writing shed in the woods

2012-01-30T06:56:00.004-07:00

found: Jean-François Lauda, Fu Baoshi, Alice Browne

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2012-01-29T07:11:00.003-07:00

found: unknown, Thomas Houseago, Andrea Belag

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2012-01-26T07:37:00.003-07:00

found: Amir Mogharabi, Michiel Cuelers, Joseph Trotto

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2012-01-25T13:43:00.003-07:00

found: Keith Allyn Spencer, Michael Williams, unknown

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2012-01-21T18:00:00.004-07:00

found: Cecil Touchon, Jeffrey Scott Matthews, Tillman Kaiser

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2012-01-14T07:30:00.003-07:00

found: Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder, Lael Marshall, Betty Woodman

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2011-12-30T13:15:00.004-07:00

found: Just Cavalli

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2011-12-30T12:54:00.004-07:00

found: Ryan Sullivan, Karla Black, Clare Price

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2011-12-27T15:34:00.003-07:00

found: Torben Ribe

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2011-12-27T15:17:00.004-07:00

found: Julia Dault, Linda Stark, Ted Gahl

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2011-12-12T07:46:00.003-07:00

found: Larry Poons, Zak Prekop, Gert and Uwe Tobias

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2011-12-09T20:48:00.004-07:00

found: Rosemarie Trockel, Rosy Keyser, Terri Brooks

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2011-12-01T07:12:00.002-07:00

found: Analia Saban

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2011-11-30T07:58:00.004-07:00

found: Anne Betbeze, Garth Weiser, Molly Smith

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2011-11-27T06:37:00.004-07:00

found: Hiroshi Sugito, Rebecca Stephany, Stef Driesen

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2011-11-20T16:04:00.013-07:00

(Mint Cavity, 2011, oil on canvas, Kim Neudorf)

(chafe inwards over toast, 2011, oil on canvas, Kim Neudorf)

(soap trail with earpiece, 2011, oil on canvas, Kim Neudorf)

More painting images here!

Proximities
Kim Neudorf

Skew Gallery, Calgary, AB
November 17 - December 16, 2011
Opening Reception: 6pm - 8pm, Nov. 17

In these paintings, gestures are made possible by proximity: crumbling edges, hit-or-miss staining, and the materiality of tone and colour in both dark and bright shapes. These are all co-existences made up of each other’s proximal space. Gestural logic moves from the daily experience of shifting "baselines", "normalities", intensities, and affects, to the attendant thing-word-strings which make up attempts to find language for “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle”.

Works cited:

Bennett, Jane. “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter”. Political Theory June 2004 vol. 32 no. 3.

www.skewgallery.com/upcoming.htm

More images from the opening here.

2011-11-20T15:08:00.003-07:00

found: Megan Mitchell, Tim Compton, Charity Davis-Woodard

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2011-11-19T07:31:00.003-07:00

found: Jean-Philippe Harvey, Cordy Ryman, Roberto Matta

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2011-11-07T19:43:00.003-07:00

found: Jutta Koether, Knoll woven sample Mid 20th century, Dan Gunn

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2011-11-06T07:26:00.003-07:00

found: Otto Dix, and two by Richard Tuttle

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2011-10-31T07:17:00.004-06:00

found: Philomene Pirecki, Lisa Couwenbergh, unknown

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2011-10-27T08:49:00.004-06:00

found: Radcliffe Bailey, Willem de Kooning, Oliver Rafferty

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2011-10-24T06:03:00.003-06:00

found: Sergej Jensen, Allison Shulnik, Svetlana Rabey

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2011-10-17T07:04:00.003-06:00

found: Joseph Montgomery, unknown studio, Nicolás Colón

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2011-10-08T07:41:00.004-06:00

found: Rosemarie Trockel, unknown, Mamma Andersson

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2011-10-01T13:46:00.006-06:00

found: Aurelio Ayela, unknown, and Eve Sussman

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2011-09-21T08:35:00.003-06:00

found: Tracy Thomason, Miriam Cabessa, Zachary Buchner

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2011-09-18T09:21:00.004-06:00

found: Marta Minujin, Rachel Niffenegger, Oscar Murillo

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Fall Group Show, 2nd Year MFAs and PhDs, UWO

2011-09-05T15:03:00.000-06:00

MFA/PhD blogs - studio and non-studio

2011-09-05T10:09:00.011-06:00

*
My interest in studio-based grad studies started when I was in undergrad, becoming more mythologized in a residency a few months after graduation. With lopsided, lengthy legwork (and alliteration), I was able to compose a more realistic idea of what grad school might be like, and whether or not I wanted to apply. Why grad school? Thesis or non-thesis program? What is the thesis-writing experience like? What do PhDs go through? What is a TA experience like? What kind of reading should I have done beforehand? What is it like to design and teach your own course? Most of these questions could be asked and answered very generally in email to previous grad students, while syllabus examples (for both grad students and TA'd courses) could sometimes be found online. But the majority of information I was able to find was often not about studio-based programs, nor even art-history based, but in writing, philosophy, design, etc. Now that I'm entering my second year in a studio-based MFA program, I'm still asking all the questions I just listed; I'm still in need of comparable experiences beyond the obvious and general. As a notebook/unposted journaler, I'm also interested in finding out whether other studio-based MFAs use/need blogs in order to compose, capture, and externalize their educational processes and experiences.

