Eleanor Heartney talks with Phong Bui

I've come to really look forward to these interviews in the BR. Another excellent one by Phong Bui. Heartney looks back on the emergence of globalism in the context of the waning hours of the Cold War and the culture wars of identity politics. Also noteworthy for today's world, Heartney discusses the role of religion in our new era. This is an issue that I assume many of us are grappling with whether we realize it or not. The 'new' metaphysical presence is certainly dictating a lion share of social and political realities across the world. Artist's need to pay attention to this in some manner.

Excerpts:

RAIL: From my own observations, I do feel that the multiculturalism that arose in the 80s, which as we all know was associated with political correctness and the rise of identity politics, had to do with both cultural and economic aspects of globalism. Hypothetically speaking, though culturally it addresses art as a manifestation of basic human interests, economically it seems tied in with corporate interest and political allegiances. In other words, artists tend to see the world at large, from the inside out, whereas corporate interests see the world as small, from the outside in. This, I would say, inevitably creates a huge conflict of communication, which means that artists are usually put in a position of having to satisfy corporate interests, which is so far removed from their intention. But at the same time we also are aware of the real issue of art being irrelevant, no longer as an isolated phenomenon, pursuing its imperatives or personal ideologies without reference to the outside world. How do you see the polarity?

HEARTNEY: I think globalism is very double-edged. It’s interesting because in the art world, when you say globalization, it tends to be a very positive thing because it suggests this new kind of inclusiveness, which admits different sorts of narratives from different places in the world. But it also of course has this other connotation, certainly on the economic front, which is invested in a variety of aggressive forms of corporatization and homogenization. Not only does it wipe out diversity, it seems to be devoted to making us all into the same sort of consumer. However, for artists, I think they find it both exciting and strange to skate between those two realities when they’re dealing with the global art world.

At the panel last week, which was about art critics and globalization, one of the things that was very clear to most of the panelists was that the explosion of International Biennials over the last three or four years has really been a vehicle for bringing artists from far-flung places and introducing them to the larger art world, which is all good, but each of them requires large amounts of money and has multiple agendas. In some cases there is a hidden political motivation that desires to wipe out some egregious kind of political event from the past. In other cases, it’s simply based on pure economic motivations. Either way, artists who participate in those Biennials are quite aware of the two different agendas, yet they’re also advancing their own agendas. So it becomes very complicated. In my case, I find it very important to figure out, “Why this Biennial, at this place, and at this time?” And then I can go on and look at the individual works.

RAIL: To go back to the late 70s and 80s, the name F.A. Hayek, the Viennese economist who wrote The Road To Serfdom (1944) and Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), somehow loomed quite prominently in the light of Reagan/Thatcher’s political and economic policies. As we knew then, the multiculturalist view had its advantages and its disadvantages. On one hand, there were those who really advocated for and embraced the so-called redemptive “diffusion” from non-Western cultures, which they thought could perhaps replace the old image of the melting pot that allowed differences to be submerged in democracy. Yet on the other hand, you have those who opposed it, who thought it was an anti-Western ideology, and therefore downgraded or undermined U.S. national culture, while raising the status and power of other cultures. Since you have written extensively on the subject, particularly in Critical Condition: American Culture at a Crossroads (1997), which traced the rise of Neo-Expressionism, appropriation, Neo-Geo, and of course multiculturalism, how would you reassess that decade from today’s perspective?

HEARTNEY: You know, writing that book gave me a chance to think about a lot of those issues. The whole multicultural movement, for instance, laid out the groundwork that preceded globalization. On the one hand, it was very much about opening up the art world to these other voices from other cultures and other traditions that had been excluded. But on the other hand there was something about it that often became very militant and very exclusionary, to the point where people were only allowed to express a certain part of their identity. So the notion that we’re all kind of hybrid and made up of many different aspects kind of got lost there. In Art and Today, I have a chapter on art and identity, which I begin with that unitary notion of identity, and by the end I concluded that we’ve moved to a more hybrid notion of identity as something that is much more free-flowing and changing. In terms of the culture war, it had a lot to do with the rise of so-called “identity politics” and the notion that certain groups—non-white, non-male, non-European—were vying for power in the art world.

What was interesting about the whole culture war that rose really in the late 80s and early 90s was that it coincided with the end of the Cold War and the rise of the global market. In so many ways, I think it was a losing battle for the right, but nevertheless one in which they were deeply engaged; and of course looking back now, one that forms the perspective of a year in which we have elected a black president and the nomination of the first Hispanic woman, Sonia Sotomayor, as a Supreme Court justice. I think it’s kind of amazing when you look back to those wars and think that they really felt that they could hold back this tide.

RAIL: Did September 11th, and its aftermath have any bearing on your next book Defending Complexity: Art Politics and the New World Order?

HEARTNEY: September 11th was such an unimaginable event that changed so many things in our lives. One of the things in particular that I was concerned with in that book, which also overlapped with my other book Post-Modern Heretics: the Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, finished right after September 11th, was the way in which religion suddenly was on the table in a very significant way, religion being a subject the art world had long ignored or seen it as a purely reactionary force. At any rate, when Serrano’s “Piss Christ” created controversy, the one thing that the right wing and the art world establishment agreed on was that it was an anti-religion work. Whereas, in fact, it wasn’t simply that; Serrano has a much more complicated relationship to religion.

