Tag: making things

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Current Book: Louis Menand – American Studies

Last night I read “The Long Shadow of James B. Conant” an essay from the above mentioned book. I case you don’t know who Conant was (I didn’t), He served as Harvard university’s president from 1933 to ’59 and was intimately involved with the creation of two items that certainly had a great deal to do with shaping my consciousness: the atom bomb and the SAT. As fascinating as that info is what really caught my eye in the essay was Menand’s capsule history of US university ideology in the twentieth century. It’s notable for its weaving together of demographic and political explanations for the rise and fall of notions like meritocracy. All of this may seem pretty opaque but it touches on a private theory of mine regarding the rise of MFA programs and departments of arts practice within liberal arts institutions during the Seventies.

At mid century College education was being touted as a “unifying force” in american society; a way codify and pass on democratic values in a society without a central religion, and with atomizing family and class structures. This was the prevailing view for the postwar generation and colleges based their curriculum around inculcating the values that were felt to be necessary for future captains of industry and government. All of this made sense while the economy was expanding but by the early seventies the US was faced for the first time since the turn of the century with a generation of people who could not expect to have a higher standard of living than their parents had. How to stop them from tearing down the society in their frustration? Train them to be artists. Why? Because in the arts, people luxuriate in a split consciousness not found any where else in society.

By being involved in the arts in American today one is able to assert something for perhaps the the first time in western history: that what one does for a living is distinct from what one is. In other words, I’m working as a waiter, but I’m an Actor. The nature of this assertion made it possible for large numbers of people to make peace with their downward mobility because they had been offered something in exchange: a notion of self as separate and untouched by occupation. And so there rose an “artist lifestyle” that valorized living in discarded commercial spaces, wearing thrift shop clothes, working in food service jobs, etc, etc. Things that twenty years earlier would have been regarded as the mark of a hobo, not of a boho.

Today most colleges have some sort of arts major and can we say that we are better off? Do we have better art, music, theater? a better society? I’m the product of such a system and I can’t say that I don’t feel subtly duped in some way, like I’ve been handed a box of milk duds and pushed to the sidelines.

Take a look at the Menand’s essay, which offers other delights, such as a prose style I can only sigh after. It actually doesn’t assert any of the things that I have just put out here, but it does provide a very different way of thinking about the supposed “culture wars on American campuses”

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…about not posting enough. The past week has provided two states of being: feeling ill, thus too limp to reflect and type or doing stuff, in which case there is no time to type. The result? A week slips by with nothing. So now finally some time is wrested from the job, which allows for a quick update. here’s some of what’s been happening:
1. I’ve attended three plays Lee Bruer’s new production of “A Doll’s House”, Cabaret, Wonderful Town. All through the great graciousness of my friends who offered me tickets.
2. I’ve spent weekend in bed convulsed by coughing to the extent that I thought I had ripped a muscle.
3. I haven’t played any Pikmin.
4. I purchased two bookshelves at Crate and Barrel.
5. I watched the people’s court.
6. I compiled a list of people I needed to contact, calls I needed to return, projects I needed to nudge forward…and despaired.
7. I had a number of exchanges and attempted to apologize for my boorish behavior.
8. I organized a still life of t-shirts and ribbons in the back room of my gallery so that it could be photographed for an ad in artforum.
9. I’ve eaten BBQ ribs on several occasions.
10. I’ve drawn.
11. I’ve spoken to my therapist about submissiveness.
12. A friend graciously came by and fixed the desktop machine, if by “fix” one means walking me though another clean install.
13. The buzzing, counfounding strains of NPR have woken me every morning, and the self reflexiveness of Adult Swim has droned me to sleep each night.
14. I’ve fretted about my filing system, and the extreme amout of facial hair left around my wash basin.
15. My family hasn’t called, nor have I called them.
16. I have found myself unable to decide between a dead or fake christmas tree.

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What, if anything, have you learned from your students, and/or the process of teaching?