There are several reasons (easy to guess) behind the apparent fact that there are almost zero blogs out there from professional studio-based artists/teachers/students/writers, while there are MANY from almost any other field. This summer I started following several blogs from non-studio-based MFAs and PhDs and what is most surprising, inspiring, and reassuring is that the majority of them blog because either they directly use the blog space to work through and capture their thesis/dissertation/teaching experience processes, and/or they (often) directly state that it is the only space in which they can speak/write about issues and ideas they're really interested in, often within a community of bloggers who contribute to discussions not possible in the professional/teaching day-to-day.

In the next week I'll be attending general TA workshops and meetings for 2nd Years, and I'll soon be assisting painting professors in a two-part course (rather than co-teaching a course with another grad student, as I did last year), so I have a lot of questions about teaching experiences for studio-based grad students. Yesterday, while trying to find alternative copies of 'The Affect Theory Reader' (after a library recall), I found a blog from a doctoral student who is studying composition and rhetoric in the States. The first post I read started with the following:

"I’m thinking a lot about teaching lately, about how my teacherly self is implicated in opposition against my researchy self. This quarter, my students have made me confront some realities about schooling (about the teaching/learning of reading and writing, specifically) that I have remained willfully ignorant of. As a result, I have had to take a different kind of stance in the classroom. My students have described their literacy development as a process of losing control, in which the activities and texts they take joy in are gradually pushed aside in favor of texts and activities (with the concomitant immersion in a more sophisticated way of talking/knowing) they don’t find pleasure in. The activities of literacy, once a pasttime, a mediator of connection with family and friends, become a skills-based sorting tool. In my classroom, despite my good intentions, it became apparent to me that my students and I were not on the same team. We didn’t even speak the same language. So, rather than continue to reproduce a system of disempowerment, I’m trying to help my students feel more in control of what they’re learning. To do this, I have to get out of their way. Which means, in some ways, that I’ve had to get out of my own way. I’ve had to disregard what I think might be the easiest, coolest, or most expedient way to teach material and, instead, find ways to make resources and knowledge available to students so that they may come to a more complex or nuanced idea of, say, genre, on their own. And for them to feel in control, I think it might be that I feel some measurable loss of control."

"Elspeth Probyn and Sara Ahmed offer some ways to think through this process. Ahmed’s “Happiness Objects,” and Probyn’s “Writing Shame” (Affect Theory Reader, Siegworth & Gregg, eds) together work toward a fuller picture of the stuff that happens when we do writing work. In these essays, the body becomes the focal point. We do work, even intellectual work, with our bodies. Our bodies are conductors of affect, I think. As such, they determine may pass through us and what gets stuck, stalled out. I’m feeling a little tentative in the way I’m trying to think about this, so let’s turn to the texts."

It's quite amazing to be let in on someone's teaching experiences in such a transparent, structured way, and for now I'm content to follow those blogs which relate - even if indirectly - to my own experiences. It's even more amazing if I find research which relates to my own.

2011-09-04T07:43:00.005-06:00

found: R.H. Quaytman

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"Op paintings work well to activate other paintings, like little engines. And they make you move. Dave Hickey wrote that they propel you through the room, and I thought that was so true. I am also interested in the sheer electricity of them because they are like television screens or monitors. They emit something like light." - Quaytman at Museo

"In Rome I began to make sentences of paintings—groups of panels that belonged together. And then, one day, I had an epiphany: “The stance of the painting is the profile.” It was like a riddle; I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it was important. It seemed to refer to the viewer’s movement past a painting. I began to think of paintings as objects that you passed by—as things that you saw not just head-on and isolated, but from the side, with your peripheral vision, and in the context of other paintings."

"I tend to work on one or two small caption paintings as I begin a new chapter. Painting them helps me think less analytically, and including them in exhibitions punctuates the other paintings the way a comma or period might punctuate a sentence. The arrows set up a contradiction, moving viewers along and drawing them in at the same time."

"The pattern I used for the Op-like paintings is called a scintillating grid, which was invented to show the blind spot at the center of visual perception. When you focus on it, your peripheral vision goes haywire. Diamond dust introduces a different kind of optical experience. Unlike an Op pattern, which both blinds and repels vision, diamond dust blinds and attracts vision. And the combination of the two can create an interesting tension."

"I wanted to create a sense of light that seemed colorless. I discovered that the RGB color model used for TV and computer screens—today’s windows onto other spaces—could be used to make paintings that would read from afar as light, or as a glowing grayness. When you approach these paintings, or look at them obliquely, their colorlessness shifts to red, green or blue, depending on your angle and the light in the room."

"I find it helpful to think about painting as if it were poetry, and to focus on a given painting’s grammar and syntax, even on its vocabulary. In reading a poem, you notice particular words, and how each is not just that one word, but contains other words as well. The same is true for a painting."

"I’ve always found it helpful to take other media and transpose their forms and ideas to painting. Early on, when I was feeling kind of lost as a painter, I’d read about other kinds of art-making—sculpture, video or conceptual art—and almost unconsciously twist the thinking around to make it be about painting."

"My rules are inventions—and they continue to generate new possibilities."

-Quaytman at Art in America.

2011-08-26T10:01:00.001-06:00

This blog may be moving to wordpress, via new blogger rules about links and other content. Move TBA.

2011-08-21T12:54:00.002-06:00

found: Lili Reynaud-Dewar

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2011-08-20T08:08:00.005-06:00

An unfinished thought:

A tendency I've run into several times in research since starting grad school is a tendency in artists who are working primarily in sculpture to position their work pointedly as opposing a kind of Michael Fried non-theatrical painting or "painting as window on the world" take on painting. Even Karla Black continues to talk of her sculpture-based work as "the opposite of the traditional condition of painting, which is a window onto another world, an optical escape." I don't think this is an intentional refusal to consider painting in the present, but an odd fixation on painting as a stilted opponent, etc.

