a crowded, unfocused, and noisy arena. And that cluttered space isn’t a way-station between clear, well-lighted spaces labelled Modernism and something as yet to be labelled, it’s the space where we live, it’s our condition. Calling it Postmodernism, which was the vogue in the 90s isn’t very helpful, at least not any more.
In the 1980s, the perceived need for a new language of art prompted a revival of the rhetoric of the sublime, as well as new maps of the artistic territory like Rosalind Krauss’s “expanded field” of sculpture. The landrush to stake theoretical claims in that new territory was one of the most characteristic aspects of the art world of the 80s and early 90s, but the attempt to use theory as a whip to dominate art has subsided or at least become fragmented. Just as there is no dominant trend in art, there is no dominant theoretical perspective, not even the competing theories of the 80s, such as deconstruction, abjection, and so forth. And, in fact, the skeptical nature of these theories may have retarded our awareness of our situation rather than clarified it:
(An unpublished essay, 2002--some passages overlap with essays already posted)
As the editor of a magazine called Sculpture, capital S, the artist whose name I see referred to most often by our writers is probably Marcel Duchamp—he is usually standing in for the idea that anything can be art. But the movement that is referred to most often by far by writers and artists in our pages is without any doubt Minimalism. On the one hand, Minimalism is the most sculptural of styles: Donald Judd's boxes or Carl André's bricks are above all objects, sitting there in living 3D. But on the other hand, Minimalist objects have no meaning, refer to nothing, exhibit industrial material and processes, with no reference to the hand of the artist. They are simply objects, sitting their in the space we share with them.
The constant references to Minimalism indicate two things about the art world today: the first is that Minimalism was, in some senses, the last Art Movement (later movements were conceived as marketing, as “brands”); the second is that the Minimalist object, with its plain and simple quality of being there, is still out there, as the source of everything from Rachel Whiteread's water tower in New York or her plinth on a plinth in London, to Matthew Barney’s vaseline sculpttures, to Damien Hirst's animal carcases. Robert Storr is quoted in a recent New York Times article as saying that the use of animals and other non-sculptural materials has followed a general "shift to literalism." "By the 1960's a painting was just paint and canvas. Sculpture went the same way. A steel box was a steel box. A stone was a stone."
Is the end of Art Movements, or the literalism or the object the End of Art, which is something Arthur Danto has proclaimed? And if sculpture ultimately is just whatever is put out in that name by the artist, the gallery, the museum, and the magazine, has the expanded field of sculpture grown so large that it encompasses everything and therefore signifies nothing? Is this the death of Art , or the Death of “Sculpture,” capital S, as a panel I was on recently proclaimed?
Over the years, we’ve repeatedly heard of the death of art, or the death of painting, or the death of sculpture. Mike Bidlo says that in the '70s, he saw that "the system [was] closed…Everything exciting had been done." (Reenactment/Rapprochement flyer) But, Bidlo, of course went on to make art for the next 30 years and counting, including a series of drawings of Duchamp’s readymades. A quote that keeps coming back to me when I think about art today comes from the end of Beckett’s The Unnameable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
What is more pertinent to artists today is not the death of art or the death of sculpture but the open-endedness, the lack of an end or a goal or a common sense of what we are working with or what we are talking about when we use the word art or the word sculpture. Maybe we need a new language to categorize art or even to talk about it. The only word currently in use that desribes the situation of art today is “pluralism.”
Finnish critics writing in a recent issue of Nu say that there are "No trends, no schools, nothing really to get a grip on," (Tuva Korström) and that the consequence of that is "that there is no school to [react] against, it is almost impossible to be in opposition—everything gets accepted." (Pelle Andersson) In the face of what might be seen as a "repressive tolerance," or an indifference to art on the part of society in general and even an art audience that is only left with momentary taste to base its judment on, art is granted permission but no value in the culture.
Another aspect of the problem relates to the question of Art Movements and the notion of Art History. I was recently in Houston, in the Menil Collection, and in the face of that definitive collection of Modernist art, the thought occurred to me, will it be possible for a wealthy collector to create that kind of institution out of a collection of '80s art, or '90s art. If not, what ceased to be possible after the '70s—since it is surely not that money is less important now, what has changed? In the '60s and '70s, as in earlier decades, it was possible to identify, or at least argue, who the major artists were, and collectors like the Menils reinforced that story of art by buying the work and exhibiting it, as did the museums and the commercial galleries, and the magazines and the critics. But now, do the glamor curators on the Biennial circuit, or the Saatchi collection, or shows like "Sensation" that came from the Saatchi collection create a history of art, or just a hype for the art market? When we talk about the art world today, are we in fact talking about art or the market?
On the other hand, has technology dissolved sculpture into cyberspace and virtual reality? At the sculpture conference that was the reason for my being in Houston, a large group of artists spent several days arguing that, indeed, "virtual sculpture" is the future of art. At one panel, one of the artists ecstatically proclaimed that he can now make sculpture in a computerer environment without having to worry about gravity. A woman in the audience piped up, "Well, yeah! That's called drawing." What the speakers on the panel had done, in their enthusiasm for a medium, was forget what had been done before, in other media. Alfred North Whitehead said that before you can create something new, you have to make a clearing. And you can’t just push everything out of the way, you have to make a place among what has happened before and what is happening already now. It would be better for all of us if we stepped back to look at what we are actually doing, rather than worrying about either labels or notions of dominating what can be called art or significant art or avant garde art.