Teaching continually confronts me with the dilemmas in my own process. When I talk to my students about their difficulties, their stopping places and moments of fear, I am able to see the similarities in my own situation. So from listening to the ways my students talk about what they do I have become a better reader of work. I’ve also learned not to spend a lot of time worrying about whether or not they like me. When I first started teaching I wanted to be every student’s best pal. That’s as bad as your parents trying to hang around with you all the time. Now I have better boundries around it all and it makes it easier for ervery one to relax.

What don’t you like about the art world? Are there frauds? Name names.

1. I don’t like the generalization “art world” as it lumps together many people who don’t neccisarily belong together : artists, certain writers, dealers, collectors, museum people, some notion of a public. We don’t talk about the “baseball world”. That being said, for purposes of answering the question I’ll talk about the group of people around the New York art market.
2. I don’t like assumed concensus, people who come to opinions without thinking about them. One of the galling things about being in the market is the unspoken assumption that everyone is on the same side.
3. I don’t like openings, which are really about people demonstrating to you that they showed up rather than anyone looking at the work in any real way. I go to very few, and when I have them I try to find some way to subvert them by doing a performance or something similar.
4. I don’t like the proliferation of prizes, art fairs and Biennials, for the same reason I dislike circuit parties.
5. I dislike the cult of youth that pervades the art world these days. It messes up my students, and it’s fair to say that art making is one of the things that you get better at the longer you do it. Do we want every field to have the emotional pitch of women’s gymnastics?

As for frauds; first let me say that I think it’s heartening that folks still worry about this. It means that on a deep level people want something important from art, given the way we have come to accept fraud in so many other fields as a matter of course. But in this case I think it’s hard to define fraud. On the part of artists I would say that there are failures, failures of nerve, imagination, growth, feeling. When someone tries to present these as not being faliures then I suppose you have a situation of fraud. For example, I think that for many years now David Salle has been treading water. His most recent show at Gagosian in New York was accompanied by an article in the New York Times that was full of praise for the development of the work. This I suppose was fradulent, in that it was intellectually dishonest. But when you try to talk about this as legal fraud you run up against a problem: who has been injured? The people who bought the pictures? The people who came to look at them? Also let me say that even if we could talk about fraud here the biggest art fraud in history could have gotten away with less in a life time than a VP at Enron could make off with in a week.
Here’s a clearer case: Thomas Kinkaide – the self proclaimed painter of light. Here is someone who has set up a huge business that traffics in asserted, simplified emotionality. It seems to me to be at its heart cynical and manipulitive of its audience on a level that Jeff Koons could only pretend to.

“me and my work”
“the types of work I enjoy”
“in terms of work”
“making work and seeing others make work”
Why not:
“me and my art”
“the types of art I enjoy”
“in terms of art”
“making art and seeing others make art”
Why this choice of words? Is this simply the vernacular from the “art world” that you’ve absorbed? What would Freud have to say about this? Discuss.

Two reasons: when I use “art” people tend to think only of my visual stuff, whereas I think of everything I do; sculpting, writing, teaching, lecturing, DJing, publishing, etc. as all being part of the same thing :”making work”. Secondly, “my art” just sounds too naff. I make things that make sense to me and then hopefully they will be useful for other folks as well. To the extent that they are then they become art.

Name some things that you personally “find really useful in a cultural sense.”
The plays of Richard Foreman – the books of Kathy Acker, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Delaney and Charles Dickens – the films of John Waters, Jack Smith and Terry Gilliam – the Music of Sun Ra, Patty Smith and the Velvet Underground – notebooks of Hokousai – the tattoos of Don Ed Hardy – the sock money – as a sculptor I wish I had invented it, and I still aspire to come up with something like it: a sculpture that just about anyone can make, that is ubiquitous and anonymous.

Who put the ram in the ramalamadingdong?

You know you did, dude.

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No real time to post any of this during the trip. The panel went fine, with me being much less negative than I thought I was going to be. I did end up using SFMOMA as a negative example a bit much more than I thought I would I was feeling very skeptical about the center, but as my fellow panelists spoke I found myself remembering what was exciting to me about being on the board there in the first place. And then seated in the midst of architects, aoard members and mysterious art fans were a group of youth arts outreach high school students. I watched them hang in through some not very exciting speaking and when my turn came, I felt that I couldn’t just be crabby. It struck me the extent to which things like the center are about the people who are coming after me, that the art world now is segregated, and compromised, but if those students are going to make it any different it will be through instruments like the center. So I tried encouraging them to take it over to make it their own. Ten years is way to short a time to assess any sort of legacy for the center.

