here is a fantasy

It’s Not Too Late! Looking Back at 2011

here is a fantasy — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:05:40 +0000

Art Fag City asked me to contribute a link to a “Best Links of the 2011″ post. I misread the invitation. Instead, I submitted several of my favorite links compiled from my Twitter feed. Only one link was selected for AFC, but I don’t want to waste all my other links to artists, projects, and essays that deserve some more attention. Here’s a back rub to 2011′s best, aka some of my favorite links of 2011:

Does this hard cock look like it belongs to someone into “chocolate nipple sucking”? This web-based game transforms posts from Craigslist’s casual encounters into a sport that’s best enjoyed with two or more players. http://casualencountersgame.com
”How the Internet Tried to Kill Me” is a short essay about how Google can turn your life into a Kafka novel. Lesson: Make your own website or Wikipedia page. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13rubin.html
Did you know that .05% of Twitter users make up almost half of all posted URLs? Or that bloggers retweet URLs more than any other type of user? This research paper – published by Yahoo, mind you – contains some gems to drop in conversation about blogging and tweeting. http://research.yahoo.com/pub/3386
Let’s fire the museum director and get interns to run our museum! http://www.towntopics.com/sep1411/other3.php
Sit back, watch some video art. Artists Talia Chetrit and Cortney Andrews founded After Bellmer, a new online magazine. So far, the magazine has centered on some of my favorite topics: feminism and video art. http://www.afterbellmer.com/
Phone Arts is a new Tumblr that proves you can do big things with a small smart phone. Plus, the phone arts on this Tumblr are better than most painting I’ve seen recently. http://phonearts.net/

Museum Curators Aren’t Your Type of Curator

here is a fantasy — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:28:07 +0000

If you follow my blog, you’ll see that my interests gravitate toward art and criticism from the 1960s onward, with a particular focus on video art and new media. The most recent curatorial proposal I posted on Here is a Fantasy concerns the physical geography of the internet; however, the next exhibition I have on my schedule is about Kathe Kollwitz, a printmaker predominately associated with the Weimar-era.[1] WTF, indeed.

Curating in the museum is different from curating in a gallery, curating online, or “curating a social summary,” the latter being a popular tag on Twitter. When I’m in a museum, I have different concerns from when I’m curating elsewhere.

Being an independent curator means being responsible for setting trends in the here-and-now. Organizing an exhibition of “young and emerging artists” – a phrase common to proposals written by curators who are just starting out – means that you’re responsible for raising the bar for what’s happening in contemporary art.

In museums, the types of artists you’re working with have already been vetted to a degree, having shown at a handful of galleries prior to gaining entrance to the museum exhibition circuit. It’s a really simple path: from the artist’s studio to group exhibitions/independently curated exhibitions, then gallery representation/solo gallery shows, and then museum exhibitions.

This model doesn’t always work so seamlessly, especially for artists who work in new media. Still, it’s useful for curators to consider this trajectory when thinking about the responsibility they have toward the types of work they plan to exhibit. Supporting artists by putting them in exhibitions, regardless of location, means supporting their careers.

While working in the curatorial department at the Weisman Art Museum, I was given the task of curating two exhibitions. I was lucky; even curatorial assistants are seldom given the opportunity to manage exhibitions as full-curators, even after working in curatorial departments for several years. I was a curatorial fellow, hired for a year, specifically to organize exhibitions. Prior to working at the Weisman, I had organized and worked on exhibitions, but they were often on a smaler scale, with emerging artists and recent MFA students.

Curating from a collection means looking through museum databases, mulling over thousands of artists and artworks stored in the museum collection. Why some works should be taken out of storage and put into the museum isn’t always so obvious. While poring over documents, I was shocked: Why had this David Hockney print never been shown? Why had this work never been repaired? Often, even if there’s good work, if it has nothing to do with the overall story the museum wants to tell about its collection, then it’s not exhibited. This may seem harsh, but think about it: MoMA is a museum of modern and now, contemporary art. If they had an esteemed work from the 1920s, but it didn’t fall into the story of Alfred Barr building a modern enclave for New York City, thereby setting the framework for New York to surpass Paris as the world’s art capital, then it might not be exhibited. The same goes for the Whitney, which, although it doesn’t always restrict itself to showing just work from the United States, is still a museum founded on the premises of showing American art.

Responsibility is a key term for curators to consider when planning exhibitions: how does this exhibition fit into the history of the museum and its own historical narrative? For my exhibition about Kathe Kollwitz, I found dozens of works by Kollwitz in the museum basement which were very good, never shown, and were tied to an important history for the museum and the artist. Many of the works were shown in her first Stateside exhibition and were then acquired by the Weisman which was founded by early proponents of her works in the States, the Walker family.