Nonethelss, there are no rules, no hierarchies, no form, and no dominant style. Since Minimalist sculpture killed off the striving toward transcendence that had characterized art until modernism, in favor of simple presence or theatricality, new art isn't just made now, it's about here and now, not about transcendent ideas or forms or essences, whether aesthetic or spiritual.
And as André-Louis Paré said in the Canadian magazine Espace last summer, " It is in sculpture that art and life meet, that ethics joins with aesthetics." That is to say, even if sculpture is just what it is, sitting there in the room with us, not pretending to represent some other absent reality or transcendent truth, it forces us to deal with that space in which we live, which puts us back into the ethical, social, political world, regardless of the content or intention of the particular sculpture we are looking at. The challenge is for the artist, either in the specialized space of the art world or the social space of public art, to engage that ethical dimension, as Paré calls it, with whatever object they are putting into the world. Robertson Davies has one of his characters say that art is both carnal and intellectual, it not only comes from the action of the body as well as the mind, it is a body, a thing, an ethical reality, in Paré’s sense. Art is the One that Gilles Deleuze refers to when he says that “One is always the index of a multiplicity: an event, a singularity, a life.” (p. 30) The singular art object implies the multiplicity and the plurality of life, and it is at the same time “a life,” not a simple projection of the artist’s life or biography, but a particularity that draws attention to life in its own combination of particularity and multiplicity.
One way of characterizing how art works to rearrange the world of the viewer can be seen in Deleuze’s notion of a “being of sensation,” which John Rajchman says is best seen in art: “artworks just are sensations connected in materials in such a way as to free aesthesis [perception?] from the assumptions of ‘common sense’.” (a life, p. 9) That’s certainly the goal of art, especially in pluralism: to Make You Look, and maybe at the same time to make you look at the world again in a different way, for a moment at least. But in the current situation, such a work of art is, as Adorno says, a “bottle thrown into the sea of communication.” (life 19) In the world of communications glut and information overload, art can be just another “repressive tolerance,” a carnival to keep a segment of the population quiet. The alternative is not necessarily to make art noisier but to remember that art is “a life,” to remember the ethical dimension of sculpture in particular, and not to limit art’s scope artificially or ideologically: Juan Munoz, in a late interview, said that there are "millions of stories we have not allowed ourselves to tell during the last ten years because of our ‘suspicions,’ incredulity, etc. regarding expression or the notion that art has an expressive rather than conceptual core.”
Art enters the messy interchange of everyday life as a conversation: art isn't just the object, not even in Minimalism: it's the dialogue around the object. Otherwise, we are just decorating rich people's houses, and maybe making rich collectors’ reputations, whether it's the Menils or the Saatchis. If art is a conversation, then art is engaged in making culture, or resisting the numbing mass culture that bombards us in a one-way stream from on high—because conversation can be multi-vocal, and either widely distributed, or local. It's also ephemeral—although a more permanent object can be the instigator or the occasion, conversation requires a living response to a live statement. But a vehicle for that coversation is being shrunk—the art is losing its press: the magazines are disappearing: Art & Text, New Art Examiner, and Art Issues recently folded, Contemporanea, On View, and Stroll folded a few years ago, and a number of regional magazines have ceased publication.
What seems new, and is perhaps a harbinger of the future in art, is an exuberant multiplicity, a polymorphous plurality. The steady timeline of art from representation to abstraction and from hand tools to industrial methods was shattered in the late 1960s. By the end of the century, it was obvious that notions of a linear progress or an increasing rationalization of form had faded out in a haze of the perpetual present, a permissive environment in which everything is available to artists, and nothing is privileged—steel is not a "higher" or "nobler" material than sheetrock or cardboard. Iron or marble or wood share the sculptural field with a vast array of possible choices that confronts any sculptor every time he or she crosses the threshhold of the studio. The future of art: the encounter with the everyday, the reengagement of both viewer and artist in the ephemera as well as the solidities of life, virtual as well as tangible reality.
Art can no longer be passive, since no one can any longer claim a universal language which should (with all the moral and hierarchical implications that have been attached to that "should") be understandable by everyone. The sculpture of today and the future starts from the ground up, speaking to viewers on their own turf. The artists bring the history of sculpture into the dialogue, but without assuming the viewer's foreknowledge—the resulting conversation carries that history, as well as the immediate concerns of the individual artists and works of art, into the future.
In a recent book, Hal Foster begins his discussion of contemporary art by telling a story: “Not long ago I stood with a friend next to an art work made of four wood beams laid in a long rectangle, with a mirror set behind each corner so as to reflect the others. My friend, a conceptual artist, and I talked about the minimalist basis of such work: its reception by critics then, its elaboration by artists later, its significance for practitioners today...we hardly noticed his little girl as she played on the beams...we looked up to see her pass through the looking glass. Into the hall of mirrors...she moved farther and farther from us...Yet suddenly there she was right behind us: all she had done was skip along the beams around the room. And there we were, a critic and an artist informed in contemporary art, taken to school by a six-year-old, our theory no match for her practice.” Foster’s story is the reverse of the cliché that “my six-year-old granddaughter could do that.” Neither Foster’s story nor the glib put-down quite capture the reality of contemporary art and its audience, but that six-year-old is clearly onto something that we need to consider. If art isn’t lived, both by the artist and the audience, it isn’t fully part of our shared experience, our life-world.
