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Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorline at Battat Contemporary, January 2012
Vong Co Blossoms, 2012, oil on canvas, 147 x 122cm
Learn more about about Vong Cổ
Vọng cổ (literally “longing for the past”) is a Vietnamese song and musical structure used primarily in the cải lương theater music and nhạc tài tử chamber music of southern Vietnam. It was composed sometime between 1917 and 1919 by a Mr. Cao Văn Lầu (also called Sáu Lầu or Sáu Làu), of Bạc Liêu, a province in southern Vietnam (Trainor 1975). The song achieved great popularity and eventually its structure became the basis for numerous other songs. The tune is essentially melancholy in character and is sung using Vietnamese modal inflections.
Mammutus, 2012, oil on canvas, 147 x 122cm
Onward, to the painting identified by the word-title Mammutus, which refers to an effect, an appearance, the result of nature at work. It is not a picture but an event, or the residue of a blistering, bubbling event. The artwork is unleashed from externalities, from the burdensome context of art discourse, more comfortable here with extra-disciplinary, global parallels in observation, nature, science.
Obeli, 2012, oil on canvas, 147 x 122cm
Finally then (for now), Obeli, the plural of obelus: not text, not symbol but cipher. A typographical mark used to point to, as if to cut away, a dubious passage or not matching transcriptions.
††
There is the cutting away, the taped masks and the inky prehistoric shards of cutting tools, a script made up exclusively of edits.
“A dagger, or obelisk (†, †, U+2020) is a typographical symbol or glyph. The term “obelisk” derives from Greek ὀβελίσκος (obeliskos), which means “little obelus”; from Ancient Greek: ὀβελός (obelos) meaning “roasting spit”.[1] It was originally represented by the ÷ symbol and was first used by the Ancient Greek scholars as critical marks in manuscripts.”
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_%28typography%29
There is nothing easy in this exhibition. Hence it’s title Nervous Trellis. The artist has created a fragile framework to which we may extend, however tentatively, tendrils of understanding.
Art vs. Illustration
THIS
Jason Jagel, Future Imperative, 2011, www.jasonjagel.com.
OR
Richard Prince (a work that’s ripped photos by Patrick Cariou, leading, sadly, to a misunderstanding of the nature of Prince’s art practice, and a copyright infringement conviction, http://www.richardprince.com/.OR
Chris Johanson.OR
Cum Collective
OR
Barry Mcgee
All the above are favs of Greg Gossel
Juxtapoz vs. Artforum
…[Juxtapoz] boasts the highest circulation of any U.S. art magazine, beating out more established counterparts like … ArtForum…
via Art for the Masses! – Reason Magazine.
(127,000 vs. 50,000)
Painting vs. ceramics
“I was studying criticism and poetry, and then started making ceramics as a hobby; there was a whole crew in Santa Barbara getting really into that. I loved it so much that I ended up in Berkeley in 1963, studying with Peter Voulkos in the art department. Of course when I moved to New York I couldn’t get any attention for that kind of work. So I started painting. Everyone in the city hated painting, including me! We thought it was the lamest thing. But by 1972 I was building stretcher bars and really getting into it.”
– Mary Heilmann, Feb. 20, 2012, via artforum.com / 500 words.
New criticism – John Kelsey and the end of seeing
The artwork mirrors the conditions in which the artist produces it. Penck's Der Ubergang, Passage, 1963
What happens to a painting when it is reproduced as a digital .tiff (tagged image file format) file, or further, when printed out by an Epson dot matrix printer? What do we miss and what do we gain when we look through 3D glasses? What is the relationship between collage and painting in the age of Photoshop and Paint? When we can no longer see a direct relationship between the value of an artwork and the amount of time and effort it takes to make it, does that mean there are no such material values left, or that we are beginning to value the thinking, talking and re-thinking that goes into creating a work of art?
