In Situ vs Site Specific

Vladimir Putin with Ronald Reagan; John Powers, Die Die Die (2007)
I'm traveling to Vyksa Russia today to take part in an arts festival. Vyska is home to a water-tower, built by the engineer/architect Vladimir Shukhov for a local metallurgic plant. The festival is built on realizing a connection between Revolutionary Russia of the early 20th century and the "street-art" of today. I won't be making any street-art, but I will be working "in situ"

Mind The Gap: Art & Ethics

MEI Chart from Andrea Fraser's “L'1% C'est Moi” in Texte zur Kunst 83; Michelle Vaughan's Instagram of vandalized Damien Hirst

I was on two panels recently. One was on the question of Art & OWS, the other was on Art & Ethics - I found myself making the same point at both: that high art prices are not the problem, they are symptoms of a problem. Along with high rates of mental illness, violent crime, and lower life expectancy, high art prices are not symptomatic of extreme poverty or extreme wealth, they are symptomatic of extreme gaps between the very rich and the very poor. Here is the point that I made to the OWS activists in the audience of the first panel, and the would-be artworld movers and shakers in the audience of the second: wealth is not the problem and the wealthy are not the enemy. The gap is a problem, and it's a problem for wealthy as well as the poor. If you are the richest American your life expectancy is shorter that the richest Greek, your likely hood of mental illness is higher, and the likely hood that your life will be marred by violence is higher. Corporations are not the problem, consumerism isn't the problem; the problem that plagues us all is the gap.

What Mike Daisey Did Wasn't Fair - It Was Right.

Moses crossing either the Red Sea or the Reed Sea (one make a better story); Mike Daisey opening up an enormous can of worms

So when I found out that one of my favorite episodes of This American Life turned out not to be true I didn't care. Not at all, not one iota. I understood that the author had presented the story as fact, had urged his listeners to check his facts, but that he had lied. It was a great story, while it cast doubt on the practices of an well regarded company, and cast doubt on the enterprise of journalism itself, it in no way made me think less of the author, TAL, or The Washington Post. I still love Malcolm Gladwell even though I now know he lied throughout the story TAL broadcast. My lack of outrage is because when I listen to TAL I don't expect "All The News That's Fit to Print," I expect something closer to the way TAL describes itself: “It's mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always.” So while I was surprised and disappointed to learn that Mike Daisey had lied about the narrative TAL had broadcast - I was just as surprised, that by doing so, he had somehow besmirched TAL's journalistic credibility. When did Ira Glass graduate from being a talk radio Casey Kasem to NPR's Dan Rather?

Twinkle Fingers Are No Way To Decide A Death Match, or: Why I Won The Flux Factory Art & Occupy Debate

I couldn't find a picture of my Deathmatch opponents, so I tried to approximate the best I could (I imagine Hrag is Master)


This past week Paddy Johnson of Artfagcity, Hrag Vartanian of Hyperallergic, the artist Bill Powhida, and I were invited to debate the topic of the art community's place within the Occupy Wall Street movement. The debate was hosted by Flux Factory and organized and moderated by Douglas Paulson & Christina Vassallo. The debate is now available as podcasts. As I told my fellow panelists, the debate format made this the single most enjoyable panel I've ever been on. It helped that I know and like everyone else on the panel, respect their work and opinions, but I really enjoyed that there was no pretense at agreement, no impulse to reach a consensus. It made for a fun night of arguing with a group who all enjoy arguing. Perhaps because it was billed as a "Deathmatch" I swore like a sailor (or maybe because I always swear a lot), so by that metric I clearly won the debate (except the method actually used: twinkle fingers).

Freedom Towers and Political Fear

David Childs presenting his "Freedom Tower" design (2006); Occupy Wall Street protester being bodily removed (2011)

Recently I was asked to contribute a piece for a group show in Hong Kong about the "ways objects produce space." Rather than contribute a sculpture and hope for some sort of latter-day phenomenological experience between ‘object’ and ‘subject’ however, I decided to revisit an urban design project that I had not worked on for over a decade. In addition to recreations of three architectural counter-proposals I originally showed in March of 2001, I added a fourth that has been gestating for almost a decade, but has suddenly taken on new relevance. I proposed building nine “Freedom Towers” arranged in a tight grid formation and completely occupying the available open space of Tiananmen Square. I wrote a post for Rhizome about the entire project, but in review my thoughts I returned to a video of talk I attended by David Childs, the Chief Architect of SOM's "Freedom Tower." Child's 2007 talk was called "Building and Fear", and while the fear he was addressing in his talk was the fear of terrorism  - a fear he calls "anti-urban" - it is interesting to note that he reports that the push to close of the streets surrounding the New York Stock Exchange began before 9/11. My project is concerned with an older fear that has been shaping of cities, the fear of political protest. A fear I might call anti-civil. Modernity is city life. Civilization and civility both draw their meaning from the same place, the ways we have learned to behave by living together in cities. 

Comic Books are Dead III: Moebius Is Dead

Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project (2003): Moebius, The Incal (1981)
(Part I and Part II)
When I was in grade school I fell in love with the comic book art of Moebius. I was sad to hear he died. As an artist myself I think a lot about my first loves, Moebius was one of them. When I talk with parents who have children who like to draw and are curious how to foster their "talent" I tell them to find art the boy or girl will enjoy copying. I usually suggest Calvin and Hobbes, because Bill Watterson's drawings are actually very advanced, with sketchy traces of cross-sectional contour and other old master devices for describing 3D forms and spaces. For the children of my friends and acquaintances, Watterson it is a safe bet, the subject mater is tame, no one is going to get mad at me. No one is getting fucked by a dog-headed villain or dropped from a thousand foot drop and shot at for sport.