See 'Objects, But Only Just: A Conversation with Karla Black' by Ana Finel Honigman in Sculpture magazine (viewable here - scroll down to page 22)

Also, see Jan Verwoert's 'Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It's a Good Idea' in Afterall magazine. For example: Painting as a stilted opponent, etc.: "conventional painting that relies uncritically on a traditional understanding of the medium."; a call for "painting to be discussed as a relevant medium again, and thereby liberat[ing] it from the curse of a premature rejection at the hands of a normative understanding of history."

2011-08-18T11:28:00.001-06:00

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"The more bullying Eisenman’s jokes and the more retrouvé her aesthetics – that is, the more she seems like the riot grrrl Currin – the less affecting her efforts. Where she eschews the traps and tropes of the 1990s, both the irony and the traditionalism, the multiculturalism and the commercialism, she seems more likely to transcend the cheaper thrills of her cohort."

-from Ian Chang's review of Nicole Eisenman at Frieze magazine

2011-08-16T06:46:00.002-06:00

found: Vanessa Püntener

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2011-08-15T12:02:00.004-06:00

found: Samantha Bittman, and two by R.H. Quaytman

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2011-08-09T16:39:00.004-06:00

found: Ted Gahl, Jess Fuller, Andy Boot

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2011-08-07T13:28:00.002-06:00

"A base function of art is to shine a light on areas in our society that have grown dark or invisible. Artists do so by challenging conventions of both form and content, by carving out a space for themselves among these issues by de-territorialising our standardised rhythms and patterns of action and thought."

-from 'Precocious and Precarious: The Future is Unstable (and it always will be, so deal with it)' by Amy Fung

2011-08-04T17:01:00.005-06:00

Over at abstract critical, Luke Elwes' critical review 'A Wrong Turn? : Cecily Brown at Gagosian' pinpoints what really isn't working in Brown's new paintings.

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"The paint needs either to describe something or else assume a life of its own. As it is, they amount to abstraction as the absence of figuration, a lazy solution delivered to deadening effect." (read more)

Oh and I just want to point out the obvious following comparison (would you say a more relevant painter, particularly today?):

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2011-07-31T12:39:00.004-06:00

found: Katrina Neumann

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2011-07-31T07:29:00.004-06:00

found: Alexis Harding

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2011-07-30T13:27:00.003-06:00

revisiting: Jörg Heiser interviewed by Art & Research:

A&R: "In the introduction to your new book, All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art you content that ‘… in contemporary art, the emphasis has shifted from biography and medium to method and situation.’ (Intro, p. 5) - a statement which echoes in part the position of overviews of contemporary art such as Claire Doherty’s Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004) – and that we must approach the analysis of contemporary art, therefore, not through simplifying questions of medium, but through exploring artists' methodologies (the method of slapstick, for example). Your foregrounding of artists’ methods would seem to speak to contemporary questions surrounding ‘artistic research’. To what extent, in your view, do debates on ‘artistic research’ count among the ‘things that matter’ in contemporary art?"

JH: "It’s a little tricky. Research as such is not an achievement, and artists impersonating scientists, ethnologists or sociologists have to be careful not to a) underestimate the discourse in these respective fields they are tapping into, and b) keep in mind what they do their research for. Like one could get carried away with self-referential questions of the specificities of a medium – ‘New Media Art’ that becomes techy-nerdy in an unproductive, or even oppressive way; or abstract painting that becomes merely tautological and plainly dull – it is equally problematic to be absorbed by the mere aura, or political gravitas, of the material one encounters in the course of one’s research. You can see the effect of that in press releases that highlight that an artist explored this social context or did research on that obscure 1950s phenomenon, without bothering to argue whether the artist then managed to do anything productive with that artistically. If an artist did great research, say, on a case of corruption, why don’t they – to put it very bluntly – do a good reportage rather than a crappy installation, i.e. chose the appropriate context and method to communicate? A productive methodology would be then to remember what really mattered, which I think (in generalising terms) is to remember what art can bring to that research; a sense of form, of perceptive qualities, and conceptual reflection – which would be precisely its political stake in this."

(read the full interview here)

2011-07-30T12:40:00.003-06:00

found: Sophie Risner, an artist, curator and writer living and working in London, England.

"I am less art critic and more art writer - I find the idea of critiquing art through writing difficult in a purely formalist fashion. I often lean towards the difficulty of language as a way into the inherent difficulty of art. Embracing all aspects which observe and inspire artist practice as a way to create a more fruitful and less didactic approach. My written style is not for the quick read and more about trying to make a written critique of art as hard as art itself. This hardness is about the beauty in difficulty and suggests that with a written observation of anything it is not the easy mentality which finds a fruitful conclusion, but moreover the questions and unresolved nature of art which makes for a more interesting platform for discussion."