Arthur Danto commented, a propos of the most recent Whitney Biennial, that "Not knowing what we are looking at is the artistic counterpart of not altogether knowing who we are." Danto may not have been intending to praise the art on view, but his comment nonetheless points out that art is not about reassuring us falsely that we do know who we are. Art is not about reassurance, it’s about challenging about who we are.
However, Art in the hypersaturated visual environment must rely on something other than shared symbols, which would have been the basis of a common culture in earlier civilizations, to establish a relation to the public. The relation of art to a public today requires something you could call education but more often resembles publicity—something that has been investigated in 2 interesting books. The first is Beatriz Colomina’s “Privacy and Publicity,” which examines the discovery of architecture’s true field as publicity rather than buildings. That discovery is based on architects’ realization that most of their projects are never built, they circulate instead in the journals. We can see an exaggerated example of what she’s talking about in the Gehry-mania around the world, and in the drive by museums to get signature buildings from famous architects. In art, Vito Acconci’s unbuilt projects and unsuccesful competition entries are as important for his reputation as the actual works visible in the civic realm or the gallery. Going back to the ‘80s, Publicity was directly engaged as art by the famous ads that Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis ran in Artforum. More recently, the entire career of Jeff Koons revolves around publicity. But publicity is a problem for artists and arts administrators with smaller budgets than Frank Gehry can command and with more difficult problems of public space than the erection of a tourist attraction-museum.
The second book on publicity is Alexander Alberro’s “Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity,” which draws attention to the dual nature of a dematerialized, conceptual art--the drive to bring art to the public and the need to find a way to sell art that has been deprived of the art object. Again, publicity is the key--both to getting the word out and in providing a kind of authenticity that a collector may be willing to buy, when a certificate of ownership may be the only physical object that is delivered at the end of the financial transaction. Although conceptual art was a creature of a particular time, its resonance is still tangible in the art world, not least in the importance that publicity has for art. In a sense, as Colomina noted for architecture, the conceptual art “object” exists as publicity, and the exhibition of these works approaches the vanishing point of art. The completion of Roden Crater has been in the news lately, but how many people have actually seen it? Much less Spiral Jetty by Smithson or Lightning Field by Walter De Maria. And more recently, a lot of the most interesting public art, including Mel Chin’s Revival Field and other new genre projects, either operate outside the view of all but a few people who are either working on the project or attending temporary events. Some of the new genre projects raise Walter Benjamin’s question of the \withering away of the “artistic function,” which is a crisis in aesthetics and in the language with which we may even talk about art. And the area where this crisis may be seen most acutely is in public art.
Public Art:
A couple of years ago, Jeffrey Kastner sent out some survey questions that he proposed to use as the basis for an issue of Public Art Review. He never used the responses, whether because of the nature of the responses or the laziness of his respondents in honoring the deadline, but these were his first two questions: "What is the most significant trend or aspect of public art that will influence the future of the field? What is the single most critical issue facing artists working in the public art field today, and what will it likely be in the next century?" To the first of those questions, I responded then with a negative rather than a positive comment, that too often, public art projects subordinate the artist to a program that seeks either to symbolize a bland civic image of an actual (or even imaginary) community, or or reduce the art to architectural decoration. There have been laments that public art programs in art schools around the country are producing a generation of artists attuned to dealing with bureaucracies to get commissions, rather than doing art that challenges or surpasses a commission. The challenge for the future is to seek tougher art, better audience education, and more adventurous commissioning bodies.
I have been on a couple of panels for the Public Art Network, mostly attended by public art administrators. On the one hand, the discussion always revolves around publicity (how can we get the newspapers to cover public art when it’s NOT controversial), and on the other, the audience often responds much more positively to discussion of projects that ingratiate themselves into public space nearly invisibly, as lighting fixtures or fountains or design elements, and they respond much less positively to projects that thrust the “art” out into the face of the “public” in a blatant or obstreperous manner.
While the reality of the public sphere demonstrates little clarity and little of its ideological, "democratic" character of a forum for debate or political contest or social interaction, "art" is certifiably a contested territory, a forum for often vituperative debate. In fact, art may be standing in for a public forum that doesn't exist outside of art, which could be one explanation of why the debate about and within art, such as the furor over the "Sensation" exhibition, has been so intense. Why, for example, has the right wing been so intent on killing the NEA, once the source of ideas and money for public art? The agency itself seems hardly to warrant the uproar, based on budget, the vast majority of grants awarded, or the content of the art once rewarded with the individual artists' fellowships that the Congress purged. If the intensity of the debate over art gives rise to the idea that there is genuinely something at stake in contemporary art, an exciting idea, there is also a danger of reducing public art to a Roman arena rather than a public forum—to a site where proxy battles are fought before a passive public.