The Trip…
Drew was an incredible host, and the panel in a real way was an excuse to come out to San Francisco and meet some new people, namely the folks I’ve come to meet through LJ. Last night was spent drinking, smoking and discoursing with Anthony Berno, and on Saturday morning I ran into Chris Komater and Chris Vandemore. This brought up the odd fact that for the whole trip I kept running into people who had seem my pieces at YB and as such recognized me as the shirtless bearded guy with the rabbit puppet on his hand. That morning I reunited with my friend Brian, and it was as if we hadn’t just gone for 11 months without talking to each other. I began to feel that there could be a future life for me in San Francsico that isn’t purely based on my past life there
Drew and his roomates kept me feeling VERY welcome and VERY full for the entire time.

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Frustration and anxiety have given way to techno-covetousness, meaning that I’ve used the excuse of desktop problems to purchase a new laptop. And so this is written on a new jujitsu lifebook, , ni the air over Michigan on an jet blue flight. I’m heading to san Francisco to speak on a panel. The topic is the tenth anniversary of the Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens. I’m supposed to provide the perspective of how the center fits into the art world as a whole. Usually the way I deal with these things is to wing it, that is I think about the topic an great deal, perhaps jot a couple of notes and then speak off the cuff. I can’t say I’m so sunny at the prospects of the center in any event. It’s difficult to paint much of a rosy picture of the art world in general these days, at least for me, and I’ve been thinking about the advisability of constructing “centers” in a time where every thing seems to be de-centering. Yerba Buena seems to be the result of a collision between two forces: the postwar drive to develop south of market San Francisco, a plan that originally included a sweeping demolition all the way out to the south bay and huge rebuilding, with the rise of the artists’ space movment, the flowering of artist run organizations that got its start in the seventies. So commercial and non commercial interests collided., And the result reveals the striations in SF’s art world, the contesting communities that co-exist uneasily in the bay area. Has the center actually meant a place for these groups to come together? Often it’s been regarded as the poor relation of the SFMOMA, at times by the board of the center itself.

And in the visual art world as a whole? In the 80’s and 90’s it became more and more characterized by travel, the moving around of people and objects from city to city, ultimately with the effect of killing off regionalism. Museums embraced the notion of a “world class” which meant that in effect all museums inb the world should have the same collection. The year now abounds with art fairs, biennials, art festivals and prizes, that constitute the circuit parties for this new jet set. People go around the world to see the same narrow set of compatriots and works, and of course each other. This is an internationalism divorced from any political thought, it is the market that whips everyone and everything along, hither and yon . Travel feels like experience, but it is not, and the work of art is not something lived with, but something primarily glimpsed in a booth on the way to another exhausted meeting. We have not yet seen the final fallout of this, but I glimpse it’s effects in the shell shocked way that my students turn this way and that in search of a reason to make anything.

Hmm, perhaps an essay called “How the idea of a Modern Art market stole New York”

Last night one of my students told me that she had been advised to stop painted the way she did because “abstract expressionist painting had failed” by one of my fellow faculty. I was and remain flummoxed. Failed to do what? She does have problems with her work, but honestly, not because she is working in some ‘Failed” manner. I wish I could summon the certainty to say something so silly. Assertions like that seem to me do be enormous denials of responsibility, the instructor being lazy in their response to the work and turning it around on the student . Plenty of times I walk into a graduate students studio and find myself at a loss or profoundly unsympathetic to what they’re doing. But it isn’t my job to stop them.