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2011-07-26T23:34:00.000-06:00

found: Sterling Ruby

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2011-07-26T13:42:00.004-06:00

found: Kelly Cline, Sophia Starling, Arlene Shechet

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2011-07-19T09:02:00.007-06:00

found: Jared Clark

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2011-07-18T11:49:00.000-06:00

found: Suzanne McClelland

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2011-07-02T08:12:00.003-06:00

found: Sarah McNulty

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2011-06-23T09:45:00.005-06:00

found: Louise Despont

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2011-06-21T14:03:00.005-06:00

found: Amy Feldman

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2011-06-19T13:18:00.003-06:00

found: gorgeous antique textiles via The Design Center at Philadelphia University

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2011-06-11T12:38:00.007-06:00

found: Jessica E. Reaves, Peter Gray Hurley, Corin Hewitt

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2011-06-10T09:22:00.004-06:00

found: Davina Semo, Esther Kläs, Roger White

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2011-06-09T10:16:00.003-06:00

found: DAS INSTITUT (an import/export agency founded in 2007 by Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder)

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2011-06-08T06:59:00.006-06:00

found: David Jones, R.H. Quaytman, Yajuro Takashima

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2011-06-04T07:22:00.004-06:00

found: Rachel Harrison, Laddie John Dill, Gotou Hidekado

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2011-05-26T09:06:00.005-06:00

found: William J. O'Brien

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2011-05-23T17:06:00.005-06:00

found: Ron Nagle

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2011-05-20T17:36:00.003-06:00

found: Moira Dryer, Michael Douglas, and an unknown sleeper

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2011-05-14T19:49:00.004-06:00

found: Brent Stewart, 'E.T.', unidentified beauty

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2011-05-14T13:23:00.003-06:00

found: two by Charlene von Heyl, and Ellen Lesperance

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2011-04-29T08:33:00.004-06:00

found: Felix Labisse, 'Fledgling', Will Sweeney

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2011-04-25T07:55:00.004-06:00

found: Kinke Kooi, Tim Head, Clem Crosby

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2011-04-20T18:50:00.004-06:00

found: turning boredom and despair into hilarity through defaced album covers

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2011-04-17T09:39:00.003-06:00

found: Adrian Schiess, "Young Einstein", Louise Bourgeois

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reading in grey

2011-04-17T08:09:00.008-06:00

*
When I exit the studio building, the sad green colors of emerging grass surrounded by all those dead greys and browns looks more intense than any colors people often moon about during summer. If exclamations of the color of nature aren't put into some kind of human-scale life context, I'm absolutely bored (this may be because I'm an indoor type, unless there are woods and fire-pits involved, because it's all about the smells and sounds). I've been using my laptop in the kitchen where I can see more of those beautiful greys out the window. I love the greys for several reasons: they signal a weather which isn't out to oppress and drain all signs of life-force, and they signal a muddiness visited and warmed by subtle shifts of light, rather than blasted by an indifferent constancy of light and its alien rays; in order to keep a good working schedule, it's easier to regulate light through greys rather than the relentlessness of light regulating me. And it's all about keeping a good work schedule.

2011-04-12T08:46:00.003-06:00

found: Huma Bhabha, and two by Tillman Kaiser

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2011-04-04T06:58:00.004-06:00

found: Johnny Robert, Stefaan Vermuyten, David Altmejd

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2011-04-02T07:55:00.004-06:00

found: Abelardo Morell, pained lion, Clemens Kaletsch

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2011-03-21T14:41:00.004-06:00

found: Louise Despont, Vincent Hawkins, Niki de Saint Phalle

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Laura Mulvey at UWO, March 15

2011-03-13T06:48:00.003-06:00

2011-03-12T08:20:00.005-07:00

found: Barnaby Furnas, buried, and Vinicio Jimenezs

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2011-02-27T06:37:00.003-07:00

found: Jerry Saltz on George Condo

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"Condo is a zombie -- a very limited, ironic, art-about-art artist whose work sounds the same visually derivative, technically generic notes over and over again. He provides almost no internal or psychic depth, instead giving people a sense of being in on some art-world in-jokes about style, tradition, kitsch and appropriation."

"he is simply deft and dexterous, aping R. Crumb and Philip Guston without any of the gutsiness or exposed inner life of these artists. Mainly you get the same fiendish figures in various styles. Condo does have a feel for grotesque in human physiognomy. I often find myself at cocktail parties, fantasizing that the person I’m talking to is some sort of Condo monster. Yet because Condo’s monsters turn into a cast of characters, they are defanged. Any idea of the grotesque is replaced by burlesque and shtick."

"Condo’s is well-done work for a time still jittery about painting, weaned on idiotic ideas that it’s somehow suspect, that it can only be good if it makes jokes or comments about itself. This sort of deconstructionism has been done to death, and is so familiar and enfeebled that it can barely lift the gun to its own head. At his best, Condo is not much more than Koons-lite, a safe Schnabel, a more ingratiating Richard Prince."

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2011-02-20T07:02:00.003-07:00

found essay:

AN ART THAT EATS ITS OWN HEAD: Painting in the Age of the Image
by Barry Schwabsky, 2005

excerpts:

"Painters like Doig, Marlene Dumas or Luc Tuymans – to name three of the most influential artists at work today – make work that is entirely permeated by a photographic reality, that is, a reality composed of detachable appearances; yet in contrast to Richter or Morley, they feel no need to represent the ‘look’ of the photograph. The painting remains painterly. To say that contemporary painters treat reality as an aggregate of images, in Bergson’s phrase, is not to say that they paint it with neutrality, or with pure aesthetic distance, or without commitment. On the contrary, their engagement with the image is precisely that, a form of engagement, and inevitably conveys an emotional stance, whether it be the piss-taking disdain typical of Tuymans’ saturnine gloom, the airy bemusement that emanates from Sophie von Hellerman’s paintings, Ian Monroe’s sense of claustrophobia, or Cecily Brown’s frenetic urgency. The effects are often uncomfortable. Wangechi mutu’s images are images of the body, but always awkward and resistant, while Dexter Dalwood’s are spaces, plausible enough to draw one in but too disjointed to actually inhabit. Much of this work has a syncretic quality that could not have existed without the example of modernist collage, but by folding its disjunctive effect back into paint — an actual heterogeneity of materials is exceptional here..."