What is public space, anyway: a good deal of what we publish in Sculpture magazine as public art is actually funded by private interests and placed within private spaces, like corporate headquarters buildings or shopping malls that may imitate "public space" but do not permit some of the rights of a democratic public sphere: free speech, free access, and so on. Malcolm Miles refers to these sites as "spaces under surveillance." Even within space that is publicly owned, the artist creating public art is often restricted in terms of freedom of expression, by means of the layers of bureaucracy involved in the programs, the commissioning, the approval, and the construction of public art. That denial of free expression is based on a distrust of individual artistic creativity, and is the symptom of the restrictive definition of "public" and "public space" that we refer to when we use "public" as in opposition to "art." There are, of course, notions of the public and public space that may not be so easily placed in opposition to art, and we will look at some of those as we go along. But, using the narrower sense of the terms, in all aspects of the field, the public and the art are in some sense in opposition, and in a constantly shifting balance.
There's a lot about the "phantom public" in writing on public art and public space, and obviously the public in public art is often a phantom or a bureaucratically defined population. Some new genre public art seeks to confront or define an actual public, in small groups or communities, but we also need to address the urban mass public, in the context of contemporary public space, in order to get a grasp on the possibilities of public art. Science Fiction writer David Brin recently suggested, on the PBS program Beyond Human, that there will be a time when we will all wear glasses with a small monitor in the corner that will display information from a computer that will scan the faces of people we pass and read out their names personal data on them. That seemed to me a horrible vision of public space, and of the interrelations of the people in it, in the future, but it was proposed as a good thing, a utopian, high tech public sphere. Brin's idea reminded me of a description of the beginnings of modern life and modern public space in the development of the city and the crowd, inBatteries of Life, by Christof Asendorf. (Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, tr. Don Reneau, Univ. of California Press, p.92) He suggests that public space is visual: that we shifted to seeing rather than hearing people in public life because we simply cannot cope with the burden of information that hearing or overhearing the members of the crowd would provide. That overload, raised to a high-tech intensity, is what makes Brin's vision horrifying to me, possibly because it exemplifies the fact that the visual overload is now at least as insistent as the auditory. How does that overload of information and pure sight and sound impact public art now and in the future. Public art is of course primarily visual, and so should be well placed to take advantage of the visuality of public life, even in competition with frenetic commercial demands on our vision.
In the early 90s, there was a lot of talk about a “crisis…[of] the loss of convictions that once governed the practice of art and the interpretive enterprise associated with it.” John Gilmour, one of the people announcing the crisis, said that “We no longer feel sure of how to distinguish art from non-art, good from bad art, nor even how to identify what makes a work distinctively modern. Moreover, we hve doubts about whether the idea of the modern matters any longer in a culture championing, inthe broadest ways, the cult of the new. We discern artists and critics alike practicing their professions in an atmosphere of uncertainty about the directon the history of art is taking, and we seem forced to describe the dominant ethos as pluralistic.” (Fire on the Earth: Anselm Kiefer and the Postmodern World, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990) The key element in this “crisis” tends to be seen as the “pluralism” of the era, something bemoaned by many other writers and something that has puzzled me—I’ve found myself asking, what’s wrong with pluralism? Though perhaps there is a better term to explore the current situation. I’ve also recently heard a lot about the need for a new critical language in the field of public art, a language to describe what’s going on or analyze the logistics or judge the particular objects being presented. I think there is such a need, but I think the problem is more general. We need a new language to talk about art today. The old rhetoric of the shock of the new, or of creativity, novelty, and mastery doesn’t really apply very well to the art of today. We are in an age of multiplicities and particularities, each artist and each work of art struggling for space in a crowded, unfocused, and noisy arena. And that cluttered space isn’t a way-station between clear, well-lighted spaces labelled Modernism and something as yet to be labelled, it’s the space where we live, it’s our condition. Calling it Postmodernism, which was the vogue in the 90s isn’t very helpful, at least not any more.
In the 1980s, the perceived need for a new language of art prompted a revival of the rhetoric of the sublime, as well as new maps of the artistic territory like Rosalind Krauss’s “expanded field” of sculpture. The landrush to stake theoretical claims in that new territory was one of the most characteristic aspects of the art world of the 80s and early 90s, but the attempt to use theory as a whip to dominate art has subsided or at least become fragmented. Just as there is no dominant trend in art, there is no dominant theoretical perspective, not even the competing theories of the 80s, such as deconstruction, abjection, and so forth. And, in fact, the skeptical nature of these theories may have retarded our awareness of our situation rather than clarified it:
Public Art and public space
© Glenn Harper
(an unpublished lecture, 2001)
Rosalyn Deutsche's book, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, suggests that art makes its own public space. Art is a social relation, Deutsche insists, but it is a relation of a particular kind, not autonomous but not identical with other forms of everyday life. (Deutsche p. 237) Deutsche says that "art is not simply an object susceptible to manipulation by preexisting interests or social forces…Art per se remains socially neutral; art and society remain discrete identitities." (p. 237) What she sees as a critical public art retains an autonomy and a role in public space for art as art. She insists that public space depends on conflict rather than solidarity: an idea that is reminiscent of Paul Valéry's comment that conversation is about resistance, rather than acceptance, of what the other person is saying. Valéry was talking about the conversation between artist and critic, but it also applies to the conversation between artist and audience, and the resistance can go both ways. Deutsche's point of view on public space leads to an art of diversity rather than an art of community or majority. She suggest a metaphor that she adopts from Beatriz Colomina, the window between public and private space, with its implication of multiple points of view and, hence, critical difference. But the metaphor goes further: Colomina suggests that architecture itself is "a viewing mechanism that produces the subject. It precedes and frames its occupants." A public is constructed by means of acts of imagination—an insight that suggests that the role of artists (technicians of the imagination) in public space can be much more than shallow truisms or decorative surfaces. The art that Deutsch discusses is often temporary or performative, such as the various projections and narrative projects of Krzysztof Wodiczko.