Nevertheless, it became clear that there were certain things we had to pay attention to which we didn’t before, and part of it was the role of religion. Whether we see it for its positive and negative sides or not, religion wasn’t something that we’d put behind us, as some kind of relic of the past. In fact, it became an evermore important and growing force. And within these various religions, there is a great deal of controversy and dissention, and to see it as a monolith is a mistake. I think the political uses of religion, both on our side as well as on the side of those who perpetrated that disaster on September 11th, became more amplified. In both cases, it empowered the people who practiced the fundamentalist versions, which tend to see things as solely in terms of good and evil. And of course that kind of mentality had been guiding the Bush administration, pretty much up till Obama’s election.

Drawing: Phong Bui

My Certain Fate - interview w/Timothy Buckwalter

So I'm just about to head out for a west coast trip and want to share with you a discussion/interview I recently had with Timothy Buckwalter about the up coming show at Pharmaka - My Certain Fate.

HLIB: I believe you’ve had a solo exhibition at Pharmaka in the past? Can you tell us something about the venue and how you came to curate a show there?

TB: After my show at Pharmaka, we all went out to a late dinner around the corner (at Pete's Cafe). And I spent a large part of that time talking to Shane Guffogg, the founder of Pharmaka (and a super painter as well). At one point we started talking about if we could own any paintings in the world, what would we own. Kinda like a dream sports teams, only with art.

HLIB: Ok, so give me some names on your fantasy art team?

Let me think back, we both wanted to own the Monet Lily Ponds at MOMA. Guffogg wanted a Rembrant, and a pre-America Mondrian. I wanted the Met’s Newman. And one of those late Klines… the ones that were in several colors. I also wanted Alice Neel’s painting of the fucked up Warhol. For sculpture I wanted Kippenberger’s Happy End of Franz Kafka's "Amerika" and Duchamp’s “Etant donnes.” And a Sherrie Levine. The game isn’t about just dropping the names of cool shit or picking the most unattainable pieces, it’s about rattling off pieces that you’ve loved over the years and would want to have in your life on a daily basis. Anyway, out of that I wrote a proposal for them about this show -- which for me is that dream sports team. Everyone that is in the show, I would love to have in my collection (and I do own works by some of the artists we are showing).

Over the years, I've collected a lot of art. They form a sort of narrative about my life in the art world -- almost everything I have is by people that I've had some kind of art or life experience with -- either showing in the same exhibitions, represented by the same galleries, living in the same neighborhoods… etc.

With My Certain Fate, I've tried to take the idea of a personal collection and expand it. Expanded it in a way similar to the premise behind mixed tapes – all of these artists say something to me, and I want you to experience those feelings as well.

HLIB: Some people may know you by your reputation as an online curator. What made you want to venture into the realm of curating a show for an actual space versus a virtual space?

Well, it’s kinda the difference between playing Grand Theft Auto and going outside and stealing a car. They are both real. And each serves a purpose. But one of those options involves a lot more work, and real danger. Having reached a certain level -- if you will -- in the binary world, I wanted to try option number two.

HLIB: Aside from the unique opportunity offered by Shane Guffogg, is there anything particular about the Pharmaka venue that influenced your decision making regarding the subject matter and scale of the show?

Certainly, on the most basic level Pharmaka is huge. It is this cavernous space on the ground floor of the Rosslyn Hotels. I don’t know if it was the lobby of one of the hotels or just the retail space. Either way it is enormous. If you’ve seen a movie since the early 80s that has a scene with a bunch of hookers, crackheads and junkies in a rundown SRO, it was probably shot in the Rosslyn.

So instead of choosing a few artists and showing a large selection of their work, which is what I started with at the beginning of the process, I decided because of the amount of space I could have to really connect the dots between a lot of different works from a much larger group of artists.

And the fact that Pharmaka is a non-profit meant I could follow my heart a lot more. I was able to concentrate on artists that either don’t have a regular gallery in LA or have never shown there.

There are plenty of people in LA that would have been perfect for the show – Brian Kennon, for one – but I really wanted to focus on out-of-towners. The one exception is John Altoon. I got a really hairy one from a private collection. Altoon seemed really necessary for the show. To me there is no one more LA than Altoon. And no one who is not seen enough down there. Every city has at least one artist like Altoon – someone who touched the mainstream for a moment then spiraled off into their own intergalactic exploration. The Bay Area has Wally Hedrick.

HLIB: You mention danger. How so? Did you find that loyalties to other artists became an issue? Or is this more like stage fright for a rookie curator?

It’s a lot easier to dismiss crap on the internet than it is in the physical world. Because venturing out of your house or job to see art in galleries or museums is a real commitment people tend to demand a specific value for their effort. The danger to which I was referring was the possibility of my not being to live up to that demand.

HLIB: An excellent point regarding the dismissal of art works. That’s a discussion in and of it self.

HLIB: In music life, there is the notion of being a ‘selector’, especially within DJ culture. Do you see this as your point of departure more than the traditional idea of a curator?

Well, I think the traditional notion of a curator is someone that has a specific agenda they want to explore, like second tier AbExers or female performance artists of the 70s. Which is cool, and certainly necessary. Curators have so much to offer, to teach us about ourselves.

But, I am way less like that and waaaaaay more like the DJ. The DJ -- I’m thinking of the one in a nightclub or party setting -- wants everyone to experience a moment that they’ve created using the works of others. Their skill comes to play in their choices and the mixing. A good one gets the crowd moving together. To me that is amazing. Someone like Josh Wink or Gilles Peterson, I can't understand their intuitiveness but I am really in awe of it. I want My Certain Fate to be like that. I don’t have an agenda that relates to a past era or movement. I want visitors to feel what the art offers when grouped together.