"This fascination with craft has the same source as the more widespread attraction to painterliness, among today’s younger painters, as opposed to the seamless surface of photorealism: not an overturning of hierarchies between high and low cultures, but a more fundamental concern with a physical involvement in the image. For although it was photography that taught us the modern idea of the image, it is painting that allows us to internalise it. It’s a question of touching and being touched. The photograph may have been touched by the light of its object, but the sense of contact is entirely subsumed in the seamlessness of the photograph’s surface. Painters like Dumas and Tuymans, and so many others who freely interpret photographic imagery, are attempting neither to disguise its photographic basis in order to retain an aesthetic effect, nor to reproduce the appearance of the photograph in order to neutralise it. Their strategy is not essentially different from that of colleagues who may not directly use photographs in the work process but who nevertheless treat the world they paint as wholly image. The surface of painting, then, is for current painting something that partakes neither of the homogeneity of the photographic emulsion nor the heterogeneity of collage. It is a place where both differences and similarities are consumed. In a way, Schutz’s painting Face Eater (2004), can be taken as a paradigmatic painting of the moment. With its evident allusions to Picasso and Bacon, it clearly signals its art-historical allegiances, but the painting wears its citations lightly – the paintings of the two modern masters, and notably those of Bacon which are themselves based on photographic vision, are simply part of Schutz’s image-world. It is hilarious and terrifying at once. A head tries to swallow itself and in the process it does not disappear, but the senses become confused: the mouth sees by consuming the organs of vision, the eyes feast on their own imminent consumption. Is this an emblem of the artist’s solipsism? Not necessarily. The painting declares itself to be – borrowing a resonant phrase from the literary theorist Stanley Fish – a self-consuming artefact, but does consumption really take place? Not really. Instead, we are shown a commotion of the senses that seems as pleasurably seductive as it may be neurotic. To look at it is practically to feel one’s own teeth start reaching up to bite the upper lip. It’s an image about interiorising as image even oneself. And in that image, touching reality."

(read more)

2011-02-19T09:26:00.002-07:00

found: more Varda Caivano

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2011-02-19T06:49:00.003-07:00

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FINALLY! Some critical writing on Kim Dorland's paintings, particularly their intense superficiality:

"The tendencies of the primitive, the naïve and the sentimental are all mixed up explicitly with the tropes of Tom Thompson in Kim Dorland's show Nocturne with its very overt references to the myths of Thompson and the primitive cult in Canadian modernism. Gone is the anti-social vision that underwrote it though. Instead, it is a deconstruction by glamour, kind of a David LaChappelle take on Thompson, that launches an attack in the name of a greater kind of superficiality. Thompson, Canadian art's sacred cow, used to have his own little ramshackle cabin in Toronto to duplicate his experience in the mythical North. It was his own little tourist portal, rather like Dr. Who's Tardis, that allowed him to stay in character all the time. In Dorland, rather than a cabin, you get a tree house as the portal to imaginary innocence."

"There's a remarkable thinness to Dorland's paintings; a kind of anorexia wherein the paint is vomited out onto the viewer. Their much lauded painterly density is both reference to and extension of this. It isn't flatness that is accented in the pictures, it's the illusion of depth, a depth which is constantly reinforced by superimposition. But what is all this depth? It's the distance between the wall and the world which it depicts. The processional march that happens between them. This distance is filled up with an attractive texture and a vibrating colour. This colour made all the more intense by being placed in the context of such opaquely layered paint."

(read more)

2011-02-16T06:24:00.003-07:00

A huge collection of online lectures by Jan Verwoert are available here! To start with, I recommend:

Jan Verwoert 1: Introduction

Jan Verwoert: Yes, No and Other Options, Part 1

Jan Verwoert: Yes, No And Other Options, Part 2

Jan Verwoert 7: Affect: in Effect. Being Touched by The Face

See my earlier post on Jan Verwoert's writing and ideas here.

2011-02-09T08:19:00.003-07:00

found: the mega-close-up viewing options rampant on http://www.googleartproject.com

2011-02-06T15:08:00.003-07:00

found: Gregor Warzecha, Johannes Jacob Scheuchzer, Tjorg Douglas Beer

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2011-02-06T06:56:00.004-07:00

found: Yanagawa Shigenobu, Zin Taylor, unknown

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2011-02-05T15:17:00.003-07:00

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Jill Bennett writes in Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art that "It is always easy for art and for audiences of art to take the moral line - to feel sympathy and compassion, to use art to confirm us in our humanitarian role", then warns us "that identifications are not always the result of moral choices. And more than this, that there is an ethical imperative to think beyond the moral role, because as Nietzsche puts it: "[People] confound themselves with their role; they become victims of their own 'good performance'; they themselves have forgotten how much accidents, moods, and caprice disposed of them when the question of their 'vocation' was decided - and how many other roles they might have been able to play; for now it is too late...the role has actually become character; and art, nature."

(More info on Jill Bennett)

2011-02-01T15:53:00.004-07:00

found: Jutta Koether, John Pestoni, Phoebe Unwin

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2011-01-31T15:30:00.002-07:00

found: Roger White via (standard) INTERVIEW

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"I do things over and over. I work out ideas in drawings and watercolors, and use these as starting points for paintings. I paint pretty quickly, over only a few sessions, but often I make two or three (or five or six) versions of the same thing before I’m happy with it. It’s also important for me to have different kinds of paintings going in the studio at the same time—this allows for some unexpected crossovers. Lately this has meant: more abstract things together with more representational things. The connection to perceptual painting, however tenuous, is very important to me, and I think of even the most non-objective paintings I make as essentially pictorial—rather than schematic or process-based or conceptual, or any of the other ways abstraction can be understood." (read more)

2011-01-30T07:04:00.003-07:00

found: Varda Caivano, Iris Haussler, Emma Talbot

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2011-01-26T07:20:00.003-07:00

found: Maira Kalman, Dwight Ripley, Lisa Sanditz

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2011-01-23T11:35:00.004-07:00

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From an interview with painter Beth Stuart at LVL3:

"LVL3: What is one of the bigger challenges you and/or other artists are struggling with these days, and how do you see it developing?