Other notions of public space don't include much room for imagination or even the artist. Architect Peter Rowe, for example, defines the most effective development of a public space as "civic realism," founded along the "politico-cultural division between civil society and the state." Rowe says that in such successful realizations of an "in between" civic or public space, "a certain amount of avant-gardism can be useful…although it is by no means fully consistent with other requirements of civic realism." (Civic Realism, 37) Rowe's "realism" relies on the "representative" public sphere, in which art and architecture play a symbolic role, representing and embodying the values and ideals of the society in their construction of public space. In his view of public space, the artist's role is subordinate to those public symbols and to the power brokers who have control over the civic borderline he describes as well as the symbols themselves. The public art of this model of public space is the art that follows the program or decorates the architecture.
It is not only what we might see as architectural conservatism that relegates the artist to the background. Lucy Lippard says, in her book, The Lure of the Local, that: "Eventually, perhaps 'public art' would no longer exist. Its successor might or might not be called art…Public artists would be facilitators, maybe anonymous, rather than egocentric creators…" Lippard's communitarian view of the public sphere, coming from an opposite ideological position from Rowe's, calls for art that is part of lived experience (p. 5). But Lippard's is an "after the revolution" notion of a public space that she envisions as occupied by open dialogue in the "everyone else's lives" that she refers to. As in Plato, artists are ultimately excluded from the utopian republic, at least in their role as identifiable agents or individual creators. The art of this model of the public is the community-based project, responding to surveys of how the public wants to be represented or what they conceive in advance that they want in"their space." The result if often benches and gathering spaces, paving tiles and murals.
Both the representational model on the right and the communitarian model on the left lead to the insistence that the artist defer to the group, rather than the group seeking to learn from the vision of the artist. Both veer toward an anti-intellectualism that is masked on all sides of the political spectrum by charges of elitism. Rowe expects artists to subdue their art in the service of accessible symbols, and Lippard expects them to subdue their art in the service of a shared public or community. In both cases, art is instrumental—they are saying that art in the public sphere is of necessity in the service of something else, some higher goal.
An artist about whom Lippard wrote earlier in her career, Ad Reinhardt, said that "art is not the spiritual side of business." To paraphrase Reinhardt against Rowe and Lippard, art is not the spiritual side of commercial development, and art is not the construction branch of community development. Reinhardt insists that we look at what art accomplishes as art. Can we not have an art that is, as art, part of lived experience in public space? Rather than art as social work or art as a reinforcement of the decorative screen against which collective or even subversive images are projected?
If Rowe sees public space as a screen on which representations of civic virtue embodied in public art are projected, and Danto expects art to be a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are, Colomina's or Deutsche's model offers a way to see public art as the viewing mechanism through which we may see our multiple reality but which simultaneously creates or constructs us as a public. Colomina's viewing mechanism is a useful model because it leaves room for both the artist and the viewer, who share in the construction of a public by means of their confrontation with public art and the public sphere it creates. The model is also useful in suggesting that whether it is monumental or ephemeral, public art is never fixed in its reference or its meaning—which is as imaginary as "the public," and can in fact participate in the act of imagination involved in the creation of the public.
To develop an aesthetic of public art as art, and not just art as an architectural decoration or a social service program, we need to reconsider what the artist does as an artist—and that is often a resistance, rather than an affirmation, of community or the public program. (John Dewey insisted that we remember that, after all, one of the major human activities undertaken in the name of community is violence.) As Patricia Phillips says, "There need to be many small excursions that consider and embrace the multiple conditions of public life—and not the singular view promoted by the sponsor of projects, the public agency, or the private developer." (p. 69) The window or the excursion that the artist can provide offers multiple views precisely because the artist is not within (but also not wholly autonomous from) the agency's, the developer's, or for that matter the community's point of view. The therapeutic art projects like Revival Field on one hand or some aspects of Project Row Houses on the other succeed as art precisely in reframing social experience; without a traditionally visual or high art component, they nevertheless succeed as art even if they fail as social or scientific projects, if they create a viewing mechanism that frames our experience in such a way that our vision of our lives and possibilities is changed.
Phillips concludes that public art is a sign of life and a summons for "active, connected public beings." (70) but such an art results from the artists' own vision, which can provide the viewing mechanism that can actively engage a diverse society.
Jeffrey Kastner also asked, in his response to a survey conducted by Public Art Review, "In the context of art history, what will future generations say was the value of public art done in this century?" The best we can do is look around at the public art work we have erected and ask ourselves what sort of legacy it leaves for the communities of the future. Unless we make a critical assesment of that legacy, we risk wasting the chance for artists to influence the public space of today and tomorrow.
