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.

Bar Bets Are Dangerous: A Theory.

The author happily washing down a serving of crow and theorizing with a little Kittler at my elbow.

The folks at Hyperallergic decided the debate between Michelle Vaughan and I, and I lost. I'm OK with that. The point of this blog is that theory and history and art should be fun, that art has no borders that need to be protected, but that what is at stake is what we believe about ourselves and out times, and those beliefs should be defended (if not to the death, at least until dinner time, and it's time for dinner). The debate with Michelle has been all that. Best of all, I have enjoyed reading the comments, emails and Twitter-snark that surrounded the back and forth. 

A long while back in a comment thread about a not totally unrelated idea some calling themselves "bert" and Joshua Noble suggested I read Friedrich Kittler's Optical Media, it arrived just in time to comfort me in my defeat. I haven't read far, but here is what I was thinking about when I learned that I would have to start planning a meal for my friends:

Besides the old ritualistic meaning of "carnival progression," the word "theory" - the primary word of Greek Philosophers - meant nothing other than "look," "observe," "a feast for the eyes," or even "pageantry," and first assumed the meaning of "a scholarly teaching"after or through Plato. 

Michelle wrote to tell me it was a "win-win," and I can't agree more. Congratulations Michelle and Bon Ap'!

What Was The Death Star?

The 1967 desire and the 1977 affect. 

"On August 6, a torch was lighted in Hiroshima, where the first atom bomb had been dropped in 1945. It was flown to San Francisco and on August 27 began its journey to Washington, D.C. On October 20, several hundred people marched to the Justice Department to turn in a thousand draft cards... After the speeches, about 50,000 people set off for the Pentagon. At the other end a group of hippies was trying to exorcize the Pentagon. The brainchild of Abbie Hoffman, the plan was for people to sing and chant until it levitated and turned orange, driving out the evil spirits and ending the war in Viet Nam. The Pentagon didn't move... This demonstration was one of several parallel actions around the world. People in six European countries, Israel, Japan and Australia marched or picketed against the presence of U.S. troops in Viet Nam." Joe Feeman

I Want To Be An Old Artist, But Movies Are The Art Of Our Times.

Bill Cunningham New York (2011); Between The Folds (2008)

I saw the Bill Cunningham documentary the night before last, and last night watched a documentary about origami a friend suggested. In Cunningham I saw what I have wanted for myself since I made the decision in my teens to become a studio artist I wanted to be an old artist; to someday be able to look back on a long life of making art. In the origami artists, I was reminded that there are many art worlds, each with their own theories, markets, aesthetic battles, etc. That I chose to move to New York, not because I believed it was the only art world, or even the only art world that matters, but that it was the art world that seemed to offer a place for me and my particular personal aspirations. I am well aware that for an artist to say that movies are the art of our time is counter-intuitive, but at stake is what is great and why.

I Struggle To Believe That Frank Gehry Has The Force

3B6-RA-7 (1977); Frank Gehry, Beekman Tower (2010)

Frank Gehry is an architect I do not feel should be a guilty pleasure, but for some reason, he really really is. 

Movies Are The Art of Our Times: A Memoir

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Movies Are The Art of Our Times: A Theory

Ed Harris playing Jackson Pollock as the genius of the Hamptons; Patrick Stewart playing Gurney Halleck as the war hero of Dune.

Movies do not leap to mind when we think of great art because for over a century most artists, theorists and historians have used the military metaphor of the avant-garde to imagine what is most valuable about the art of our times. Shock troops leading the charge in battle, was never a good metaphor for artistic greatness. It puts the highest value on imagining art as an environments of chaos, as artists as heroic individuals willing to place themselves at the controversial front lines of intellectual life, and over values the most explosive art. The avant-garde misrepresents both modern warfare and modern art. They set us to the task of looking for tall trees (heros and masterpieces), when we should be looking for the greatness of the forest. The art of our time is not a work of art, it is an artform: movies.

Bar Bets Are Dangerous.

The author, magnanimous in victory, with a friend (who I know prefer to remain forever anonymous), in the aftermath of settling a bar bet (I was sure Obama would win way before the primaries had even begun).