John Kelsey writes not just about the context of an art work – issues raised by, or that arise out of the work itself – he uses the work to explore questions, things on his mind as it were.
His editors, Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw, suggest that Kelsey’s kind of critical “play” is all that can be managed given that conventional art criticism has been superceded successively by curators, then impressarios, then dealers and finally collectors, who now lead the process of identifying and validating art.
Albert Oehlen's collage-painting machine diagrammed by John Kelsey.
There is more to it than that. There is a shift taking place that is hard to describe. Kelsey is looking for value in different places, in different ways, in the world at large of course, but also in the ways we interpret the world. “Art becomes a way of working on the displacement of information from one format to another, and of working on the way we are displaced too, in work and in play.” (p. 68) Compared to art criticism which pivots on the interpretation of what can be seen relative to what we know as having been seen before, Kelsey’s writing speaks an end of seeing. By writing about the economics and other exigencies of art practice, the artwork emerges in relation to, contingent upon, representative of, the circumstances under which it was produced and is being viewed. We, as observers, are afforded the opportunity to be more fully present with the artwork as social beings within a social framework.
Within this collection of 26 previously published essays, The Self Employment Rate dips deepest into social/political analysis, mentioning artists (Marcel Broodthaers, Martin Kippenberger, Merlin Carpenter) in passing, using them illustratively. This approach allows Kelsey to cut to the core of the culture of crisis we are now living: “[O]ur self-employment increases according to the degree we make ourselves flexible within the networks of communication that we busy ourselves extending under the sign of the social, in the modes of art and entertainment.” (p. 181)
Kelsey doesn’t see many options, for criticism or for artists. “Artists will either have to make do with exploiting the merely superficial differences that designate their own practices within a generic (and ever more captured and productive) availability to abstraction shared by every metropolitan self-employee, or they will invent new and specific ways of interrupting themselves. At a certain point, it just seems boring not to pursue the latter option on some level, not to appropriate and make use of our own special crisis as a kind of art.”
Art writing as competitive sport.
Rich Texts: Selected Writings for Art
John Kelsey
Sternberg Press, 2010
248 pages (numbered pages start at 7 and end at 245)
Softcover with dust jacket bearing on the interior side a colour photo of an artwork by Michael Krebber.
978-1-934105-23-8
Curiously illustrated with photos of professional women tennis players at work.
US $19.95
Order in North America from R.A.M. Publications + Distribution.
Game on.
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book image: http://www.worldfoodbooks.com/artist/john-kelsey/
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Errata?
The title of the essay The Self-Employment Rate is asterisked to refer to previous publication, just as all the other essays in the book are, but no previous publication is noted at the bottom of that page. Perhaps the essay was first published in the book. But if so, why the asterisk? If not, where’s the citation?
Where are the credits for the b/w photos of professional women tennis players?
++
Addendum
“We must insist that what artworks are economically, centrally determines what they mean socially and also artisitcally.”
- Andrea Fraser, L’1%, c’est moi.” p.6
Nice, if it only wasn’t said as art.
Is this site being inadvertently mothballed?
I can’t seem to bring myself to report about the CAMDO-Pages “pop-up bookstore” at Art Toronto 2011. All that effort is going to other places on the web, Facebook, etc. I feel like this site is getting fossilized, not unlike this artwork by Jaqueline Rush Lee.
Found here: http://endicottstudio.typepad.com/endicott_redux/arts/page/2/
cites Center for Book Arts in New York: http://www.centerforbookarts.org/
Petrified Book, by Jaqueline Rush Lee
Notwithstanding its ups and downs over the years, the New Yorker remains the ne plus ultra of English language magazine publishing. Every author hopes to be either written about or published in it. It’s the Nobel Prize with subscribers.
Canadian author Patricia Pearson enters the pantheon of such celestial and celebrated talents in the October 17th issue with her History: The Customer Reviews in the Shouts and Murmurs section, on your local newsstand this week.