HLIB: Yeah, I often heard artists complain that curators get all the attention in what can be a limited field of visibility. Do you feel as an artist that this is a hazard in a crowded market place or simply a battle of egos or should I say easily bruised egos?

Well the art world like life has a bunch of people in it who complain at the drop of a hat. Some of the bitching is valid. Some is based on backbiting. I tried to be as sensitive to all of the artists’ ideas, needs and concerns, but I’m male. So I’m sure I’ve failed in some way.

HLIB: How has this experience informed your own work, if at all? Do you see it more as an extension of your studio practice or simply a new way for you to expose the public to ideas and artists that you think are important? Making connections for people – bridging communities in some way?

Oh geez, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s had any noticeable affect on my work. It has made me appreciate the amount of effort that galleries afford to their exhibitions. Honestly, I was living under this thoroughly misguided notion that they mostly sit around, answering the phone, emailing invites and showing art in the backroom to collectors. So I’ve come around a lot on my view of that part of the art world. Galleries are kinda like auto mechanics, right? You find one that works for you and you stick with it. At lunch, you only talk to your friends about the mechanic that screwed you, the one that’s a real asshole. If you try to fix your own car, you learn a lot and it gives you some insight into your own mechanic.

HLIB: I think that is an important realization that many artists take for granted or are simply just ignorant on the subject. It is a tremendous amount of work and it takes a small village sometimes to get a show off the ground. Winkleman has covered this issue quite well over the years. Still, until you’ve done it, you’re not really aware.

The other thing I would say is that the artists in the show make work that I, for any number of reasons, truly believe in. And I know that if you want anything in the world, like having others experience your joy, then you need to go out and make it happen. There is no one sitting around taking note of your happiness. You gotta go out and shake them.

HLIB: That’s an excellent point. This has to be a labor of love on some level otherwise you’re in for some dark moments. Belief in the work – I like that. It seems like we haven’t heard language like that so much over the last decade which tended to favor talk of heated markets and branding strategies.

HLIB: Let’s get back to your process for curating this show. How did you come to the artists presented? Did the exhibition concept prefigure your choices or did your choices dictate the theme?

Some I went to art school with years ago. Others I’ve admired since the 80’s and they’ve always been lurking somewhere in my mind. Some are from my current batch of friends. And the rest, I’ve bumped into their works in galleries or on the 'net and lusted after it. I’m greedy so I wanted to put in everything. I didn’t though. While figuring out My Certain Fate, I was concurrently trying to figure out an abstraction-only show called Their Majesties Satanic Request, which features people not included in My Certain. I’m still shopping Satanic around.

HLIB: Well, you have included a very large roster of artists and works for this show. I’ve had a lot of experience working with exhibitions and I can tell you, this scale is a big undertaking. You seem to have handled the logistics pretty well.

Well, speaking of logistics, since you won’t help me hang the show (even though you are in LA at the time) I’m thinking about dumping you from the show. Just kidding!

I don’t know how it grew to be this big. I was keeping it all in my head until a couple months ago. I finally created files for all the artists in my computer. And I was shocked at how many there were. I called my wife and I said, holy fck I think I’ve got like 30 people in this show.

HLIB: You’ve mentioned on your blog that for a lot of the people in My Certain Fate, music is an important part of their lives, and of course the evidence is sometimes right on the surface of their work. Other times it's more obscure. So, I’m interested in your relationship to music as an artist. Can we talk about your relationship with music and art?

I love music. A while back, my Mom gave me her diary. There is an entry from when I was three years old. She and my father were concerned because they felt I spent too much time in my room listening to my record player and drawings with crayons. That’s been my life.The music that I enjoy the most always seems to have some kind of twist to it. The music strays too far from the lyrics. The mood changes abruptly, whatever. I’ve always tried to do that in my paintings -- offer an image, tie it into color and then spin the whole thing to somewhere else with the title.

HLIB: Can you imagine making art without music? I know that I can’t really imagine such a scenario. I might go mad without it.

Last week, my kids wanted to know if I would rather be blinded or deafened at that moment. They were all excited because they had decided that if they were deaf they could still watch TV and get around town. I upset them when I said I wanted to be blind because that way I could still touch art and remember what it looked like, but since I can’t remember sound that well I would be really upset if I couldn’t hear music anymore. Eight-year-olds can be really pragmatic.

HLIB: It’s obvious that recorded music is an essential medium to the contemporary artist as it saturates our lives both in and outside of the studio. It is a tradition that began early in the 20^th century. We’re quite aware of the influence Jazz had on the Ab-Ex generation and how Pop and Rock melded perfectly with Warhol and so on down the line to each of us. I think for a lot artists music not only acts as a creative driver but also as a companion for long hours of independent work. Any thoughts as to how this might be molding artistic decisions? Has music actually become more influential on artists than other visual art?

It seems that artists working to music is not so special. Many people listen to music while they work, not just the art world. And I think everyone works along to it for different reasons – distraction from the mundane, awakening feelings of nostalgia, keeps your body moving, etc.
I listen to music when I work because it’s the perfect lover – I can always switch to something that says just what I want it to say when I want that said.

HLIB: A mood enhancer.

Plus its prevalence throughout the art world gives you something to talk about besides art.