Drawing lines around a museum curator and an independent curator may seem stuffy, conservative, and hey, even pretentious; but it’s necessary due to differences in how artworks are chosen and circulated. Curating in the museum means caring for a collection; and that’s something I’m willing to stick to, even if it’s not the most popular position in our hybrid-curator climate.

[1] In preparation for a forthcoming speaking engagement with students at the University of Minnesota to discuss my exhibition at the Weisman Art Museum, I plan to answer the question, “Why Kathe Kollwitz?” by first bringing up the differences between the hybrid role of a curator-at-large compared to the more strictly enclosed roles of a museum curator.

Donald Moffett at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston

here is a fantasy — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:31:35 +0000

Donald Moffett’s show at the CAMH isn’t amazing, but it left me baffled, wondering if it’s at all possible to reconcile an artist’s activist and formalist practice. In The Extravagant Vein, Moffett’s paintings, in comparison to his overtly political works, aspire to completely different goals. Simply put, the two have nothing in common. It’s a depressing claim for the state of the political in art and I feel uneasy writing about it.

Moffett’s paintings are by-and-by formalist. Lot 051408 (X), 2008, pictured above, plays with the limitations of painting’s physical structure, paying particular attention to the relationship of canvas and paint to the gallery walls. The canvas opens up to the wall through Moffett’s addition of zippers. Lot‘s painted surface follows this similar trajectory where the wall, like the physical canvas, has been painted in blocks of gray and white. Yawn. Moffett’s tactics belong to a course on Greenberg 101.

An example of Moffett’s work that has nothing to do with formalism is Mr. Gay in the U.S.A., 2001. Ronald Gay had been taunted all his life for his last name and one day, due to a lethal cocktail of mental illness and homophobia, he decided to “waste some faggots” by opening fire on a gay bar. This happened in 2000. Moffett went to the court proceedings and sketched out the trial. His line-drawings are expressionistic and, as the wall labels state, the drawings focus heavily on the faces of Gay and the others involved in the proceedings.

I’m hard-pressed to find any similarities between Mr. Gay in the U.S.A. and Lot 051408 (X). Moffett’s political and formalist works are on completely different streets, like two cul-de-sacs in two different suburbs in two different states.

The problem with attempting to reconcile Moffett’s activist and formalist work comes down to aspirations. How can you tell if a political work is successful? It’s easier to gauge the success of a painting that’s concerned specifically with the rules of painting. There’s a formal history that’s given to us, whether or not we agree with all of formalism’s rules, secrets, and codes. Formalism and activism have two have different ambitions. It’s disappointing that Moffett’s two extravagant veins can’t be reconciled, giving little hope for an art that can be both.

Here is a Fantasy Year in Review

here is a fantasy — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:14:07 +0000

I love “worst of the year” lists. Being a hater is relevant because there’s too much high-gloss sculpture and layer-cake painting out there to pretend otherwise. Still, an essay like Jerry Saltz’s “Reasons to Love New York 2011“ serves to remind me of just how important it is to get out in person and see art, regardless of how much of it wades in suckage. If I see just one show a week that I like, well, I’m doing my job as a curator and writer. With high-standards, it’s impossible to like too much art. It’s no surprise that my favorite essays from 2011 have focused on calling out unfortunate trends in contemporary art. I like art; I just have standards.

Below, I’ve included my non-blog highlights – mostly curatorial projects – and my favorite essays from Here is a Fantasy for 2011.

2011 Highlights

I curated a show. My favorite work in the show was Mike Ruiz’s Replaced Mona Lisa (2011), a painting of a photograph of a painting. Yup, that’s a tongue-twister. After spending a week in Minneapolis for install week, I wrote a catalog essay for Hang in There, an exhibition curated by Jason Lazarus at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago. Then, just a few weeks later, I curated an online exhibition for Culturehall. I also contributed essays to Shifter and Artwrit. Later in the year, I started a NSFW curatorial project.

Undoubtedly, the best essay I wrote in 2011 is my polemic against Laurel Nakadate. Laurel gets crushed. Even though I wrote that for AFC, I wrote some gems on Here is a Fantasy, too.

2011 Top Essays on Here is a Fantasy

1. Because we’re not over Modernism and we’re not over Postmodernism, I wrote Best Frenemies: Modernism and Postmodernism.

2. I’m waiting to make this exhibition happen: Curatorial Proposal for the Splinternet.

3. This short review of Daniel Gordon at WALLSPACE is nothing special, but it’s a concise and straightforward piece of good writing.

An honorable mention goes to Patrick Bobilin for calling me out about my use of the g-word on the blog. I’m never writing about that word again. And thanks, Paddy. I wouldn’t have become such a baller Twitterer without you.

