Words and Concept

Art used to be (and in some cases still is) all about the image. Francis Bacon's work was all about the sensation. He said that he wanted the images he painted to create a feeling before they created a story. In this way the person is forced to spend time engaging with the art and figuring out for himself the story within only after he has emotionally reacted to it. Not at any point did words play part in explaining it - one has adjectives to describe the work, but not explain it.
It seems these days that art is no longer a language in itself, devoid of words. Conceptual art has inevitably formed a relationship with spoken and written language required and used by the artist in order to ensure his work is understood, so the verbal explanation and the visual piece come together as a single, complete package.
Why? Because the artist has become a lazy creature. What happened to years of training oneself to speak with images? What happened to a lifetime's dedication and devotion to the better understanding of the language of the picture? Cézanne, Van Gogh, Paula Rego, Lucien Freud, Rodin etc. etc. didn't waste their time talking endlessly about what they were trying to achieve without actually attempting to achieve it.

I remember when I was still in school an artist was commissioned to make a sculpture/installation to put in the main hall. It was an awkward piece: wooden boards jutting out at weird angles with paintings of miniature people and scenes all over it. The artist came in to talk about it, and he spoke for the better part of an hour about how it was autobiographical, and then went on to explain all the little stories he'd depicted. It was really tedious, a complete waste of our time. But it turned out he'd been doing this all over the country, his work and his live talks about them were part of the same package. My history of art teacher mumbled something about what a scam it was and left half way through. Touché.

Somewhere along the way verbal explanations have come to be required, and no longer by the art critic, but by the artist himself. Surely if the work requires this, it's not achieved its goal? It's like an architect standing outside his building explaining all the interior spacial arrangements to people before they're allowed inside.

Artist vs. The Maker

Artist vs Maker, Part 2

January 9, 2008 in Aesthetics, Art Making, Art/Life, Current viewing, Museums, Seeing, The "Art World", What Art Can Do | 1 comment

In one way or another, contemporary artists have been handing off the actual making-of part for years. Who would expect Richard Serra to hand-install one of his thousand-ton steel sculptures, or for Christo and Jeanne-Claude to be out in Central Park hanging the 23 miles of nylon panels that made up “The Gates”?

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gates in Central Park

But when viewing more intimate works, especially sculpture and painting, part of the appeal has always been standing in the presence of the unique hand of the artist. Vincent van Gogh spent years developing the swirling technique that would define his dramatic wheatfield oil works in Saint-Rémy. Jackson Pollock took pride in his “action painting,” sometimes poking holes in paint cans to create a delicious stream, sometimes picking up a turkey baster to put on the finishing touches.

The intensely personal feel in a van Gogh, Pollock, or Picasso may be part of why works of the artists can fetch millions on the auction market, and reliably draw millions of visitors to museums to see the paintings in person.

Though that understanding of art may still drive individual viewers, it’s not so current in the art world. As far back as 1917, Marcel Duchamp signed “R. Mutt” to “Fountain,” a urinal meant to signal his move away from painting into Dada-inspired provocations. In the 1960s, the movement called “conceptualism” came into its own: An artwork could be a barricade of oil barrels blocking a Parisian street, or pages of a book chewed up, dissolved in acid, and then “poured” into bottles to be sent back to a library. What did it matter who did the chewing? Suddenly, the idea was more important than the creation of it.

Duchamp, Fountain

John Baldessari, a pioneer of conceptual art, trained as a painter and earned a degree in art, but in 1968 held a cremation in which he burned all his paintings as a way of holding himself to his new plan: to stop using technique and commit to the maxim that the idea is everything. These days, he has a handful of assistants to help create his collages, videos, and other conceptual works. In addition, some pieces - prints more than 60 inches wide, all framing - are “jobbed out” completely and done elsewhere.
“It’s delegation,” says Baldessari, 76. “An architect is a classic example. He doesn’t have to build a house. A composer doesn’t always have to conduct his work so why should an artist?”

Some artists have built entire careers on this concept. Sol LeWitt, though trained as a conventional artist, began to recruit teams of installers to create “his” pencil drawings, obsessively detailed works done on gallery walls, and then removed. The team approach became part of what viewers appreciated in a LeWitt work - and makes possible the curious exhibit being mounted later this year at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. LeWitt died at age 78 last year, but the show goes on: close to 40 trained installers will spend six months creating nearly a half-mile of his penciled and painted wall drawings. It will be the largest-ever LeWitt show featuring these works - and will be created entirely posthumously.

LeWitt, wall installation

“I think he was very interested in the notion that the idea itself could carry great power,” explains Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, which is collaborating with Mass MoCA on the $9 million project. “If he showed the idea to others, people would enthusiastically enjoy participating in that experience.”