HLIB: yes, a get out of jail free card when cornered or bored.

What’s interesting to me about the whole of pop music is how in adolescence (either in high school or art school) music was used as a way to sort people. Knowledge of certain bands and specific moments had cachet. I remember going to parties and people would quiz you on what music you liked it, and then maybe ignore you if your answer wasn’t hip enough. I’ve done that more than once. Music as a dividing force is about as influential as it gets on the personal level.

HLIB: I remember all too well. It was a filter – even a caste system at times. Still, like you, I think it provided a way of looking at the world and finding your place in it. It helped in understanding social strata and the inherent biases.

But is music any more influential in the world than visual arts? I don’t know. How influential is any of this stuff outside its small group of admirers?

I would say that the nostalgic element, and the hipster quotient, of pop music have recently given risen to a large number of shows that feature titles from 80s songs.

My Certain Fate comes from part of a Mission of Burma song. You can’t get more 80s than that. I think I’ve seen Smith’s songs used five or six times as exhibition titles in the last year. (Btw I would love to do a show titled “Barbarism Starts At Home” there are so many ways you could go with that, right?)

HLIB: Ok final question and cheap self promotion at that. Assuming the show is your ‘mix tape’, what song/artist would I be?!

I think you would be something from the 4AD label. Say, Dead Can Dance, Wolfgang Press or maybe Scott Walker. Those artists are all kinda mysterious and beautiful to me, and I don't really understand their music but I really like it anyway. That is also how I look at your work.

HLIB: Glad to see I’m confounding! Scott Walker is a nice reference but I confess, I was hoping for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds or something more on the drone end of the music spectrum. I can live with 4AD though which was a formative label for me. I’ll even reluctantly share that I’ve been on a Cocteau Twins binge lately. So you’re perhaps a clairvoyant after all.

The Cocteau Twins’ Garlands is amazing. I mean where did that come from? Amazing. A.R. Kane’s i records is pretty great as well (Guthrie produced it).I guess your work could be like early Nick Cave, when he still had some of the chaos of Birthday Party on his sound. For the last decade he’s kinda become a parody of himself. Your work is more unique than that. I think about as drone as your recent work gets for me would be Spiritualized -- maybe their single version of Feel So Sad.You know what, WhiteNoise No. 6 is Exit Music (For a Film) covered by Kolacny Brothers & Scala.

HLIB: Comparisons I can certainly live with. Thanks again for taking time to talk about the show Timothy.

My Certain Fate, curated by Timothy Buckwalter opens May 14 (6-9pm) at Pharmaka, downtown L.A.

My Certain Fate - a series of interviews

As mentioned, I'll be participating in an upcoming group show curated by Timothy Buckwalter. Over at Timothy's site, he's been posting his conversations with several artists about their relationship with music and art. If you're a music head and artist or both, I think you might find some kindred spirits.

• Douglas Witmer
• Jeffrey Cortland Jones
• Rebecca Whipple
• Jim Winters
• Tammy Harper
• Michael Zahn

Matvey Levenstein with Phong Bui

Dealing with some deadlines and thus the lack of posts over the previous days. One thing of note is a great interview at the Brooklyn Rail with artist Matvey Levenstein. I met the artist at a residency a few years back and he is quite an engaging speaker with a fascinating story. Some solid areas covered in the interview - see his current one-person exhibition at Larissa Goldston Gallery, on view from April 2^nd to May 9th.

Rail: I read Susanna Moore’s essay in your catalogue at your first show at Larrisa Goldston a few years ago, and she mentioned that you admired Ingres, and that you don’t trust any expressionistic impulses. Actually, one of the first books I bought was the Dover Edition of Ingres with a small text by Vincent Price, the actor, in which he wrote, “Ingres, in correct pronunciation, should be like the word ‘angry’ without the ‘y.’” Isn’t that perfect? [Laughter.] It stuck in my mind forever. In any case, a lot of credit has been given to Ingres because of what Robert Rosenblum described as his coolly disciplined and warmly sensual style. Picasso recognized in his paintings the acute visual perception that accommodates the abstract order. But David, his teacher, was just as radical: by adopting classical relief, he reduced the use of perspectival recession while maintaining the atmospheric effects and making the linear contours more pronounced—like figures across the picture plain.

Levenstein: Yeah, David can be thought of as kind of a punk reaction to the sophistication of Baroque and specifically Rococo painting. In any case, with the exception of “The Death of Marat,” I don’t like David and have always preferred Ingres. Ingres, I think, was both more complex and perverse as an artist when he combined Baroque sensuality with abstracted forms. Ingres is still fascinating to me.

Rail: I agree. We identify with his terrific and expressive distortions of form and space, which opened up another possible language to Cubism, the curvilinear structure that allowed Picasso to break away from his previous analytical and synthetic phases. In some ways I believe this was what de Kooning discovered. We can see that response in his standing and seated figures from 1938 to the greater dismemberment of the body in “Pink Angel” of 1945. Which actually, thinking of de Kooning’s sometimes garish palette, full of harsh contrast, blue, pinkish tones against bright orange and ochre, reminds me that it appears you deliberately heighten certain local colors in such objects, perhaps more with the last group of paintings than this new one. In a painting entitled “Still Life” (2002), there were predominant green and violet pillows set in the middle of the turquoise blue arm chair, against the cadmium yellow wall in the back, or “Couch (Self Portrait)” (2004), with the Buddha’s head in ultramarine blue lit from behind, and the deep cadmium red couch on which your silhouetted figure sat on the far right. Is that a fair reading of those paintings?

