Washington D.C., y'all. Mary Jeys

I was recently in Washington D.C. Most of these shows are closed now, but it's always nice to document in the written word.

G Fine Art, 1515 14th Street NW
Blasts, curated by Paul Brewer
Quote from the gallerist: "[The show] ends up being anti-war without being didactic." Interesting. I didn't find any hint of anti-war-ness in the show, save perhaps Louis Cameron's Warfare Riddim (version 2) digital piece showing a fake newsperson in front of cinematic imagery of buildings being blown up in a faux news show. The rest sort of seems to be about explosions. Heide Fasnacht's drawing, Three Buildings shows one of the three in the process of demolition. Something that I personally think is taboo regarding explosions is their beauty. A specific example is the visual beauty of buildings being blown up, even dare I say, the World Trade Towers. I think the beauty that we can not speak about does not rise from the symbolic destruction of a superpower, but rather in the ordinary way that we like to play with games and toys like Jenga. It's fun to watch things topple over. It's actually kind of beautiful to watch something hard and concrete end up to be a pile of rubble in the end. For me the show was a revelry in watching rubble happen.

Numark, 625 E St. NW
A City Paper "pick". The show is sort of the polar opposite of "Blasts", titled "An Empire of Sighs". This was a really delicate show that kind of reminded me of some of the more irritating parts of the art world. The fascination with delicacy and preciousness. At its best, I can be a participant in the fineness of this group show, like Michele Kong's Pores, made of hot glue and mono filament in a precious display of latticework. Sadly, the rest of the work left me uninterested either because it wasn't twee enough, or because craftmanship left something to be desired.

Fuse Box, 1412 14th Street NW
An installation by Kendall Buster, Model City is made from tent-like materials and is suspended from the cieling. Who lives in this model city? Why are they living in blue tents painted to look like brickwork? How is it a city when clearly all there is outside of any individual "tent" is another individual "tent"? None of these questions kept me from liking the work.

Conner Contemporary, 1730 Connecticut Ave. NW
Julee Holcombe's one person show was at first a witty trickster playing with notions of painting and image in photography. It becomes deeper as you notice the careful slowness with which her imagery is constructed. I'm constantly on the lookout for work that whispers or hums, not shouts. Holcombe's work melodically hums without you noticing that you've picked up the tune yourself.

Found Sound, Various locations around DC
I only got to three of these installations. Harry Shearer's ipod shuffle with ambient street sounds in the wake of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, Brandon Morse's street sound installation that mixed traffic noise with prerecorded sounds constantly mixing in a parabola, and Joseph Grigely's non-sound piece about not wanting girls to hear one pee. All three were fun, and the kind of thing cities are good for. That is, communal experiences. To have a large community involved in sound awareness can only spell good for those of us who are acutely atuned to improper cell phone usage and unnecessary honking incidents.

D.C. had a lot more than I expected. And the Spy Museum rocks a whole lot.

Sam Durant James Stanfield

Several of my friends asked what I thought of the Sam Durant exhibition at Paula Cooper.

The main showroom spaces are filled with gray – Bondo colored – renditions of obelisk shaped monuments. The press release can give you the skinny on the conceptual project behind it all. My politics are so aligned with the thrust of this project that I don’t feel any shock or estrangement from the facts that Durant asks me to focus on. (In fact, the only persons that could be challenged by his trajectory are either deplorably undereducated or Republican.)

My criticism is that Durant takes no real chances. This cleaned-up, research-enriched, gallery-ready, conceptual project method of building an art experience is so acceptable that I can’t find the excitement. The method has become prosaic. It’s unfortunate that a project intent on exposing the glorification of homegrown genocide is stifled by such a Phaidon book version of 80’s and 90’s era post-conceptual practice.

On the up side, the mental gesture involving the transfer of these monuments to Washington, D.C. is amusing. What if he could cause that controversy – force the majority to face facts?

Seth Price: Dispersion James Stanfield

I found Seth Price’s Dispersion while wandering the artist’s website. The essay is easy to read, and it's presented as a fully illustrated, and appropriation drenched, booklet/internet document.

Sometimes images in Dispersion act as layout devices, sometimes as literal illustrations of the text, and still at other times they act as visual non-sequiturs, but at all times the images reinforce Price’s penchant for leveling all imagery found in the popular archive.

What is the popular archive? It is hard to say - as Price does not spend much time describing it. I take it to mean a collection of all the images that have ever been produced. In Dispersion’s case Price is describing all audio and visual signs - made since the invention of the printing press - that can travel in a mass-produced media document. He sees these as objects to be collected and reused “with or without modifications, regardless of intellectual property laws.”

Price says:

The last thirty years have seen the transformation of art’s "expanded field", from a stance of stubborn discursive ambiguity into a comfortable and compromised situation in which we’re well accustomed to conceptual interventions, art and the social, or “relational aesthetics”. The impulse to merge art and life has resulted in lifestyle art, a secure gallery practice that comments on contemporary media culture, or apes commercial production strategies.

End quote.

Instead of continuing this practice Price offers up the restaging of familiar techniques of distribution - using recognizable and previously distributed images - as a way of creating an art-like experience outside the confines of the gallery. It is uncertain if this action is art, since it attempts to escape the confines of artistic practice by more fully merging its sensibility with whatever media is being used. So Dispersion argues for less of a rupture between artistic interventions and distributed media.