But artists such as LeWitt and Baldessari make the gap between “artist” and “maker” part of the fun of the work. That’s not the case with Donovan, Sherman, or Finch. Creating “Untitled (Pins)” is not some kind of social gathering. It is business carried out by an installer who pours the pins into a mold, and then removes that mold to leave the cube.

For Donovan, having another person create her pin sculpture is not a statement. It’s practical.

“If I installed everything, I would never be in my studio,” says Donovan in a recent phone interview. “I’d be following everything around all the time.”

Donovan created the first cubes by her own hands a decade ago while experimenting in her studio. But now, whether you’re a collector buying one through one of her galleries or a museum - the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego has a pin cube - you’re expected to assemble it on your own. Donovan does send instructions.

She believes that her work is done before a sculpture is seen by the public.

“I’m the one in the studio making these discoveries,” says Donovan, who will be the subject of a one-person show at the ICA next year. “But because of the nature of my work, I can pass off some of the labor to others. I’m more interested in developing the phenomenological aspects of the material. Once that’s done, my part is done.”

There is disagreement about this premise.

Maine-based John Bisbee makes sculptures using nails and spikes. He knows Donovan’s work, and long admired her - until he had heard she stopped making her own art.

Bisbee, whose 20-year retrospective opens in January at the Portland Museum of Art, says he knows that curators and gallery owners don’t mind when artists delegate.

“It’s more production, more shows, more money,” he says. “I’ve got to be honest. I fantasize about it. I’ve got more ideas than my hand can do. But for me, art is about what one person can do, from conception to completion.”

On a recent Sunday morning at the ICA, a woman circled Donovan’s cube of pins. Charlotte Sullivan, a 23-year-old artist in Athol, crouched at one point to examine it more closely.

“I wonder about how it came to be here,” Sullivan said when asked what she was thinking. “I think a lot about the process. Is it solid pins all the way through? Is it important for her to make it herself or did it come with instructions?”
Told the answer, Sullivan admitted she was disappointed.

“I’m not really sure it’s a successful piece of work,” she said. “I would feel closer to feeling it was if I knew she had built it. I would know her hand and time were connected to this because I don’t think you know unless you do it.”

In a sense, this approach to art simply takes us back to Rubens’s time, when a workshop of assistants and apprentices did much of the painting for distinguished artists, with the master guiding the work at the top level. Only now, the “assistants” are museum workers and gallery workers.

Then, as now, art was not just a calling but also a business. If anything has changed, it’s that today you don’t need to be a Rubens or LeWitt to offload the work. You can be Tara Donovan, just 38 and on the cusp, but certainly not a household name.
But this also means that Donovan, an artist praised by serious art-world types, has something in common with Thomas Kinkade, the QVC-selling “painter of light” who has never been taken seriously by art collectors, but has built huge success on an empire of “official” reproductions.

Donovan says she’s sold about three dozen cubes of different sizes and materials. (”Toothpicks” sold for $45,600 last year.) She notes that it doesn’t matter who you are, a museum or a collector: The piece comes with a set of instructions.

So what, she was asked, would stand in the way of somebody who wanted to save money by creating a pin cube without paying the artist?

“They could, but they won’t own a Tara Donovan,” she says. “Unless you own a certificate along with that work, you don’t own my work.”

Geoff Edgers
The Boston Globe

Art Critic Crisis (article from the guardian)

Art Critic Crisis

Damien Hirst’s diamond skull

You can whack them with a shovel. You can shoot them, poison, stab or throttle them. You can threaten their families and you can hound them in the press; you can put them down any way you like, but some artists refuse to stay down. What does this tell us? That artists are the undead? Or, worse, that criticism is in crisis?

At almost every international art fair over the past few years, there has been a panel discussion about the crisis in art criticism. I have found myself talking about the topic in London, Madrid, Berlin and Miami. Wherever critics are paid to gather (you wouldn’t catch us in the same room otherwise), they go on about the crisis. These debates have become an occupational hazard - but they also pay well. If I had known there was money in it, I would have invented a crisis myself.

At Art Basel in Miami Beach last December, just as we were about to go out and perform on the imminent death of criticism and to answer such questions as “What is art criticism today and why is it relevant?” and “Is money the new art criticism?”, the Las Vegas-based critic Dave Hickey said he felt like Donald Duck at the Last Supper. Being Donald Duck is at least livelier than being a dinosaur, drowning in a dismal swamp. There is indeed something faintly ludicrous in sitting around at an art fair talking about criticism. Never has the art market been stronger. Never has money been so powerful. Never have so many artists got so rich, and never has there been such alarming stuff on sale. Never have critics felt so out of the loop.