A couple weeks ago I made a bet (a bar bet) with my good friend Michelle Vaughan. Michelle is a painter, and she and I were talking about gallery shows, art theory, absolute freedom, arguing truth vs beauty - oh wait, no, we were talking about movies - and I made the off-hand observation that "movies are the art of our time." Michelle is an escapee of LA - and while I am one of those rare New Yorkers who loves LA (it is one of my favorite places), Michelle is not. She is very happy to have escaped a city that revolves around the industry of movie making and to have made a place for her self as a visual artist in a city that revolves around making art - and writing for magazines, and publishing books and a metric shit ton of other stuff, but there is no getting around that there is a greater density of galleries in this city than any other place on the planet (Irving Sandler recently put the count at upwards of 600). New York is an art town, but like everywhere else in the world, the art that New Yorkers consume most passionately are movie (just saying).

A Modest Proposal: Title IX MoMA's 501(c)3

Bill Bartman with Elizabeth Murray [image by Bill Zules]; Women of the 2010 Whitney Biennial

In 1999, Bill Bartman, the founder of Art Resources Transfer, told me an idea of his that I still believe is one of the best I have ever heard: art museums are 501(c)3 nonprofits, by merit of the exact same quality that makes universities eligible: they are educational institutions. Bill's idea was to sue art museums under Title IX; to force them to give female artists an equal portion of resources spent on men, in the same way universities have been forced to give women and minority students an equal share of scholarship money and then latter transformed college athletics by requiring parity in spending for women's sports. It is a dangerous idea, one that, if carried out, would transform the artworld more than any avant-garde provocateur could ever hope to.

Modernist Hangover: The Masterpiece

Robert Smithson, Arial Map Proposal for Dallas -Fort Worth Reginal Airport (1967); Spiral Jetty (1970)

For the past two days a number of people I follow on Twitter are wrapped up making lists of Post War masterpieces (check out what is going on at Two Coats of Paint). The challenge seems to be to produce a list with more than 3 female artists - which is laudable. I've looked over a couple lists that have been emailed to me and I can't help but grind my teeth over this weirdly Modernist exercise. A masterpiece assumes timeless quality, universal appreciation. I imagine Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty will make almost every list, but it shouldn't. No Post War American art should. There is no such thing  a Post War American masterpiece because there is no such thing as a masterpiece. It is a totally bogus category.

Middle Modernism

Jane Jacobs is the Mother of all Jedi (and yes Gladwell is one of the Skywalker twins)

The medieval European doctrine, "City air makes free," is quoted by Jane Jacobs in her book Economy of Cities, more recently in Stewart Brand's Whole earth Discipline, and in Steven Johnson's latest book Where Good Ideas Come From. This isn't just a coincidence. Jacobs is the mother of New Urbanism; Brand and Johnson are both diehard urbanists and admirers of Jacobs. But Jacobs is also the God mother of a new strain of Modernism that Brand and Johnson are examples of. Jacobs cites Brand in her last book, Dark Ages Ahead. (Not her best book, but still how cool would that be?) Jacobs was writing in response to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (even cooler), where he made his case for a "genuine science of human history." Kevin Kelly who co-curates the Long Now seminars with Brand and did a Book tour with Johnson late last Year is another new Modernist, I would add to the list Gail Collins, Malcolm Gladwell, David Bell, Helen Fisher... the list goes on. These are not the sorts of writers that are cited in academic papers, these are the sorts of thinkers one finds searching airport book stores or giving TED talks.

Star Wars and Postmodernism

Boys and their toys, Then, and Now

Like most boys, I spent a lot of time playing war. But unlike American boys of the 50s and 60s, who grew up imagining themselves as patriotic GI Joes, my friends and I didn't play with army men. We were born into the rain shadow that followed the Vietnam War, during which, Hasbro stopped making soldier toys. We still played war, but instead of American soldiers,  played with Star Wars. Unlike boys just a few years older than us, we were no longer fantasizing about being grunts of the Greatest Generation defending American freedom from Fascism; our imaginary enemies wielded weapon of mass destruction and were fascists with a lowercase "f' (I spell out the difference I see between Fascism and fascism HERE). The story we were all reenacting was an upside-down fantasy of North Vietnamese-like space guerrillas battling American Modernism in Nazi drag. We were replacing the story of one kind of authority, with a new, very different story of authority. It looked like a childish fad, but, in the context of that particular moment, it was subversive.