Seeing Red: Fabian Protests

George Washington on Wall Street; and an OWSer who didn't get the memo

I'm aware that, due to the Tea Bagger's tricornered pinheads, looking at OWS in relation to George Washington's Continental army is a mixed metaphor of sorts. And while I am more than happy to cede the Boston Tea Party to the Neoliberals, Libertarians and their flock of rasist retirees, the OWS movement, and its admires, would do well to consider the lessons of the long war of attrition that followed that initial tax revolt. According to the historian Joseph Ellis: "Washington did not believe he was weak, and he thought of the Continental army as a projection of himself." Clearly OWS movement has no reason to imagine itself as weak, it imagines itself as a projection of the 99%, but like Washington, there seems to be an urge for symmetrical confrontation: to shut down the G8, to demand that the Whitney Biennial cease and desist, and to call for a general strike on May 1st. Like Washington however, OWS can't win frontal assaults, they need to make what Ellis calls, a "Fabian Choice."

Thoughts on Triple Canopy's Open Letter to Kevin Kelly

Episode IV: A New Heap - Robert Smithson, Heap of Language (1966): Star Wars, Opening Crawl (1977)

"You remember, right? “Star Wars: A New Heap,” by John Powers, that elaborate Smithson-inspired disquisition on the relationship between Star Wars and Minimalist sculpture. Apparently sci-fi is the internet’s main artery, because we’ve never gotten more unique hits for any article." An Open Letter to Kevin Kelly - Triple Canopy

While no one has asked my opinion, but because it opens with a reference to the essay I wrote for them about Star Wars (and the very favorable review Kelly posted about it on his blog), and since I at least correspond with all the players (pretty sure the open letter was written by Colby Chamberlain) I felt I have the right to chime in. I take issue with the idea that What Technology Wants is war, but also with countering Kelly' observations on technology with a 40 year old quote. Triple Canopy's position feels dogmatic to me. Bending a knee to canon while ignoring what is happening all around us. Cassandra vs Pollyanna is a false choice. Things are bad - our problems are very real. But as Kevin Kelly points out to those who say we can't go on as we are: We never do.

Without Space, They Can't Hear Us Scream

Model of the Nostromo, Alien (1979); Model of proposal for Tiananmen Square Extrusion (2012)

For those in Hong Kong, I have a series of architectural models at the Saamlung Gallery, in a group show there called "No One Can Hear You Scream." The show takes it's title from the tagline of the original 1979 film Alien: "a primal scene in its graceful collapse of science fiction and a broader spatial concern, and it is this possibility--space as something generated by a cultural object." My contribution for the show is a series of modest proposals, three of which I originally made as large scale foam core models for a show about public space in March of 2001. The fourth proposal (shown above right), of nine Freedom Towers transplanted from New York's WTC site to Beijing's Tiananmen Square, I've never shown before. With the help of my friend and fellow scifi geek, the architect Otto Ruano I was able to recreate the original models (long ago destroyed) as well as realize the fourth, all as 3D printouts based on CAD models (the future is indeed awesome).

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

Tory author Lewis Carroll and, presumably, a more progressive Occupier.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

My father, who made his living as a psychologist, warned me to beware anyone who speaks nonsense words. "They're up to something" he'd say. "Their up to something that they are ashamed of." His example was always the conservative author, and likely pederast, Lewis Caroll: "All that cutsy shit is cover for what he really wanted, but was ashamed to say clearly." He told me. "Straight shooters shoot straight." Occupy Wall Street has to start talking strait or they are going to be mistaken for perverts and are not going to get what they want.

Pointless

Georges Seurat 19th century anarchist pointillism; Damien Hirst's 21st century nihilist Spots
(Return to Part IV)

"Bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" are terms that may still have a certain amount of currency among a set of cultural theorist and political activists, but for most of us they are badly dated terms, especially in the case of proletariat, which few people use except in boldly debarked air-quotes. "Bourgeoisie" has a little more currency left because it still gets thrown around as an insult. The Parisians call hipsters BoBos (Bohemian Bourgeoisie). We all can picture someone, some place, or some event as being "bourgie" - even if we don't know exactly what it means, we know contempt is being expressed and that it has something to do with material wealth and comfort. But even if most of us no longer think of ourselves primarily in terms of class, these remain powerful frames, that shape the ways we think. At exactly the same time as workers and capitalist differentiated themselves from peasants below an aristocrats, artists came into their own as a highly regarded group outside of class, producing objects that were understood to be separate from the market forces that defined the classes art was understood to be outside of.

Biographical Extraterritoriality

Junkets: Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard (ca 1815); Damien Hirst 

(return to Part III)

When we use the word "art" in its modern sense, we are speaking back and forth through time. We mean the inherited traditions of European aristocracy, but we also mean other traditions from around the world that French King's would have dismissed as savagery, as well as all the things we do today that no savage or French King would have hoped to have understood as art. But because so much of what we have in mind when we conjure "art" to mind are things that belong to the past it is easy to forget how alien a territory we are crossing when we enter that state of mind. an important element of the contemporary art-game is to ignore that the past is the most exotic of all foreign countries, and that even our immediate past is a place we can no longer call home.