People blame all the money sluicing round the art world. They blame the internet and the rise of the blogger. They blame the dumbing-down of newspapers and the replacement of criticism with the sparkling, if vapid, preview featurette, and the artist-as-celebrity photo opportunity profile. Who cares about the art or the concepts?…

Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York Magazine, has complained: “At no time in the last 50 years has what an art critic writes had less effect on the market than now.” Whatever he writes, Saltz believes, has no effect. Might as well shrug and walk away. I just wonder why a critic even cares that their writing has such a negligible influence on the market. Although there has been a certain pleasure, on one or two occasions, in making Charles Saatchi stupendously angry, I couldn’t care less if collectors pay any attention to me or not.

Some critics think that the fact that there’s so much bad art around means that it is a great time to be writing about art, which is like saying that because of the plague, what a great time the 14th century was to be an undertaker. Critics aren’t doctors. We can’t fix things. We are not here to tell artists what to do. They wouldn’t listen anyway. Maybe the word criticism has become part of the problem. Or the problem is that we are asking the wrong thing of the critic: critics are not the painting police nor the sculpture Swat team, not market regulators nor upholders of eternal values (there aren’t any). Those who think they have a role to play in this regard are as jumped up as they are unreadable. Criticism might blow the whistle on overhyped art, flabby curating, moribund institutions or the odd fly-blown administrator, but that is because you cannot divorce art from its context.

Being iconoclastic, slagging off artists and institutions, gets a critic noticed. Anger, undeniably, is also a good motive for writing in the first place. Controversy, the smell of blood, the whiff of scandal - this makes careers. It also sells newspapers and magazines. Of course it is the duty of the critic to be iconoclastic, and to be reckless; but critical terrorism is no good as a long-term strategy. It becomes predictable, and the adrenaline buzz soon wears off. It is also disingenuous, and ultimately a false position. There is such a thing as bad faith, and lousy opinions.

Getting things wholly wrong is also a critical prerogative. But, again, it is no good just turning up with a lot of fixed opinions and then complaining that the art doesn’t measure up to your impossible requirements and unassailable prejudices. Some critics make you wish you didn’t like art at all.

The Guardiann

Good Article on Art Education

Undergraduate Choices

April 25, 2008 in Aesthetics, Art Education, Art Making, Criticism, Pluralism, Uncategorized | No comments

One more take on the now over-discussed topic of Aliza Shvarts’s senior project at Yale…

It is often said that great achievement requires in one’s formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others. And such seems to be the case with Ms. Shvarts.

In “My Life Among the Deathworks,” the sociologist Philip Rieff coined the term “deathworks” to describe works of art that celebrated creative destruction, and which posed “an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture.” He argued that the principal artistic achievements of the 20th century were such deathworks, which, however lovely or brilliant, served primarily to negate or transgress the existing culture, rather than to affirm or celebrate it. He did not live to see Ms. Shvarts’s piece, but one suspects that he would have had much to say.

Mr. Rieff was especially interested in those who treated their bodies as an instrument of art, especially those who used them in masochistic or repugnant ways. By now, it is hardly an innovation to do so. Nearly two generations have passed since Chris Burden had a bullet fired into his body. It is even longer since the Italian artist Piero Manzoni sold tin cans charmingly labeled Merde d’artista, which contained exactly that. Even Ms. Shvarts’s central proposition — that the discomfort we feel at the word miscarriage is itself a species of linguistic oppression — is a relic of the highly politicized literary theory of the late 1980s. As she wrote in an op-ed published in last Friday’s Yale Daily News:

“The reality of miscarriage is very much a linguistic and political reality, an act of reading constructed by an act of naming — an authorial act. It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it.”

In other words, one must act to shatter the rigid lattice of categories that words impose upon us. Although the accompanying jargon is fashionable (or was a few years ago), it is essentially a portentous recycling of the idea behind Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 urinal, which became a “Fountain” when he declared it so.

Immaturity, self-importance and a certain confused earnestness will always loom large in student art work. But they will usually grow out of it. What of the schools that teach them? Undergraduate programs in art aspire to the status of professional programs that award MFA degrees, and there is often a sense that they too should encourage the making of sophisticated and challenging art, and as soon as possible. Yale, like most good programs, requires its students to achieve a certain facility in drawing, although nowhere near what it demanded in the 1930s, when aspiring artists spent roughly six hours a day in the studio painting and life drawing, and an additional three on Saturday.

Given the choice of this arduous training or the chance to proceed immediately to the making of art free of all traditional constraints, one can understand why all but a few students would take the latter. But it is not a choice that an undergraduate should be given. In this respect — and perhaps only in this respect — Ms. Shvarts is the victim in this story.