Levenstein: I was using color as a way to figure out what is considered flat and what is spatial. To tell you the truth, while looking at de Kooning, I was also looking at a lot of Italian Mannerist paintings. This idea of combining a flat shape of either neutral color or black with a very bright color was crucial for me. How can you get black to be both the shadow and the local color at the same time?

image: Brooklyn Rail/drawing by PhongBui

My profile on updownacross

I've recently had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with art blogger (and neighbor) Joann Kim of updownacross. She's just posted a profile piece on me here and at Greenpointers blog. Joann is hoping to get some dialogue between artists in the Greenpoint established with a grand vision of developing some public platforms for them as well. Very commendable. Please be sure to make Joann's blog a daily read.

Chris Jagers at Americans for the Arts

Art blogger and Slideroom guru, Chris Jagers is guest blogging at the Americans for the Arts blog. The subject is "Public Art", with Jay Sullivan, Professor of Sculpture and Chair, Division of Art: Meadows School of the Arts.

Here's and excerpt:

CJ: When I first asked you to do an interview with you about “Public Art,” what did you immediately begin thinking about?

JS: I first thought of Foucault’s idea of Heterotopias: spaces within a space, where a certain kind of special activity can take place, both within and also slightly outside of society. Classic examples of this are hospitals, insane asylums or graveyards. These are places where society can have safe conversations about things that they don’t want to deal with all the time or everywhere. Ironically, when I think about Public Art, I think about the Percent for Art Project and this notion that we seek to beautify train stations, airports and other things. There is a heterotopic feel about that. On one hand, it is defining certain structures (usually municipal) as being public in a way that other spaces (like major street intersections) are not. For instance, if I put a big sculpture at a major street intersection, I could get into more trouble (aesthetic) than if I put the same piece of sculpture in a train station—the spaces are “public” in different ways and we expect different things to happen there.

Of course, work like Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” violated all this … it went into a public place which was owned by the government, a super public space. Yet, it did some things within that plaza that attacked pre-existing boundaries of that being a public space normally appropriate for such works.

CJ: How do these ideas relate to the administrative process of choosing a project?

JS: I have had a chance to be on a few Public Art review panels, and its very interesting to hear the discussion of the jurors who represent the community. And it is also interesting to see what is given as the agenda for pieces because these things are always supposed to address the community. Projects are supposed to be responsive to the place, but at the same time they are encapsulated in a way that can be easily ignored or marginalized. And when a piece is easy to “bracket off” visually, it becomes difficult to address the community. A thing may be there, but it becomes ancillary to the space itself.

Of course, art has always occupied a special place that is different from ordinary objects … so it’s always a negotiation. A negotiation with the public about goals, the role of the piece and which spaces are potentially available for art versus other public spaces which are viewed are more private. In the early stages, but even later, the artist doesn’t have too much say in all this, which is difficult–the panel is in some sense “guessing” who would be best.

Jeff Sharlet - the Family interview

Guernica recently conducted a fascinating interview with religion journalist Jeff Sharlett regarding his recent publication: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

Excerpt from the (Rawlinson) interview:

One of the most interesting things about anti-intellectualism in American life is that it’s a very intellectual project. Real anti-intellectualism, the Family kind, you know, “Jesus plus nothing,” the systematic stripping away of history, of theology, of any kind of influence—that’s an intellectual project. Not for nothing does Doug Coe express some admiration for Pol Pot. In year zero, he did the same thing. Pol Pot had all the intellectuals killed. You only do that if you have an idea. That’s an extreme form of ideology that says: I can purify things.

There are two great traditions that have been written about before, which are American rationalism and American sentimentalism. What you see in the Family’s expression of power is that these are not two opposite poles, but the head and heart, the realpolitik of world power. The sentimental narrative, which is anti-intellectual—is absolutely interwoven with the rationalist Family agenda.

sticky sublime and the pusuit of strangeness

I've been thinking about this comment recently:

But to get back to the sublime, if you start out academically and you are a student and you are trying to understand some of the networks behind art, and you are getting more comfortable with what might be, what it could be, what some of the apparatus might be, there still is this very self-conscious deliberate journey you are on and that is much of what I felt in graduate school. This journey oriented to assuming a belief that through this intelligence, through mental acuity, you are going to try to pressure these doors open and to give you some sight. And all that is done without being in tune, necessarily, with the enormous levels an artist can bring into himself, and assume, and let open, once you are relaxed about the arena you are in. Your mind is like a blowtorch, trying to burn down things so you can find a home. You’re in the woods, and now it’s time to both feel the repercussions of what you did, and to flavor yourself with a little more feedback from Camus. I thought a lot of that early stuff of mine was deliberate and intellectually oriented. The piece with the spider, where I coaxed the spider through the tube, some of that stuff started to allow certain chemical and psychological things in, that didn’t get in at the start, because you were too targeted. Like the case about the object, the anti-object and the role of galleries. Soon there came a time when the decisions were made in less calculated ways. They were a bit more mysterious. These are the elements that were going to separate you from other people. They were not strategic. They were violating strategy, and in its place there was a kind of uncertainty. So through this mystique I would find references operating in a large universal, or perhaps, in an arena more capable of strangeness.