(Sources of the references are available, but not included here for formatting reasons. Contact artsorg@gmail.com)
(an unpublished lecture, 2001)
Rosalyn Deutsche's book, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, suggests that art makes its own public space. Art is a social relation, Deutsche insists, but it is a relation of a particular kind, not autonomous but not identical with other forms of everyday life. (Deutsche p. 237) Deutsche says that "art is not simply an object susceptible to manipulation by preexisting interests or social forces…Art per se remains socially neutral; art and society remain discrete identitities." (p. 237) What she sees as a critical public art retains an autonomy and a role in public space for art as art. She insists that public space depends on conflict rather than solidarity: an idea that is reminiscent of Paul Valéry's comment that conversation is about resistance, rather than acceptance, of what the other person is saying. Valéry was talking about the conversation between artist and critic, but it also applies to the conversation between artist and audience, and the resistance can go both ways. Deutsche's point of view on public space leads to an art of diversity rather than an art of community or majority. She suggest a metaphor that she adopts from Beatriz Colomina, the window between public and private space, with its implication of multiple points of view and, hence, critical difference. But the metaphor goes further: Colomina suggests that architecture itself is "a viewing mechanism that produces the subject. It precedes and frames its occupants." A public is constructed by means of acts of imagination—an insight that suggests that the role of artists (technicians of the imagination) in public space can be much more than shallow truisms or decorative surfaces. The art that Deutsch discusses is often temporary or performative, such as the various projections and narrative projects of Krzysztof Wodiczko.
Other notions of public space don't include much room for imagination or even the artist. Architect Peter Rowe, for example, defines the most effective development of a public space as "civic realism," founded along the "politico-cultural division between civil society and the state." Rowe says that in such successful realizations of an "in between" civic or public space, "a certain amount of avant-gardism can be useful…although it is by no means fully consistent with other requirements of civic realism." (Civic Realism, 37) Rowe's "realism" relies on the "representative" public sphere, in which art and architecture play a symbolic role, representing and embodying the values and ideals of the society in their construction of public space. In his view of public space, the artist's role is subordinate to those public symbols and to the power brokers who have control over the civic borderline he describes as well as the symbols themselves. The public art of this model of public space is the art that follows the program or decorates the architecture.
It is not only what we might see as architectural conservatism that relegates the artist to the background. Lucy Lippard says, in her book, The Lure of the Local, that: "Eventually, perhaps 'public art' would no longer exist. Its successor might or might not be called art…Public artists would be facilitators, maybe anonymous, rather than egocentric creators…" Lippard's communitarian view of the public sphere, coming from an opposite ideological position from Rowe's, calls for art that is part of lived experience (p. 5). But Lippard's is an "after the revolution" notion of a public space that she envisions as occupied by open dialogue in the "everyone else's lives" that she refers to. As in Plato, artists are ultimately excluded from the utopian republic, at least in their role as identifiable agents or individual creators. The art of this model of the public is the community-based project, responding to surveys of how the public wants to be represented or what they conceive in advance that they want in"their space." The result if often benches and gathering spaces, paving tiles and murals.
Both the representational model on the right and the communitarian model on the left lead to the insistence that the artist defer to the group, rather than the group seeking to learn from the vision of the artist. Both veer toward an anti-intellectualism that is masked on all sides of the political spectrum by charges of elitism. Rowe expects artists to subdue their art in the service of accessible symbols, and Lippard expects them to subdue their art in the service of a shared public or community. In both cases, art is instrumental—they are saying that art in the public sphere is of necessity in the service of something else, some higher goal.
An artist about whom Lippard wrote earlier in her career, Ad Reinhardt, said that "art is not the spiritual side of business." To paraphrase Reinhardt against Rowe and Lippard, art is not the spiritual side of commercial development, and art is not the construction branch of community development. Reinhardt insists that we look at what art accomplishes as art. Can we not have an art that is, as art, part of lived experience in public space? Rather than art as social work or art as a reinforcement of the decorative screen against which collective or even subversive images are projected?
If Rowe sees public space as a screen on which representations of civic virtue embodied in public art are projected, and Danto expects art to be a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are, Colomina's or Deutsche's model offers a way to see public art as the viewing mechanism through which we may see our multiple reality but which simultaneously creates or constructs us as a public. Colomina's viewing mechanism is a useful model because it leaves room for both the artist and the viewer, who share in the construction of a public by means of their confrontation with public art and the public sphere it creates. The model is also useful in suggesting that whether it is monumental or ephemeral, public art is never fixed in its reference or its meaning—which is as imaginary as "the public," and can in fact participate in the act of imagination involved in the creation of the public.
To develop an aesthetic of public art as art, and not just art as an architectural decoration or a social service program, we need to reconsider what the artist does as an artist—and that is often a resistance, rather than an affirmation, of community or the public program. (John Dewey insisted that we remember that, after all, one of the major human activities undertaken in the name of community is violence.) As Patricia Phillips says, "There need to be many small excursions that consider and embrace the multiple conditions of public life—and not the singular view promoted by the sponsor of projects, the public agency, or the private developer." (p. 69) The window or the excursion that the artist can provide offers multiple views precisely because the artist is not within (but also not wholly autonomous from) the agency's, the developer's, or for that matter the community's point of view. The therapeutic art projects like Revival Field on one hand or some aspects of Project Row Houses on the other succeed as art precisely in reframing social experience; without a traditionally visual or high art component, they nevertheless succeed as art even if they fail as social or scientific projects, if they create a viewing mechanism that frames our experience in such a way that our vision of our lives and possibilities is changed.