"Beth Stuart: I see - especially in the work I most admire - a tendency towards modesty, humility, soft humour and a kind of deliberate tentativeness. Consciously or unconsciously, I think this is in reaction to the more and more intense professionalization of the artist. As if in protest to the kind of aggressive, big, hard, shiny presence needed to breach the system, the best work is embodying none of these traits. People are exhausted with the constant noise, and perhaps finding respite in more quiet, mysterious actions." (read more)

2011-01-23T10:58:00.003-07:00

Artist Mira Schor on the "constant negotiation between world and self, the art itself and the making of it":

"I’m committed to the artist as a historically produced thus educated to history, culturally contextualized person who should have as much control of theory as possible so it won’t have control of her–but at the same time I love the development of working–call it studio practice even when it isn’t what that used to mean or what I do–and I know that creative work needs to occasionally be unmoored from overdetermination."

"In this city/graduate school environment, the upside of constant interaction/confrontation with people, work, and ideas that you have to understand, absorb, react to, sometimes defend yourself against, yet often allow to transform you, is that complacency is hard to come by. The downside is that there may not be time to process everything and all the outside voices can drown out the interior ones or, even, according to certain theoretical outlooks, deny that an inner voice exists inasmuch as it might be associated with autonomous art practices which have been deemed obsolete. And you are constantly having to put yourself forward, which for the MFA student means constantly talking about what your work means leaving little time for either doing it or for doing work whose meaning you might not have a ready explanation for, work that is transitional, even work that is a “failure.” You become all outside speech and less inside voice until you are running on empty."

"Thinking of this split between information and critical discourse on the one hand, and studio/post-studio/post-post-studio practice on the other in relation to the usefulness of graduate school, one could truthfully state that the knowledge one is exposed to in school is available in the world at all times, especially in urban centers: museums, galleries, books, art magazines, internet sources, panel discussions, artists’ lectures all abound, though graduate school intensifies, categorizes, and filters that knowledge through the interpretive structuring lens of the school’s ideology and its faculty’s strongly held viewpoints while insisting on disciplined and timely engagement and response on the part of the student. But critical responses to your artwork by individual artists and critics is much harder to come by outside the academic structure, people are just too busy and will certainly not be able to give sustained attention, so if you don’t do the work when you’re in school, you lose out on the unique opportunity to get concentrated and sustained feedback, when you want it and even when you don’t."

(source)

2011-01-20T07:31:00.003-07:00

found: Alice Channer, unknown, Neo Rauch

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2011-01-12T07:37:00.004-07:00

Excerpts from Judith Butler's ‘Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France':

“the immediacy of desire proves to be always already mediated, and we are always much more intelligent in the moment of desire than we immediately know ourselves to be. In the ostensibly pre-rational experience of desiring some feature of the world, we are always already interpreting that world, making philosophical motions, expressing ourselves as philosophical beings.” (2)

“actualization only occurs to the extent that the subject confronts what is different from itself, and therein discovers a more enhanced version of itself. The negative thus becomes essential to self-actualization, and the human subject must suffer its own loss of identity again and again in order to realize its fullest sense of self. But once again, can this full self be found?” (13)

“Hegel’s sentences enact the meanings that they convey; indeed, they show that what “is” only is to the extent that it is enacted.” (18)

“the text must be read to have its meaning enacted.” (19)

“to implicate the reader indirectly and systematically.” (20)

“we recognize ourselves as the subjects we have been waiting for inasmuch as we gradually constitute the perspective by which we recognize our history, our mode of becoming, through the Phenomenology itself.” (20)

“We might read this subject as a trope for the hyperbolic impulse itself, that frantic and overdetermined pursuit of the Absolute which creates that place when it cannot be found, which projects it endlessly and is constantly “foiled” by its own projection. As a being of metaphysical desires, the human subject is prone to fiction, to tell himself the lies that he needs to live.” (23)

“As readers of his text, accepting time and again the terms of his journey, we indulge in the same exorbitant desires; we become makers of fiction but only to dream more shrewdly the next time.” (24)

“When we ask, what is desire “after,” we can give a partial answer: the illumination of its own opacity, the expression of that aspect of the world that brought it into being. This is part of what is meant by the reflexivity that desire is said to embody and enact.” (24)

“Desire is intentional in that it is always desire of or for a given object or Other, but it is also reflexive in the sense that desire is a modality in which the subject is both discovered and enhanced. The conditions that give rise to desire, the metaphysics of internal relations, are at the same time what desire seeks to articulate, render explicit, so that desire is a tacit pursuit of metaphysical knowledge, the human way that such knowledge “speaks.” “ (25)

“conceptual thinking must replace Understanding, for only the former can think the movement between opposites. The Understanding consistently mistakes stasis for truth, and can only understand movement as a series of discrete moments, not as the vital unity of moments that imply each other endlessly and do not appear simultaneously. The Understanding cannot grasp movement itself; it is always prone to fix its object in a present tense which purports to present exhaustively the full reality of the object at hand.” (27)