The most gruesome example offered in Dispersion is “the Daniel Pearl video”.

Quote begins here.

Even without the label PROPAGANDA, which CBS helpfully added to the excerpt they aired last spring, it’s clear that the 2002 video is a complex document. Formally, it presents kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl, first as a mouthpiece for the views of his kidnappers, a Pakistani fundamentalist organization, and then, following his off-screen murder, as a cadaver, beheaded in order to underline the gravity of their political demands.

One of the video’s most striking aspects is not the grisly, though clinical, climax (which, in descriptions of the tape, has come to stand in for the entire content), but the slick production strategies, which seem to draw on American political campaign advertisements. (Price)

End quote.

Here a violent, political action was taped and then edited for consumption. The edits mimic media graphics in either a naive or mocking way. There is a willingness on the part of the executioners to exploit the same graphic language used in American propaganda. This video's tragic content is too powerful to rest as art, but its advert-like appearance makes it confusing. Its edited and reprocessed existence feels like a media critique - like something that uses contemporary art making strategies.

In Dispersion there is a still from the Daniel Pearl video printed next to the text. The three images following this still are various appropriated portraits. Two of these portraits would normally not be understood as gruesome, but since they are printed near the image of Daniel Pearl’s decapitation video they both gain a slightly eerie connotation. These two images’ titles are Computer Technique Group, Cubic Kennedy, 1960’s and Computer Technique Group, Return to a Square, 1960’s. It is in this grouping that Price’s way of creating experience through bits culled from the popular archive begins to emerge. It is the residue of shock (Daniel Pearl video) mixed with the residue of history (assassination of Kennedy) and underscored with the residue of perpetually obsolete technology (Computer Technique Group, 1960’s) that creates an art-like experience for the reader. The general tenor of this mixture is one of pathos and melancholy.

Why is this experience just art-like and not simply art? I believe Price’s own phrasing is best:

One suggestion comes from the philosopher Sarat Maharaj, who sees the question as "a marker for ways we might be able to engage with works, events, spasms, ructions that don’t look like art and don’t count as art, but are somehow electric, energy nodes, attractors, transmitters, conductors of new thinking, new subjectivity and action that visual artwork in the traditional sense is not able to articulate." These concise words call for a art that insinuates itself into the culture at large, an art that does not go the way of, say, theology, where, while it’s certain that there are practitioners doing important work, few people notice…

End quote.

Mike Smith Database Pt II Midnight Dusters

Hello!

I completely forgot about this blog until today... I saw the posting about Mike Smith, and I felt compelled to add to it a bit as I, too, am a devotee of his work and know that access to it seems difficult. (So please don't kick me off!)

The best resource for information about Mike's video work is the Electronic Arts Intermix website:
http://www.eai.org/eai/artist.jsp?artistID=316
On the site you will find all of the videos by Mike in the EAI collection as well as a brief synopsis of each. The best part about EAI is that anyone (including you) can call them up and make a 2 hour appointment to see any work in the entire collection. There is no charge for this, and EAI is conveniently located (for artheds) on 22nd St in the Printed Matter building.

Hooray for Mike Smith.

Open Letter to Mark James Stanfield

This is in response to a comment left at the bottom of the previous post.

Hey Mark,

That last post of mine was pretty cheeky. I don’t think I wanted to critique Zak Smith’s work as much as I wanted to critique the Chelsea/Grad School scene that puts so much machinery behind young artists. It is like collectors want to buy the work that reminds them of their children. The effects are not devastating to art – you can’t kill that. The effects are devastating for individual artists. Zak Smith is already a brand name – his future potential limited by this fact. Those gallery lights are pretty bright and won’t mind burning him and several hundred other kids to a crisp.

Of course I know what you are saying, but everyone has different tastes. Many of the people working out here are doing so in their own field of inquiry.

I always have mixed feelings about my own work. Usually I feel like I’m chasing down something really important - doing something that few others would be willing to. But, when my work is shown very few people are capable of reacting to it. I don’t think that my work is of low quality (although a lack of craft is part of its demands); I just think that it’s not for everyone. In fact, it’s for very few people.

There is a romantic idea that someone really can express themselves in their artwork. Well, I’ve found that this is true, but it’s not as simple as it first sounds. Since I’ve been in the city I’ve met only a few artworks - by a certain few people- that I’ve truly been interested in. These works don’t express a lot in the romantic sense. They aren’t containers for immense amounts of pain and anguish. They aren’t happy, radiant, or bubbling over with human dignity. They don’t express much in the plain-speak sense of the word express. What these works do is communicate that their makers and I are thinking similar thoughts. I live for these moments. I like to believe that what is being said in these artworks is something that would not be as well communicated in words. I also believe that what is being said could not have been achieved if the artist hadn’t physically worked with material from the world.

It is strange that so much artwork is made, but that I’m only able to find the things I care about in a small percentage of it. It’s like I’m blind to much so that I can have a deeper experience in just one area. At 19 I did not know that it would be harder and harder to like others’ work. At 27 art journeys are already starting to seem bittersweet.

Thanks for the comment,

Roy