Helen Frankenthaler, 1928 – 2011, in Painters Painting

here is a fantasy — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:08:28 +0000

I’d rather not write a silly obit for painter Helen Frankenthaler like the one in The New York Times that focuses on her love for dinner parties and dancing. Instead, I prefer writing about Emile de Antonio’s classic film Painters Painting (1972) which documents Frankenthaler within the post-Pollock art scene in New York. The film provides a serious and insightful take on Frankenthaler’s drippy, tattered abstractions. She’s in it, but you have to watch other painters chat about the crisis of painting in the United States before you get to some of her short scenes. Frankenthaler appears, dressed in a suit, at the 34 minute mark.

Some of Frankenthaler’s wisdom in Painters Painting about her most well-known painting, Mountains and Sea: “I didn’t want the sign of the brush or how the picture was made to appear. That area not painted on didn’t need paint because it had the paint next to it, so it operated just as forcefully.”

I recommend renting the film from Amazon, since none of the clips on YouTube or UbuWeb show Frankenthaler.

Nicknaming Contemporary Art

here is a fantasy — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:19:23 +0000

Bear with me while I set up a paradox.

Part one: Naming things makes things begin.

Part two: Beginnings are things that get rid of what came before.*

When you come up with a name for something (part one), paradoxically, it erases something else (part two). That’s not hard to explain. To prove this isn’t some Logic 101 experiment, I’ll throw in an art world example, that noxious term “conceptual.” Whenever you name something, the naming gets rid of the original thing. That’s what’s happened with the original art thing called “conceptual,” a term that’s become a catch-all for any type of art that’s heavy on ideas.

Conceptual art began, roughly, in 1961 with the publication of George Macunias’ An Anthology. Henry Flynt coined the term “concept art,” which he wrote about in An Anthology as “an art of which the material ‘concepts,’ as the material of, for example, music, is sound.” This version of conceptual art is – duh – different from how conceptual is thrown around today. In the story of conceptual art from the 1960s up to the present day, part one is Flynt’s naming of a thing as “concept art,” marking its beginning as a solid, concrete thing. Part two is what we’re dealing with now, at a time when it seems like conceptual has become so all-encompassing term that it suffocates any artwork it describes – as well as evading “concept art’s” original intention. This sucks when conceptual had such a great beginning; Flynt’s description of an art that’s based around the concepts of materials is brilliant.

The art world acts like magpies about categories. We talk about artists who are young, global, conceptual, contemporary, performative, whatever. Regardless of how much we agree with the tight frames we willingly put around art, we do it anyway.

If naming is too restrictive, then I suggest we just give things nicknames. Nicknames quickly wear out. We’re given tens and tens throughout our lifetime. As a kid, I was a Cori, Corky, and CJ, but those were shed when I became a teenager; they didn’t fit anymore. Nicknames belong to a specific moment in any person or thing’s life. There’s not an emphasis on permanence. I can use Flynt’s term sometimes and the banal, idea-based term, other-times.

* I don’t want to sound poncy, so I loosely translated F.W.J. Schelling’s statement, “The beginning is the negation of that which begins with it,” into something less stuffy.

The Atlantic Gets Video Art Wrong

here is a fantasy — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:50:01 +0000

The Atlantic just published an essay that says early video art is like YouTube. Yeah, well, this video art historian says, “Not quite,” all the time to statements like these, making me realize it’s time for a video art handbook.

Video art has a short history and internet-informed art’s is even shorter. It’s no surprise that when the two are compared it’s a big, untruthful mess. “Early video art was just like the internet!” comes up all the time in articles that seek to historicize new media. I don’t have any problems with historicizing digital work now by pulling up early video art as a precursor; it’s important to create give weight to the lightness of the present by grounding it in history.

My issue concerns the flimsy comparisons that are brought up time and again about why the two are similar: they’re both cheap and everyone can use them. There’s some things that are still historical fact and historical fiction.

Video Art Handbook: Early Video Art Wasn’t Cheap

Claim: “Unlike film, which had to be developed and was expensive, video could be fast, cheap, and on-the-go. This change allowed video collectives to experiment with new ways of producing *and* consuming moving pictures.”

Truth: Early video art was expensive and clunky. Video collectives were formed not because video was cheap, but because sharing resources to buy or rent equipment helped alleviate part of the labor and cost. Like film productions, many collectives functioned as mini-film crews; thus needing a ton of people to be involved.

The Sony Portapak, the first hand-held camera, came out in 1965 with a listing price of $1,250 and by 1971, it cost almost $1,500. Taking inflation into account, that comes out to over $8,500 today. Not even the most tricked-out MacBook is going to cost you that much. That price just includes the camera: not the cost of videotape and not the cost of video editing equipment. Even if you go into the price comparisons of the 1970s, that’s about the average amount paid on rent once you include the costs of video editing equipment and videotape.