Dennis Oppenheim speaking with Bill Beckley

Sticky Sublime, 2001 – pg. 109

Luc Sante interview

Guernica magazine has a great interview with author Luc Sante currently on their site. Those close to me know how much Low Life was a book that impacted my life and imagination in way that is often hard to describe. I still feel it resonate inside of me when I walk down certain streets. If you are into histories of place, there is no better read. If you live NY, you better get a copy asap. It should be required with your driver's license.

Some interesting discussion about rhythm in the interview.

Excerpt from Sante::

Actually, songs don’t provoke visual images for me. I hadn’t exactly been aware of this before. What I get from songs is language, but not necessarily the actual lyrics. Hmm. This line of thought seems to be getting neurological… Anyway, I sometimes get words from instrumentals, but mostly from music I get rhythm. And timbre and inflection, stuff like that, which makes it sound much drier than it actually is, but in any event the image-generating portion of my brain involves some entirely other lode.

It’s funny—if music produces words, words do produce images. Despite this, music and images seem to live in different sides of the brain. I guess I think in analogies, which tend to be visual. And images produce images—the more images I see the more I can imagine, which, in part, accounts for my addiction to images and my stamina for consuming vast numbers of them at a time.

Whenever I’ve searched for the origins of rhythm in my life the only thing I’ve ever been able to find is the rhythm of the litanies in the Latin mass—the ora pro nobis iteration in funeral services and the antiphonal ceremony of rogations in the fields. Otherwise music was pretty much absent from my early life—my family didn’t get a record player until I was nine, and the radio only seemed to issue news and soccer, later baseball. Music crept up on me in childhood from a variety of ambient sources. In any case, soul music came to seem like something I’d always known, and—beginning when I was nineteen—reggae even more so, as if I’d somehow heard it in infancy.

Rhythm in writing is somehow analogous, but it’s a completely intuitive matter. I don’t really understand the process. It’s related to the substance of Flaubert’s famous letter to George Sand: “When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal, like a principal? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry?” This is crucial stuff for me. I write intuitively, not knowing where I’m going, not knowing what the next sentence will be until this one has guided me there, and knowing how the sentence goes begins with my hearing its rhythm in my head, and then filling in the specific words. If the sentence is cloddish and clunky, it’s simply wrong—and not just wrong-sounding but wrong in its meaning. I realize at this point that I seem to be conflating two separate senses of the word “rhythm”—beat and flow—but they are inextricably linked in my mind and the matter lies largely outside my ability to articulate it. Rhythm also guides my reading, that part of which has nothing to do with acquiring information. There are certain writers whose rhythm is immediately congenial to me. Among the living, I think of Geoff Dyer, whose books I’d devour even if they were about metallurgy or stamp collecting. His rhythm carries me through, exactly the way the rhythm of a dancehall number takes over my body.

image via Guernica

Seeing is Forgetting - Robert Irwin

One of the great pleasures so far this summer has been finally (after years) getting around to reading Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler. This may well be the best book about an artist and their working method and evolution that I have ever read. If you interested in abstraction, this is pretty much required reading. You'll also get a nice little history on the formation of the L.A. art scene from the 1950's on which for an east coast artist, was quite intriguing and it certainly filled some gaps for me. This is a fast read (and great biography actually) with a lot of big ideas and I think some very fruitful fodder on how to approach one's work within your own studio dynamic. My interest and admiration for Irwin has gone off the charts to say the least, it has left a true and at times profound impression. If you teach, I think you need to get a copy of it.

Here's an excerpt regarding Irwin's relationship with his studio practice during his "late lines" period(1962-1964):

In the beginning all of this was not very considered. It was done very intuitively. My concentration was not real good. It was mostly a question of just staying in the studio and simply not going out. Whether I did anything or didn't do anything, whether I was able to work or not, I simply would not let myself leave. But after awhile, if you don't let yourself leave, then everything else begins to leave, that is, all of your other reasons or ambitions in being there; and if you're very fortunate, you might then reach a point of being completely alone in an intimate dialogue with yourself as acted out in the realm of the painting.

David Maisel interview [2006]

The commenter on the previous post (and the Headlands event) made me want to dig up this excellent interview from 2 years ago on Archinect. Geoff Managh of BLDBLG is the interviewer and I really consider this one of the best artist interviews I have ever read. If you don't know the artist this is a great place to start, if you are familiar this will enhance what you already know and like.

from the interview:

David Maisel (b. 1961) studied architecture, landscape architecture, and photography at both Princeton University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design - before leaving the latter to pursue his photographic career full-time. He now lives in the Bay Area, and exhibits internationally.

In his own words, David has a “fascination with the undoing of the landscape.”� He has become most widely known for his aerial work, which includes extended studies of North American mines, clear-cut forests, urban sprawl, evaporation ponds and other peripheral industries of the Great Salt Lake .

David has also produced a widely known photographic series of Owens Lake, California, with images taken from nosebleed-inducing heights as great as 13,000-feet. As cinephiles will no doubt know, Owens Lake was drained in the early 20th century to water the lawns of suburban Los Angeles (a notorious act of hydrological theft that found its way into American mythology through Roman Polanski's Chinatown). Owens Lake is now a Dantean wasteland, one of the most toxic sites in North America.

some highlights -

Managh:
It struck me while looking at your work, however, that even the word landscape is a bit inaccurate - the idea that you are a landscape photographer - because the sites you choose are more like events. Anthro-terrestrial events, so to speak. One could even argue that you are an event photographer, because you document abraded lake beds, forests being clear-cut, copper mines, and so on. What do you think of that? That a landscape itself could be an event, a process?