Phillips concludes that public art is a sign of life and a summons for "active, connected public beings." (70) but such an art results from the artists' own vision, which can provide the viewing mechanism that can actively engage a diverse society.
Jeffrey Kastner also asked, in his response to a survey conducted by Public Art Review, "In the context of art history, what will future generations say was the value of public art done in this century?" The best we can do is look around at the public art work we have erected and ask ourselves what sort of legacy it leaves for the communities of the future. Unless we make a critical assesment of that legacy, we risk wasting the chance for artists to influence the public space of today and tomorrow.
(Sources of the references are available, but not included here for formatting reasons. Contact artsorg@gmail.com)
Futur Skulptur
© Glenn Harper
(Catalogue essay for the "Futur Skulpture" exhibition, juried by Glenn Harper for the McLean Project for the Arts in 2001)
When I was first asked to jury "Futur Skulpture," the image conjured up in my mind by the title was of a gallery filled with flickering monitors displaying virtual sculpture. But these 14 artists, chosen from 108 submisions, had a quite different notion: they fulfilled the polyglot premise of the title in a pluralism of ideas and materials: watercolor and oil paint are used as sculptural materials, as are coins, velveteen, wax, salt, concrete, and grocery bags—plus video, computer animation, and hypertext. These materials are not new in sculpture—many can be traced back to Post-Minimalism, and even digital and video art are hardly new entries in the "expanded field" of sculpture. But it is in the exuberant multiplicity of the works, in the attraction of sculptors to a wide variety of materials (and in particular to ephemeral and non-monumental materials), that the future can be seen.
By the end of the 20th century, it was obvious that notions of a linear progress in art or an increasing rationalization of form had faded out in a haze of the perpetual present, a permissive environment in which everything is available to artists, and nothing is privileged—steel or stone are not "higher" or "nobler" than wallboard or cardboard. That welded or cast metal and carved stone or wood are missing from this exhibition of sculpture is not a sign of their demise but an indication that they share the field with a vast array of possible choices confronting any sculptor every time he or she crosses the threshhold of the studio. The works in Futur Skulpture make me think of Kafka's "almost limitless theater" at the end of Amerika: not the Kafka of totalitarian nightmare but of a carnival of open possibilities, announced by a call to become an artist: "If you think of [the] future, you are one of us."
What sculptors do within this open field is make us look again at the facts, current and perpetual, of human life. Zoe Leodacki uses the most advanced and decentralized technology of the 21st century (so far) to explore the experience of fear. Tim Makepeace dissects the walls in which we enclose ourselves. Randy Jewart, known for his sculpture in more permanent media, chose to work for this show in a less "sculptural" metal: stacked coins—and the performance of stacking and, at the end of the show, toppling this tower of money. Paolo Machado confronts us with the aesthetic form of the most everyday of objects, brown paper bags. These artists are confronting timeless human experiences in the languages of today: the information, construction, and exchange realities of daily experience. That is the future of sculpture: the encounter with the everyday, the reengagement of both viewer and artist in the ephemera as well as the solidities of life, in virtual as well as tangible reality.
Beginning with Minimalism, sculpture first implicated and then enveloped the viewer. The "theatricality" for which Minimalism was initially criticized and Kafka's all-encompassing theater of life have converged. Even the tiniest of these sculptures, miniature salt and cloth or earth constructions by Lucy Spencer, for example, draw viewers into a discourse on their own terms, as surely as a room-sized installation would. Evidence of this relation to installation art can also be seen in Ronald Gonzalez's heads. They are studies for a much larger work, yet the totality of the room-size installation is already there in the evocative heads, which seem to be moaning to us—they implicate us in the agonies of history and of today. Other works are interactive in a more direct way: Dan Steinhilber's bags of watercolor are meant to be manipulated, felt, played with. Walter Ratzat leads us from isolation within a "media kiosk" to shared experiences of cyborg bodies and uncanny objects. In his combination of high-tech imagery and low-tech construction, Brendan Morse sutures us into the middle of a virtual world by making us lean into a space created by the most ordinary and palpable objects: a couple of TV sets and a cabinet that you lean into rather than sit in front of.
Some of these works have simple forms and direct relationships with the viewer: Joanne Kent's small panels of sculpted paint leap out at you with both the intensity of color and the exuberant modeling. Mary Early's wax and concrete forms are simultaneously simple shapes and resonant languages. Kristin Caskey's more complex, even baroque, form pushes out at us, in terms of scale, color, material, and placement. Tracy Jacobs's simple formal language fails to resolve itself into simple forms: her works literally and figuratively short-circuit our shared social space, recirculating ideas and views and receding into infinity. Fumihito Sato's construction, a steel frame, wooden boxes, and stretch fabric, creates a visual and conceptual tension that is palpable.