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Ok, so here it is: I now have three shows up: new work in London, retrospective at the Tang in Saratoga Springs, and collaboarative video installations in San Francisco. So i think i can say that the harvest season is over. Next official deadline: new two channel video piece for group show in Jan. This harks back to what things were like for me twelve years ago, except then I didn’t have the added workload of running a graduate program. I wish I knew some other way to work, to be honest. This week I was frantically getting the videos for SF made into DVDs and fedexed so that they would arrive on time, Meanwhile there was a huge opening in Saratoga, attended by my Mother and Sister as well as a number of friends. After the dinner, I djed a dance party for the Skidmore students, an interesting effort since the record collection I was using started in the early sixties and ended around ’91. Luckily they all came ready to dance, so the only real problem was that their hopping up and down made the turntables skip on occasion.
I think this post should be firmly filed under count your blessings. Although each of these projects brought up wildly varied emotions, moment to moment , each was an oppurtunity I am grateful for:a chance most people in my field don’t have. I wish that I could proceed through them with grace, rather than by causing drama for the other people who work with me. Drama through shutting down and being uncommunicative. Drama through waiting til the last minute. Yes, everything got to where it needed to be at the right time but it still is at the expense of frayed nerves, for people that I know and care about. SO here’s a public apology to everyone who deserves one.

(side note to the shrink: just noticing that I can’t talk about good news without talking about how badly I’ve behaved – that must get a bit tedious for you, eh?)

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Sitting in the office, bushed and…and…inarticulate. Got up yesterday by accident 4:30 am (ws shooting for 5:15) and took an early train to Saratoga Springs, where my show “Some kind of Love” is now open at the Tang museum. Got in to town around noon and then went from gallery talk to lunch to student radio station to teacher talk to giving slide lecture. The only break was a bout of compulsive shopping at Target when I decided that the headphones I had brought for my cd player were wrong, wrong! and I needed to spend money on new ones. Ridiculous behavior, that was tolerated by Ian Berry, the curator who has put the show together. It’s a small retrospective of video work and walking through it was disorienting, moving , distressing , all at once. Some of the pieces have my voice in them so I was hearing myself from 14 years back or so. I also was not at the Tang to work with the installation crew, so I walked in and the show was pretty much a fait accompli. At this point there are things out there in the world that I haven’t laid hands on for almost two decades. Now when I come upon them I think, what did I have to do with this?
Couple that with the slide talk and Q and A session that followed it: Lots of people and me talking always talking about the work. Trotting out some of the jokes that I’ve been using in my slide talks for ages now. It feels very separate from what goes on when work is made. Once I start answering questions, things pick up, for me at least. I welcome these kinds of forums, and the chance to get to hear from people what they see going on with the work. After an hour and a half or so, the event is over and then it’s off to dinner with Ian, his wife and Mason, the faculty member who was interviewing me. He teaches gender studies and African-american lit and talks about how Saratoga had one gay bar, but it closed in ’97. We talk a bit about the ways that online life is killing off bars and as the meal goes on I find myself popping in and out of presentness. At times the conversation seems to be taking place in another room and I can barely understand what folks are talking about or why. I order cheese instead of dessert and a delicate, lush goat cream cheese arrives, with a warm biscuit and a fig and apricot chutney. Its like the best cream cheese and jelly sandwich ever. Dinners done, Ian drives me to the guest house and I collapse and sleep for about six hours. It’s not enough and I wake feeling hung over. Onto the train where my tiredness and grumpiness makes me ignore the stately Hudson scenery all the way down to the city. Standing in Penn Station a woman comes up to me and says “Hi! How was Bard?” I tell her I was at Saratoga and we say good bye. I’m utterly unable to say who she is, so much so that I suspect that she didn’t really know me either but only thought she did.

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Ok everything seems to be happening. Hard to focus. I am a meticulous packer, but the way I do it is to wander around, do a little then do a little more and so on. Doesn’t inspire confidence, not even in myself. Anaconda is on.One of the questions is do I pack to leave enough room to pick things up while I’m there? I mean I always do… ugh, this is useless!

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Now comes the frantic rush toward Saturday’s London departure. Weekend was spent trying to wrap up last minute loose ends, and seeing folks who were in from out of town: James Gobel, Didi. A swirl of artworld related hiking culminating in Sunday’s opening at the Sculpture Center: tons of people, a sunny afternoon, and hearentening art. At the same time, this week was truly the official beginning of the New York season and it seemed like everyone I knew was having an opening: friends acquaintances former students. Given that I can hardly bear to be at openings, and had to get my own (last-minute as usual) stuff together, I found myself continually apologizing to folks about not being able to attend. I’d so much rather see the show at another time when I can look at it. Peter Norton hosted a reception for the Sculpture Center in his apt , Thor graciously consented to go with me, and so the evening found us wandering around the 45th floor apt gaping at the views, eyeballing the art collection and downing canapes whose unifying characteristic was that they had all been designed to be circular and 3/4 of an inch in diameter.