“Self-consciousness thus emerges as a kind of knowing that is at once a mode of becoming; it is suffered, dramatized, enacted. Consciousness gives rise to self-consciousness in the bungled attempt to explain what it knows” (28)

“The Understanding lacks reflexivity, and so cannot understand how consciousness’ own difference from that which it scrutinizes is itself part of the phenomenon under investigation.” (28)

“And yet this failed explanation reveals an unexpected clue to the proper formulation of the phenomenon. As an “Explanation,” the Understanding comes to be determinately manifest in material form; there is consciousness itself sprawled on the page, formed in letters and words, existing, materially, outside itself. In recognizing the authorship of that explanation, consciousness becomes aware of itself for the first time. No longer enthralled intentionally with a world that ostensibly monopolized reality, consciousness discovers its own reflexivity; it has become other to itself, and knows itself as such” (28)

“Consciousness thus relinquishes itself as consciousness in the process of explaining what it knows. By the time the Explanation is over, neither consciousness nor the object it seeks to explain are the same." (29)

”the only true satisfaction for desire is to be found in an object that mirrors the reflexive structure of desire itself.” (40)

“But what is it that the other recognizes us as? The answer is, as a desiring being” (58)

2011-01-12T06:50:00.006-07:00

found: Ellen Gallagher, Marguerite Burnat-Provins, Eva Räder

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2011-01-07T18:32:00.002-07:00

found: Beth Stuart

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2011-01-03T13:05:00.005-07:00

Excerpts from Jacques Rancière's ‘Future of the Image’ (2003):

‘The Future of the Image’

“the novelistic tradition begun by Flaubert: an ambivalence in which the same procedures create and retract meaning, ensure and undo the link between perceptions, actions and affects…the operation of the power which separates cinema from the plastic arts and makes it approximate to literature: the power of anticipating an effect the better to displace or contradict it.” (5)

“There is visibility that does not amount to an image; there are images which consist wholly in words. But the commonest regime of the image is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible, a relationship which plays on both the analogy and the dissemblance between them. This relationship by no means requires the two terms to be materially present. The visible can be arranged in meaningful tropes; words deploy a visibility that can be blinding.” (7)

“the micro-movements of a matter that is ‘rhythm, speech and life’ “ (44)

'Painting in the Text'

“The essence of painting – simply casting coloured matter on a flat surface – is to suspend the appropriation of means to an end that is the essence of technique.” (72)

“A medium is not a ‘proper’ means or material. It is a surface of conversion: a surface of equivalence between the different arts’ ways of making; a conceptual space of articulation between these ways of making and forms of visibility and intelligibility determining the way in which they can be viewed and conceived.” (75)

“What Deleuze calls the logic of sensation is much more a theatre of de-figuration, where figures are wrenched from the space of representation and reconfigured in a different space.” (77)

“The ideal plane of the painting is a theatre of de-figuration, a space of conversion where the relationship between words and visual forms anticipates visual de-figurations still to come.” (88)

“anti-theatre itself comes directly from the theatre – very precisely from the naturalist theory of the ‘fourth wall’ invented by a contempoarary of Gaugin and Aurere: the theory of a dramatic action that would pretend to be invisible, to be viewed by no audience, to be nothing but life in its pure similiarity to itself…The ‘formalist’ dream of a kind of painting that turns its back on the spectator in order to close in on itself, in order to adhere to the surface that is peculiar to it, could well be nothing but the other side of the same identitarian dream…But theatre is not primarily ‘spectacle’, is not the ‘interactive’ site calling upon the audience to finish the work denounced by Fried. Theatre is first and foremost the space of visibility of speech, the space of problematic translations of what is said into what is seen…forms do not proceed without the words that install them in visibility. The ‘theatrical’ arrangement of Gaugin’s peasant women establishes the ‘flatness’ of the painting only at the cost of making this surface an interface that transfers the images into the text and the text into the images. The surface is not wordless, is not without ‘interpretations’ that pictorialize it…the present of art is always in the past and in the future. Its presence is always in two places at once. [Hegel] tells us in sum that art is alive as long as it is outside itself, as long as it does something different from itself, as long as it moves on a stage of visibility which is always a stage of de-figuration. What he discourages in advance is not art, but the dream of its purity.” (88-89)

‘Are Some Things Unrepresentable?’

“It says that a thing cannot be represented by artistic means on account of the very nature of those means, of three characteristic properties of artistic presentation. Firstly, the latter is characterized by its surplus of presence, which betrays the singularity of the event or situation, recalcitrant as it is to any plenary material representation. Secondly, this surplus of material presence has as its correlate a status of unreality, which removes from the thing represented its weight of existence. Finally, this interplay of surplus and subtraction operates according to a specific mode of address that delivers the thing represented over to affects of pleasure, play or distance which are incompatible with the gravity of the experience it contains.” (110); “not only through its own particular surplus, but because the peculiarity of the there was in general is to exceed thought. Thus, in Lyotard in particular, the existence of events that exceed what can be thought calls for an art that witnesses to the unthinkable in general, to the essential discrepancy between what affects us and such of it as our thinking can master. It is then the peculiarity of a new mode or art – sublime art – to record the trace of the unthinkable.” (111)