Maisel:
The word landscape is an interesting one - it implies a viewer who is making a judgment call. A landscape is bounded by our own set of interests and values. I mean, the land exists without us; the landscape involves our own discernment. So I suppose that you're actually very accurate. It's that sense of turmoil, or finding some... Really, it's the sublime, right? It's the dislocation of the viewer that interests me. It gets back to the same issue as Ansel Adams. I mean, I think that his work at a particular moment in time probably had a different meaning than it does now - but I want to make work that has meaning now. And I think you really have to be decisive about what that is - as an artist. You have an obligation, in a way, to choose subject matter that has meaning.

Managh:
You say meaning, but your own writing tends to have a more poetic than political overtone. Not that your writing is apolitical but it doesn't seem to prescribe anything, or make judgments. Does your work have a specifically political - even ecological - message, or do you see it as purely aesthetic?

Maisel:
I think there is definitely an ecological message there. But the issues are actually quite complex. The more I learn the less I know. The more I see the less I know. I think these are issues in which finger-pointing is really an easy reaction. Yet what I do feel is that we are kind of at the edge of this abyss [laughter] - and I know I'm now falling back into poetic language - but that for me is the message that I want to tease out of these places. That's the continuity I think I bring from one area of subject matter to the next.

So we can drain as many lakes as we want, and we can pour cyanide solution over hundreds of thousands of acres of copper mine tailings - but we'll pay the price. I mean it's interesting, with The Lake Project, once the work was done and the book was out in the world, and there was a certain amount of attention paid to that work of mine, it was then that I met the head of the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District who really appreciated what I was doing. And he is the scientist and, sort of, activist, who organized a local group of citizens in the area of Owens Lake and became the David who slew Goliath in court. They sued the city of Los Angeles - and won. They're the ones who helped the court mandate this whole shallow flooding of the lake to keep down toxic dust storms.

So I have incredible respect for his work, and for his understanding of the complexity of Owens Lake. But he has an understanding; I don't, and I'm willing to say that I don't. I mean I could - I don't think it's an insurmountable lack of knowledge, or comprehension - but there are people who are better trained than I am, and who can make those calls. And I think, in a way, that the pictures aren't even necessarily suited to help make those decisions. They're using, for example, aerial photography now to survey the surface of Owens Lake in order to assess whether or not this shallow flooding is actually helping - and that's a different kind of aerial photography than I'm engaged in, completely! [laughs]

Full interview here.

image: David Maisel

keef

I meet Keith Richards at his office....

the [GQ]interview.

image: Keith Richards in Tonite Lets All Make Love in London (1967) (vertigo magazine uk)

Nick Hornby interviews the Wire's David Simon

“MY STANDARD FOR VERISIMILITUDE IS SIMPLE AND I CAME TO IT WHEN I STARTED TO WRITE PROSE NARRATIVE: FUCK THE AVERAGE READER.” - David Simon

Three or four years ago, I got an email from a friend in which he described The Wire as the best thing he’d ever seen on TV, “apart from Abigail’s Party.” Here was a recommendation designed to get anybody’s attention. No mention of The West Wing, or The Sopranos, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or any of the other shibboleths of contemporary TV criticism; just a smart-aleck nod to Mike Leigh’s classic 1977 BBC play. It reeled me in, anyway, and I went out and bought a box set of the first series.

I’d never heard of the show. It’s not widely known or shown here in the U.K., although whenever a new season starts, you can always find a piece in a broadsheet paper calling it “the best programme you’ve never heard of,” and I didn’t know what to expect. What I got was something that bore no resemblance to Abigail’s Party, predictably, and very little resemblance to any other cop show. At one stage I was simultaneously hooked on The Wire and the BBC’s brilliant adaptation of Bleak House, and it struck me that Dickens serves as a useful point of comparison; David Simon and his team of writers (including George Pelecanos, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane) swoop from high to low, from the mayor’s office to the street corner—and the street-corner dealers are shown more empathy and compassion than anyone has mustered before. The hapless Bubbles, forever dragging behind him his shopping trolley full of stolen goods, is Baltimore’s answer to Joe the Crossing Sweeper.

We talked via email. A couple of weeks later, we met in London—David Simon is making a show about the war in Iraq with my next-door neighbor. (Really. He’s really making a show about the war in Iraq, and the producer literally lives next door.) We talked a lot about sports and music.

—Nick Hornby

This seems the be Wire week around here and accordingly a friend sent a link The Believer's interview between author Nick Hornby and David Simon - the creator/writer/director of HBO's
The Wire. If you are unfamiliar I think it is safe to describe the show as a Greek Tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. At least that's how the Simon aptly describes it. Here is another great observation from Simon.

In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

Full interview here.

Rauch

You've called your earliest paintings (from 1993) in the Wolfsburg show your first "valid" pictures. How do you judge a painting's "validity?"

Let's go back to that image of the internal compass that I just spoke of: Before 1993 the magnetic needle was swinging all over the place. Discovering my position was complicated, because there were so many artistic points of reference. I was overwhelmed by all of the possibilities coming into my studio from thousands of different directions. My work displayed violent mood swings from abstraction to figuration, and this was just one of the many internal conflicts I faced at the time....

"Validity" comes down to the extent to which the uniqueness of the artist's psyche can establish a permanence of form and meaning in the actual work. Since 1993, I have been able to focus better on sorting out what is most significant for me.