If, as Twain advised, “It is the will of God that we must have critics… and we must bear the burden,” Pearson lightens that load considerably.
Pearson’s blog Good News About the Coming Apocalypse
Sketchbook with voices
Eric Fischl's 1986 book, reprint edition by Chronicle Books, ISMB-13 978-0811875493
It struck me as sadly desperate that an artist and a critic as celebrated as Eric Fischl and Jerry Saltz are would stoop to publishing this sort of novelty or gift book. But when I got the book home and opened it up to the colophon page, I discovered it was first published in 1986, which is about when Fischl’s career was peaking. So that left some doubt: is it a cynical effort to cash in from the mass market or sincere effort to reflect on the creative process in a way that is both accessible and encouraging of actual creative play?
Although it’s hard to imagine that very many people would buy this book to use it a sketchbook – it’s much more likely to be given as a gift to the aspiring artist or creative-type friend after which it would sit on the shelf. But I’m planning to take it at its word and use it just that way to see what happens.
I paid $24 for this book when I could have paid only $16 to Amazon and had them deliver it to my doorstep. Why? It’s not because I’m some sort of fanatical supporter of local business or bookstores, though I am to some extent, so much as that I can’t resist buying books when I go into a bookstore. In fact, I try to avoid bookstores for that very reason. It’s hard on the pocketbook and eventually I am going to have to get rid of the books.
So why do I still buy books? Maybe it’s because buying is an essential part of what you do in a store. You browse, you discover, consider and choose, a process that culminates in the purchase. This is not something anachronistic like steam powered locomotives but a fundamental part of the consumer experience.
Art books are especially good conduits for this kind of desire machine. Add visual design, size, weight, paper quality, and images to the mix and the process moves to a whole new level, practically fetishistic. No wonder bookstores that are surviving are stocking more and more art books. They’re practically irresistible.
Bad Idea
It is one of the oddities of the interface of art and publishing that you can find obscure little magazines like this one on some Canadian newsstands several years after they were published. It’s like the store buyers forget that magazines have best before dates and treat them more like books. I found this 2008 issue of the UK culture mag Bad Idea at my fav bookstore, Type, in Toronto.
Bad Idea is anything but. Billing itself as “the smart option, young journalism, ideas and opinion” it gives a neat cultural feel to just about everything. In this issue, the economy is the focus with cartoons explaining the economic fallout of sub-prime mortgages and the joys of bingo, articles on the UK’s collapsing pork industry, property investment in Romania and the art market bubble, and a special feature on the credit crunch, illustrated with exceptionally handsome photographs of Bay Street by Sebastian Meyer.
Do you know what a “deal toy” is? Known more formally as tombstones, deal toys are trophies custom designed to celebrate huge financial deals. That fact alone and the samples shown made the $12 price tag worth it. The rest was gravy.
Another super good idea about Bad Idea is that issues 4 to 7 are all available online, using the awesome e-publishing facility Issuu:
Read the current issue here http://www.badidea.co.uk/magazine/
Read about Issuu here http://blog.issuu.com/?page_id=733.
So why on earth call a magazine as good as Bad Idea “bad”? Perhaps it was what Clay Felker, founder of New York magazine, said to the precocious students at the U of California who suggested starting it back in 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Idea
Then again, maybe it really was a bad idea. I can’t find any copy on the website more recent than April 2010 and issue 7 is the last one to follow the 2008 issue I picked up, and email to the address listed on the website bounced back as undeliverable. Funded primarily by the British Arts Council (or so it looked to me) perhaps they succumbed to the very economic crisis they so confidently laid bare.
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Art is all about interpretation and this blog is about how we interpret or "read" art. It's also about arts policy, which tells us something about how others think art is to be read, and about the art economy, which no matter how you read it, matters a good deal more to us individually and collectively than we care to discuss. I started this blog initially to review books about art and there's still quite a bit of that sort of thing too. Read on.Latest Topics
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