What’s So Great About Collage? Daniel Gordon at WALLSPACE

here is a fantasy — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:31:45 +0000

Collage isn’t anything new, but it’s a common tactic in digital work. Sure, it might go by some other name like a supercut, but that’s still collage. Collage became prevalent with Cubist works–think about the bits of newspaper Braques and Picasso tacked on their sculptures–and then Weimar-era works by Hannah Hoch. The goal of early 20^th century collage was fragmentation beyond recognition: to cut into commercial text and images until they lost their original significance, becoming almost indecipherable. That’s not what’s going on in Daniel Gordon’s photographs at WALLSPACE. He puts images back together after they’ve already been severed apart. This way of thinking about collage is useful for how we come across images today, when, by quickly entering any search term, millions of images and vidoes can be brought up online. It’d be postmodern ennui to take part in endless cutting up. Chopped and screwed things aren’t meaningless reuse; they synthesize diverse elements into a manageable, 3-minute track, that allows the original to recirculate.

In Gordon’s series of portraits, glue drips off his dark blue and gray palette filled with chunks of noses, eyes, and ears, that are then pasted onto swatches of pixellated TV snow. The globs of glue are subtle enough to be missed, but they definitely aren’t so over-the-top to make his figures grotesque. Throughout his portraits he creates stages, like theatre sets, with awkward, shallow perspective, making the heads seem huge when shoved into the confines of a frame. People aren’t the only subject in Gordon’s collages; his other subject is the “rotting still-life,” aka the memento mori. Sure, Gordon’s collages use simple, fairly standard motifs. What’s impressive is how he constructs succinct scenes out of a large, potentially endless archive of people, things, and pixels.

Leaked from American Apparel: Vanessa Beecroft at Miami Basel

here is a fantasy — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 05:58:03 +0000

Love or hate Vanessa Beecroft, at least she pays her performers more than Marina Abramović. According to an email sent out yesterday to American Apparel employees worldwide, the artist wants AA employees to participate in her performance at Miami Basel. Beecroft tends to hire professional models to stand around looking bored and pretty. Soliciting retail employees to model the clothes they sell is barely an interesting twist on labor. Of course, AA employees are usually young and attractive enough to model nude unitards, so it’s not like this performance is going to deviate too much from Beecroft’s one-liners. Below, the full-text of the email sent out to AA employees, including the description of the free trip to Miami:

On Nov 21, 2011, at 10:19 AM, wrote:

Hello everyone,

American Apparel is collaborating with the artist Vanessa Beecroft during the Art Basel in Miami starting at the end of the month (http://www.artbaselmiamibeach.com/).
We are looking for 5 girls to model for this art performance in Miami, leaving on 11/29 in the morning.
All info below.
Please share this with your entire staff ASAP and send myself and Iris cc here pictures of whoever is interested in participating with their contact information. Please also include if they can staff for the flea market as well or just for the art project.

Art Basel is a very famous art fair, it is a great experience and a free trip to warm Miami! Please get back to us ASAP we need to plan everything ASAP.

Artist:
Vanessa Beecroft
http://www.vanessabeecroft.com/frameset.html
See images below of past performances.

Project:
Vanessa Beecroft for Van Cleef & Arpels
American Apparel models will wear skin tone micromesh unitards designed by AA along with $200,000 – $3,000,000 jewelry by VC&A. The performance will take place at a masquerade gala for jewelry and art collectors attending Art Basel.

Location:
Miami

Dates:
November 29th, evening. Dress Rehearsal – should last no more than a few hours.
November 30th, evening. Performance – 30 minutes. Models will need to be available for a few hours that evening.
ALSO if they are available, we have the Miami Flea Market happening from Dec 1-10 and we need employees, especially cashiers. They will be paid their hourly wage for working at the market.

Pay:
$300 total for each model.
$30 per diem for Nov. 29 and 30th
Passes to Art Basel Art Fair

Requirements:
18+
Must be comfortable with partial nudity (through nude colored micromesh)
5′ 7″ and above (there will be no shoes so we need certain heights)
We need 2-3 photos for each girl: Closeups and full body, wearing something more or less fitted (no chiffon skirts, etc). No smiling in the photos. Hair down.

Let us know if you have any questions

Curators Exerting Too Much Control

here is a fantasy — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:29:04 +0000

Ian Burn, an art critic and curator, changed the date of Joseph Kosuth’s Art as Idea works for an exhibition. Burn stated:

“If they were made in 1965 like he [Kosuth] claims, they are Pop Art. If they were made in 1967–8, when they were exhibited, then they are among the first conceptual works, strictly speaking.”

What did this curator do next?

In his 1970 essay “Conceptual Art as Art,” Burn gave these works this latter dating and characterized them as key examples of the “strict form of Conceptual Art” because they were analytic of the nature of art, their (minimal) appearance being of the most minimal relevance.“

Changing a date because you think it’d fit art history better. Scandalous.

These quotations come from Terry Smith’s “One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art.”