Looking at Do Ho Suh with David Brin - 5

Rachel Whiteread, One Hundred Spaces (1995); David explaining Do Ho Suh's Home Within Home prototype (2011)

(Return to Part 4)

After having seen the Richard Serra and Nick Cave shows, David and Cheryl and I then walked a couple blocks north to see an the two installations of two over-size doll houses colliding in two very different ways by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery. Of the three shows I took the Brins to see, this last one is where I had the most fun, because it was there that David grabbed the reigns from me and his story telling took over. Not long after we had entered the show I was no longer explaining the work to David, he was explaining the work to me and Cheryl and complete strangers; whatever I had hoped might happened when I invited the Brins to look at art with me, this was better.

Art Then Technology (Part7.5): Medium is not the Message

US Dollar; Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, (1859)
(Return to Part 7)

When I introduce myself as a sculptor, the most common first question people to ask is what “medium” I work in. I do my best to answer, but I am always a bit at a loss. I understand what people want to hear, but not what it is they want to know. I'm aware that people are usually not just being polite, that they making good spirited attempts to show an interest in an unusual occupation. But asking a sculptor about their medium is no more meaningful than asking a banker what currency they truck - you could do it, but even on the off chance you met a single-currency banker, what would you learn? My own experience, as the object of that question, is you don't learn much from the answer.

Art Then Technology (Part 5): Abstract Art Is A Technology.

Fat Bastard: end of third day of installation.
(Return to Part 4)

As a participant in an exhibition of abstract 'generative' art called abstrakt - Abstrakt, I spent nine days installing, and had a lot of time to think about the work of the other artists in the show, most of whom used or addressed the crumbling edge of digital technology, and almost all of whom evoked for me the flatfooted logic of the last great wave of abstract art, 1960s era minimalism. My work is sometimes describes as post-minimalist. I like to describe it as post-Star Wars-minimalism, but not because it's high-tech. My art is not-at-all-crumbling edge; I use no advanced technology, my design and fabrication is entirely analog, but by the time I became aware of abstraction, Modernism had been recast as the Deathstar and destroyed. Abstract artist of my generation are "late-adopters." Late adopter is a term usually reserved for technologies. My decision to take up abstraction in the mid-1990s was because abstraction is not a style, that the difference between abstract art and earlier art is not a difference in quality, it is a difference in kind. But it has only been as I've been thinking about exactly what technology is that it occurred to me that the difference is the difference between a very old technology and a relatively new one.

Painting Must Die (Part 1/3): Backing into Murder

Frank Stella, Hyena Stomp (1962), Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

Barnet Newman's quip that, "sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting,” has become a cliche no self respecting art historian would quote. So it's a curious pleasure to find it in Rosalind Krauss's essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field. (It's like coming across a knock knock joke in a Walter Benjamin essay.) Like all humor, Newman's joke is funny because it is a little cruel, and it is cruel because there's some truth to it (one of my pieces was damaged that way once - my friends all laughed). As a sculptor it is painful to admit this, but by all accounts, for most of history, painting has driven art. That’s why we discuss the death of painting, and (almost) never the death of sculpture. The harsh truth is, no one much cares if sculpture dies because sculpture is thought of as a kind of painting; a parasitic twin carved in stone.