Michael Lewis
Wall Street Journal

Talent doesn't matter?

About a year ago I had an interview at Central St. Martins for their Fine Art BA programme, the unsuccessful nature of which I'm not so sure was such a lamentable thing.
After portfolio examinations they put up a list of those they wanted to interview, and lo and behold my name was on it. So when I was looking through my work with them, one of the men asked me if I'd been taught how to paint. I said no, I taught myself, and the man, rather bewildered, said, 'It's not every day you come across someone with natural talent.'
Let me remind you, I didn't get in. So what kind of people are they accepting on their courses? People without talent obviously. What does that say about the art world? Talent is no longer an important factor? Well why on earth be an artist if you can't paint or sculpt or draw, even? The answer goes back to my previous blog post, only the IDEA is what matters, it doesn't matter how shabbily you demonstrate it. What nonsense.

The problematic relationship of art and concept

One of the commonest questions these days which ceaselessly pricks at the arms of all involved in the art world is 'What is art?'. It's just one of those irritating unanswerable questions that appears to be designed as a catalyst for conflict.
Well, I decided the easiest way to figure it out was to look it up in the trusty dictionary.
–noun

1.	the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.

2.	the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria; works of art collectively, as paintings, sculptures, or drawings: a museum of art; an art collection.

or

n.

1. Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.
2. 1. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.
   2. The study of these activities.
   3. The product of these activities; human works of beauty considered as a group.
   4. A system of principles and methods employed in the performance of a set of activities: the art of building.

Or

noun
1.	the products of human creativity; works of art collectively; "an art exhibition"; "a fine collection of art"
2.	the creation of beautiful or significant things; "art does not need to be innovative to be good"*"I was never any good at art"; "he said that architecture is the art of wasting space beautifully"

What's interesting about these definitions is that they mention beauty or aesthetics as a main factor. Well we all know that's not necessarily true any more. Art can be as aesthetically unappealing as the artist pleases, Duchamp's urinal says it all.

Here's the meaning of conceptual art according to the British Council:

´Conceptual Art is an art of ideas, in which the artist's concept or idea constitutes the work (it is also often called 'Idea Art', 'Dematerialized Art' or 'Information Art'). Emerging in the late 1960s at a time of political protest Conceptual Art marked a major turning point in the history of art. Artists challenged the established conventions, authority and commercialisation of the art institutions and the emphasis on the precious commodity of the unique art object. The roots of Conceptual Art are in the Dada movement, and specifically the artist Marcel Duchamp, whose work and ideas first challenged the established definitions of art.

The term came to describe a wide range of artists and to be associated with a number of concurrent art trends and movements, including Land Art, Body Art, Performance Art, Video Art, Sound Art, and Installation Art, in all of which the concept takes precedent over the object, documentation of an event or action. Conceptual Art might consist of a statement, a set of instructions documenting how to make a work, or a photographic record or video of an event.

Conceptual Art soon became an international movement, associated with artists including: Keith Arnatt, Art & Language, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Michael Craig-Martin, Gilbert & George, Hans Haacke, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Bruce McLean, On Kawara, Robert Smithson and Lawrence Weiner. By questioning and challenging traditional practices, media and cultural conventions Conceptual artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s influenced and inspired subsequent artists. Many artists from the 1980s onwards have employed and adapted the techniques and strategies of their predecessors to explore still further possibilities.'

So, my question (in fact I have an endless list of questions) is: is art a medium for concepts? or is the concept a medium for art? By this I mean why is an idea called art?
I recently went to a lecture given by a lady called Angelica Bertolucci whose profession is selling ideas to artists. She was adamant that she isn't an 'artist', merely a 'person with ideas'. Interesting, I thought. Does that mean she herself doesn't think ideas do not an artist make? Well, I'd have to agree with her. I think she probably has more self respect that the majority of 'conceptual' artists out there in recognizing that as she has no technical ability in the way of sculpting, painting etc. she therefore cannot be classed as an artist. Thereby, she manages to make a mockery of people who do call themselves artists, especially seeing as some of them actually buy her ideas!


At the time I was outraged, but not at those who take the credit for the fruits of her labour. I was mad as hell at the woman herself. I thought how dare she make a mockery of the integrity of the artist? But then I realized that I actually never thought that many artists these days had much integrity in the first place.

note* I have just found out (a week after I wrote this post) that the Angelica Bertolucci lecture was A FRAUD. Turns out she was an actress, and that the tutors just wanted us to think about it. So doesn't that just completely undermine my argument?? However, I guess it's still a realistic possibility that 'Angelica Bertolucci-s' exist, just, obviously, with different names.
It is, I suppose, just Artists (my tutors) once more making a mockery of others.