The phonetic quality of the spelling of "Futur Skulpture" suggests the universalist aspirations of Esperanto, a language that would have been understood by all, a language that would draw us all together. The work in Futur Skulpture suggests a more skeptical universalism: an attempt to reach out to those with whom the works and their creators share space, to establish communication anew with each confrontation. Sculpture can no longer be passive, since no one can any longer assert a universal language, whether social or aesthetic. The constantly renewed conversation at the heart of an encounter with the objects shown here carries the history of sculpture, as well as the immediate concerns of the individual artists and works of art, into the future. Our future and the future of sculpture is in question: it begins again at every moment, in a polymorphous, polylingual, multi-dimensional interaction among our phenomenal and material projections of ourselves.
(Catalogue essay for the "Futur Skulpture" exhibition, juried by Glenn Harper for the McLean Project for the Arts in 2001)
When I was first asked to jury "Futur Skulpture," the image conjured up in my mind by the title was of a gallery filled with flickering monitors displaying virtual sculpture. But these 14 artists, chosen from 108 submisions, had a quite different notion: they fulfilled the polyglot premise of the title in a pluralism of ideas and materials: watercolor and oil paint are used as sculptural materials, as are coins, velveteen, wax, salt, concrete, and grocery bags—plus video, computer animation, and hypertext. These materials are not new in sculpture—many can be traced back to Post-Minimalism, and even digital and video art are hardly new entries in the "expanded field" of sculpture. But it is in the exuberant multiplicity of the works, in the attraction of sculptors to a wide variety of materials (and in particular to ephemeral and non-monumental materials), that the future can be seen.
By the end of the 20th century, it was obvious that notions of a linear progress in art or an increasing rationalization of form had faded out in a haze of the perpetual present, a permissive environment in which everything is available to artists, and nothing is privileged—steel or stone are not "higher" or "nobler" than wallboard or cardboard. That welded or cast metal and carved stone or wood are missing from this exhibition of sculpture is not a sign of their demise but an indication that they share the field with a vast array of possible choices confronting any sculptor every time he or she crosses the threshhold of the studio. The works in Futur Skulpture make me think of Kafka's "almost limitless theater" at the end of Amerika: not the Kafka of totalitarian nightmare but of a carnival of open possibilities, announced by a call to become an artist: "If you think of [the] future, you are one of us."
What sculptors do within this open field is make us look again at the facts, current and perpetual, of human life. Zoe Leodacki uses the most advanced and decentralized technology of the 21st century (so far) to explore the experience of fear. Tim Makepeace dissects the walls in which we enclose ourselves. Randy Jewart, known for his sculpture in more permanent media, chose to work for this show in a less "sculptural" metal: stacked coins—and the performance of stacking and, at the end of the show, toppling this tower of money. Paolo Machado confronts us with the aesthetic form of the most everyday of objects, brown paper bags. These artists are confronting timeless human experiences in the languages of today: the information, construction, and exchange realities of daily experience. That is the future of sculpture: the encounter with the everyday, the reengagement of both viewer and artist in the ephemera as well as the solidities of life, in virtual as well as tangible reality.
Beginning with Minimalism, sculpture first implicated and then enveloped the viewer. The "theatricality" for which Minimalism was initially criticized and Kafka's all-encompassing theater of life have converged. Even the tiniest of these sculptures, miniature salt and cloth or earth constructions by Lucy Spencer, for example, draw viewers into a discourse on their own terms, as surely as a room-sized installation would. Evidence of this relation to installation art can also be seen in Ronald Gonzalez's heads. They are studies for a much larger work, yet the totality of the room-size installation is already there in the evocative heads, which seem to be moaning to us—they implicate us in the agonies of history and of today. Other works are interactive in a more direct way: Dan Steinhilber's bags of watercolor are meant to be manipulated, felt, played with. Walter Ratzat leads us from isolation within a "media kiosk" to shared experiences of cyborg bodies and uncanny objects. In his combination of high-tech imagery and low-tech construction, Brendan Morse sutures us into the middle of a virtual world by making us lean into a space created by the most ordinary and palpable objects: a couple of TV sets and a cabinet that you lean into rather than sit in front of.
Some of these works have simple forms and direct relationships with the viewer: Joanne Kent's small panels of sculpted paint leap out at you with both the intensity of color and the exuberant modeling. Mary Early's wax and concrete forms are simultaneously simple shapes and resonant languages. Kristin Caskey's more complex, even baroque, form pushes out at us, in terms of scale, color, material, and placement. Tracy Jacobs's simple formal language fails to resolve itself into simple forms: her works literally and figuratively short-circuit our shared social space, recirculating ideas and views and receding into infinity. Fumihito Sato's construction, a steel frame, wooden boxes, and stretch fabric, creates a visual and conceptual tension that is palpable.
The phonetic quality of the spelling of "Futur Skulpture" suggests the universalist aspirations of Esperanto, a language that would have been understood by all, a language that would draw us all together. The work in Futur Skulpture suggests a more skeptical universalism: an attempt to reach out to those with whom the works and their creators share space, to establish communication anew with each confrontation. Sculpture can no longer be passive, since no one can any longer assert a universal language, whether social or aesthetic. The constantly renewed conversation at the heart of an encounter with the objects shown here carries the history of sculpture, as well as the immediate concerns of the individual artists and works of art, into the future. Our future and the future of sculpture is in question: it begins again at every moment, in a polymorphous, polylingual, multi-dimensional interaction among our phenomenal and material projections of ourselves.
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