On a kind of straight-forward description of activities, tasks, and observations leading up to and after a traumatic event: “The ‘interrupted spectacle’ revokes the privilege of the theatrical space of visibility, the separate space where representation offered itself up to vision as a specific activity…What is revoked, at the same time as the poem’s specific space of visibility, is the representative separation between the rationale of facts and the rationale of fictions. The identity of the wanted and the unwanted can be located anywhere. It rejects the separation between a specific world of facts pertaining to art and a world of ordinary facts.” (122); “The language that conveys this experience is in no way specific to it.” (126); “the absolute passivity of physical matter. This extreme experience of the inhuman confronts no impossibility of representation; nor is there a language peculiar to it. There is no appropriate language for witnessing…this principled identity of the appropriate and the inappropriate is the very stamp of the aesthetic regime in art.” (126); “If what has occurred, and of which nothing remains, can be represented, it is through an action, a newly created fiction which begins in the here and now. It is through a confrontation between the words uttered here and now about what was and the reality that is materially present and absent in this place.” (127)

2011-01-03T06:50:00.003-07:00

found: Rebecca Morris

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2011-01-02T15:36:00.002-07:00

found: Eunice Adorno

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2010-12-31T15:51:00.003-07:00

found: "higher! higher!", Huma Bhabha, Sofia Ajram

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My List of Top Findings from 2010

2010-12-26T10:16:00.021-07:00

*
1. Joanne McNeil's blog Tomorrow Museum

2. Jon Pylypchuk

3. Edward Wiiralt

4. Seeing Luc Tuymans, Paul Thek, and Arshile Gorky in New York

5. Jan Verwoert

6. Slavoj Zizek on love, charitable giving, and film

7. David Sedaris as an antidote to forced moral and social responsibility

8. Chatty Cathy

9. 'Janitor' by The Suburban Lawns

10. The TV series 'Deadwood', which I discovered only a couple months ago. During final crits I was most encouraged when I started hearing Al Swearengen in my head telling me I was doing a "f##king great c##ks##king job!"

11. Mary Gaitskill at Ryeberg Curated Video

12. 'The Five Obstructions' (2003)

13. aphasia and the first rap

14. Patti Smith in 'Dream of Life'

15. Fellini's 'Casanova' (1976)

16. A. S. Hamrah's film reviews from n+1 magazine

17. '35 Shots of Rum' by Claire Denis (2008)

18. Urs Fischer

19. Bill Murray

20. Hans Josephsohn

21. stolen Mona Lisa blank spot

22. Phillida Barlow

23. Asger Carlsen

24. Daniel Shea

25. depravity and humanity from superbomba

2010-12-25T12:04:00.004-07:00

found: Avner Ben-Gal

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2010-12-24T08:26:00.004-07:00

found: Kyoko Hamada, 'Dracula' (1931), Stefan Kübler

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recent readings

2010-12-19T17:29:00.006-07:00

*
Animation and Animorphs – Norman M. Klein

On 'Street of Crocodiles' by the Brothers Quay: “Puppets are another species of ‘character’ than dolls. The puppet’s face is weathered, historicized: thoughtful, greedy, scheming. The doll, on the other hand, is merely a remnant of a childhood desire; it is a carrier, much blanker in expression, and clumsier in its expressive movement.” (34); “in the Quays’ film, these spaces seem to refuse narrative revelation. Their sum is a stop motion ‘parenthesis.’ It acts as if ‘contaminated’ by a lost narrative. Movement proceeds very slowly and precipitously, the way water leaves a leaky jug – but always in mid-morph: again, the anatomical scenes using cut organs from the butcher; scenes where heads are transferred from one body to another, from doll to puppet.” (35)

Meta-Morphing “At the Still Point of the Turning World” and Meta-Stasis, by Vivian Sobchack

“My own body quickens to its effortless transformations at some deep molecular level, and I recognize the morph as strangely familiar; that is, I feel ‘myself’ in constant flux and become aware that I am never self-identical (and possibly not even self-contained).” (132)

‘The Sight of Death’ by T.J. Clark

“Don’t we go back to it because we sense that in it is re-enacted a death or terror we would all like to experience again in this harmless, ordered, palliative mode?” (8)

“Many of us, maybe all of us, look at some images repeatedly, but it seems we do not write that repetition, or think it, once written, worth reading by others. Maybe we deeply want to believe that images happen, essentially or sufficiently, all at once.” (8)

“of moving in vision toward a place we don’t physically occupy – reinstates the distance, the interval between us and what we are seeing, which is the eye’s most consoling fiction. The eye assures us, against the evidence of the other senses too much of the time, that there is such a thing as space. It sets us back from our material existence, and offers us the world whole – empty, transparent, open to understanding.” (238)

‘An Ethics of Spectatorship: Love, Death and Cinema’ by Patricia MacCormack

“The screen forms a mucosal connective tissue with our bodies, and ‘we can no longer allow others to turn our mucous membranes, our skin, all our sensitive areas into occupied territories’ (Guattari, 1996: 31).” (130)

“ ‘The always already is only a cemetery where entropy rots matter away’ (Serres, 2007: 122) (132)

“Perception is limited to larger or smaller molar objects not affective intensities with which we enter into becomings.” (133)

“Spectatorship is not a structure but an event with certain functional properties which are more and less affective of extra-cinematic events.” (133)

“so thinking cinema as real is vital in reconfiguring subjectivity and modes of sensation-perception in our apprehension of the world from belief and judgment to creativity, imagination and ultimately love.” (134)

“The affective qualities consist of the possible-perceived, what the images might create and have created with us.” (134)

“Saturations of hue, sonorities, elements of art unmoored from their capacity to inform the spectator of the form and function of an image are aspects of cinema with which we enter into asemiotic participations.” (138)

“Cinema is not unreal escape, it allows us to explode into the world through unnatural perception of the human via a natural contract of dissipative and asignified-asubjectified relations.” (139)

“To love an image is to allow both vocalities of image and spectator to exist simultaneously, creating speech which is chaotic but not irredeemably so.” (141)