Neo Rauch interview on ArtInfo. Here's a review by Schjeldahl on the show at the MET.

Alexey Titarenko

lens culture has a conversation with Russian photographer -Alexey Titarenko. I'm new to the artist and these are really stunning images. Like a contemporary Etienne Jules Marey mired in the masses of a changing Russia. - more pics at artnet.

great tip by wood s lot

Edward Burtynsky's visions of a hyper-industrialized world.

"A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions … apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?" - by Harold Pinter

So I’m taking a moment here from the apocalyptic (well sort of!) to look at this recent interview with Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky. He’s pretty much a household name at this point but if you are by chance unfamiliar you should know that he has been building an incredible body of work over the last 25 years looking at the relationship between humanity and consumer desires as plays out on geologic and maximal scales.

Here is Burtynsky on the quote above:

"Truth is open to a lot of interpretations in the artist's hands. I think, what Pinter is saying is that, as a global citizen you are responsible for asking a question: do I agree with particular politics, do I agree with a direction we are being lead. As a citizen you have to make a decision how you feel about the world, what you think is right. As citizens, it's our responsibility to move out of the domain of creating reflections on humanity into the domain of acting on our beliefs." "As a citizen I do take a pretty strong stand. I do believe that there are serious environmental consequences to what we do and what we don't. There are millions of little things we can do every day. We're making decisions about the kind of cars we drive, how we insulate our houses, how wastefully we use the water and what we do with our old computers. These are real things that make a difference, millions of these decisions done by millions of individuals." - Burtynsky

Christopher Grabowski has some great questions for the artist - here's a few that seem particularly acute for recent postings around the blogosphere.

On why the news media isn't really getting the big story:

"Mainstream news media has a problem with it because they are searching for the breaking story that would sell papers. They're always on the search of headline grabbing material. At the same time, the news media are very top down hierarchal organizations that are not very good at allowing creativity. They are not very good at allowing the people who are on the ground, seeing things first hand, to become a feedback system to back up the organization's pyramid."

On why he decided not to photograph the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

"I've photographed several natural disasters in the past and have decided that it is to close to spot reporting for me. You're in and out very quickly. The thing I was interested in was the slow burn, not the ka-boom, the things and processes that gradually create the world we live in, the processes that we tend to see as normal, as opposed to a tsunami or a hurricane.
"I focus on a world that we're consciously creating. The Three Gorges dam under construction on the Yangtze River looks like a disaster but it was a conscious decision to tear all these cities apart, to relocate 1.5 million people and to build new homes for them beyond the flood area. It was a conscious, industrial transformation of the landscape.
"I don't think it's been adequately covered. As far as I know, I am the only guy who ever went there with a 4x5 camera. In many places up the river, I was the only professional photographer people said they'd seen."

[my post regarding this very topic: Soth, Polidori and Katrina]

On whether photographs reveal or conceal the truth:

"I constantly face questions concerning truth and distortions. As an image-maker I have degrees of control on how I tell my stories. If there is a piece of plywood somewhere in the corner of my frame that catches the sun and burns a hole in my image, I may consider moving the plywood, or if access is difficult, to remove the reflection in the Photoshop. Now, if I take that same image and paste some people into it and introduce some staged narrative without telling anybody about it, that would create a challenge to the traditional trust in the relationship between the image, the creator of the image and the viewer.
"Having said that, photography can be used in various, non-documentary, forms depending on how the author wants to engage the audience. The meaning can be found in making something up completely, a flight of imagination can sometimes have more to do with truth about poverty than, let's say, a straight picture of a street scene."

On simplistic framing of images – and issues:

"I started my work off saying: look these are the complex issues here; there is a definite disconnect between what we consciously do and what the global reality of what we do is.
"To me, if you build your polemics around the point that all corporations are bad, it lacks the necessary complexity, it is just too narrow and almost a caricature of a view. There are some bad corporations and some good corporations. There are some very bad people who work for the corporations but it is also quite easy for some environmentalists to feel self-righteous, to get up on the soapbox without the full grasp of the complexity of the problem.
"My goal is to allow dialogue, not to draw lines and start throwing things at each other again, because this has not gotten us anywhere all these years. It pleases me if my work does something to arouse consciousness, to increase dialog or to influence people to make real personal changes, which is the only thing that makes a difference, as far as I am concerned."

On whether a still image works differently on our consciousness than a documentary film:

"Absolutely, I do believe that a still image fixes in the consciousness in a whole different way than a documentary film does. With a film we are caught up in following the narrative and we don't really pay attention to the images. The still image does fix into the memory, it locks in, it's easier to recall. It has a role in raising consciousness and it does it differently than a documentary film. One might say that film is more compelling because you're more driven to understand the theme but the film doesn't recall the same way in our minds. What I recall from the Vietnam War is not the video footage; it's Eddie Adams' images that stick in my mind."

On whether artists need to be analytical, like anthropologists:

"People who are engaged in art are engaged in a process of thinking beyond the present moment, looking both forward and backward, reflecting on how the human story plays itself out. In a way, art is a research and development department. It shows us new places we can go in terms of thought; it makes us reflect upon our actions, our ethics; it questions our definitions of good and evil.
"I believe that culture is key to a healthy society. So many people are caught so entirely in the process of working and making a living that society needs somebody to put a mirror up, to open up our consciousness to the things that are out of sight, out of mind."

Full interview at the Tyee

image: Edward Burtynsky

via wood s lot