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I am so glad I am not living in California right now.

Actually this entry is an excuse to list my current mood as “moody”. If only there was an option for moodily moody. Late yesterday I ran over to the gallery to meet with Sarah, the designer who is fabricating “the big one” the latest piece for the upcoming London show. “the Big One ” is a 16 foot long white nylon bunny suit proportioned like a child’s snow suit. We had to adjust the ears: too small, a little too pointy. Last Friday I spent a couple of hours rolling around on the floor stuffing it and it’s one of the best ways to experience the piece: as a cross between furniture, wrestling opponent and pal. So far most people who has seen it wistfully say ” I wish I could lie down on it.” To me yesterday it looked both inviting and corpse like. There is a kind of glee that comes over me when I’m showing folks a piece and I feel that it’s working, that they are thinking about what they’re looking at, that it pleases them. Very distinct from the ways in which I please myself in the making of the things. On reflection I’d say that my mental state while working is more one of suspension, an attempt to attune myself to the varieties of experience that are emerging from the work situation itself. I can find my way back to that kind of attention most easily when I draw consistently. All of which is now leading me to think that I’m probably not letting my self draw much theses days because I sense some sort of obstacle waiting for me in the drawing, a technical hurdle or emotional situation that I need to confront and work through but that I’m hanging back from. All of this goes back to the studio issue. I need to make a time and a place to make the work. Or that is the story I’m telling myself and I wonder about it being a species of avoidance. I have a history of making myself think that I can’t deal with something until I have the “right tool”. I can’t start in on that book project until I have the right laptop and the perfect cafe to sit typing in. Setting is nice, but the opportunities for working are always at hand around me every day. It’s like needing the right yoga mat, the right gym shorts, the perfect pen. I’m willing to compromise on the equipment I use for my vices, so why do my virtues have to be so perfectly accessorized?

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Autum came crashing in on NYC this weekend. The weather turned so quickly that it felt like God was channel surfing. (I’m bored! Let’s make it Fall!) And with the season has come the actual beginning of the new MFA program here at the ICP. It was unnerving to sit down in front of the incoming class of eleven (eager? guarded? cynical? hungry?) students and realize that for the next two years I was going to be helping them structure a new kind of educational experience. I found myself getting a little teary actually, as I tried to explain what I hoped we would do with this oppurtunity. Very strange all in all as I would never have thought to be the chair of a graduate program. Seven years ago when I moved back from SF, I was passing out towels to muscle queens at the Chelsea gym. Is this a step up? The next two months are an insane minefield of activity and commitments. In the past I’ve dealt with situations like this by shutting down and going into crisis mode. I hope that this time around I can do something different. One thing that is strange is that all of this is laced with making work, so that things are tumbling out in a way that I would not anticipate, and I find myself taking odd moments here and there to develop pieces. I’ve wanted to make this LJ activity a way to start to codify some of my thinking about studio practice, and now I find myself operating with only the meagerest of physical studios (about ten square feet in my apt.) and hardly any practice to speak of.

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Suppose you want to start a band right now. My suggestion is that you go and THROW OUT EVERY LP AND CD AND MP3 YOU OWN. Do you like a particular song? Recreate it from memory. I’m saying this because of the god-awful music videos used as bumpers on theN, and all nickelodeon related channels. All of it is a hideous goulash of sounds swirled together for “mouth feel” like mcnuggets. All of coming from the fact that folks are in the habit of recreating records and indexing their sounds via their music collections. Better everyone should have to go back to transmitting orally.
What else is there to crab about? I bought a hideously overstyled corkscrew today at Bed Bath and Beyond. Buffaloed by faux functionality. And I lost out on an Nancy daily I was bidding on. Out sniped.