Several have theorized that our present cultural landscape is the result of primary elements of Postmodernism, pastiche and irony, exhausting themselves.  When we reference the referential, the original meaning is lost and replaced with something else; biting satire inevitability loses its edge, simple childhood fables are mentally rewritten as grand allegories, the archaic becomes quirky.  Now, we remember the movie, not the source novel.

This acculturative re-appropriation as been with us for some time, but at the moment is responsible for some of the most interesting art being made today.  While in great debt to the Pictures generation artists, these artists are in many ways taking those ideas and are redefining and elaborating on them.

While he has been getting a fair amount of exposure, Paul Slocum has for years been working within pre-existing systems; deconstructing video games, consumer electronics and internet culture, and in the process, exploiting inherent flaws to explore and rework our understanding of, and connection to, the media that saturates our lives.

In his last large work, You’re Not  My Father, Slocum created a sequence of recreations of a 10 second scene from the television show, Full House, and overlaid the video with a set of sound loops from the scene’s original music.  Crews were assembled to re-shoot the scene through Internet message boards and Craigslist, using a set of precise instructions that Slocum devised.  In spite of the choreographed blocking and dialogue, the scene is never the same; perpetually out of sync and echoed with looping canned music, the scene and the basic premise of the show itself undoes itself before your eyes.

Along a similar, if differently angled path is the work of Mike Kelley.  In 1995, Kelley created his best known work, Educational Complex, an combined model of every school he attended along with the house he grew up in, leaving out the parts he couldn’t remember.  The piece, resembling a modernist architectural model that describes, as Howard Singerman, put it, “the failures of memory and the constrictions of fiction.”

Existing simultaneously as a compositional exercise and an autobiographical tableau, Educational Complex is in many ways an homage to artistic instruction.  Trained in the tradition of abstract formalism, Kelley’s Complex is ordered accordance to Hans Hoffmans’s push and pull ideas of structure and appearance; Kelley is using formal language to echo is own artistic genesis.

Using that which you know is of course nothing new, but in a world in which information is instantly available and utterly decontextualized, this work seems more relevant and immediately accessible than it might have ever seemed before.  It is this playful readability that makes this work all the more interesting.

Finally, in light of all of this appropriation, it seems quite appropriate-

-Collin

After two years as your professor I am happy to have the chance to publicy express my great pride, admiration and excitement for the things you have accomplished.  Never have I been so inspired, challenged, and honored to share the classroom with such students.  Your individual talents and ideas spring from wells of incredible depth, and it has been ever exciting to see how you all have begun to draw upon your potential as artists.  I look forward to seeing the work you will make and hope that through your continued exploration of the world you can inspire others in the same ways you have inspired me.

The world you enter now is a tough one.  Even after years of hard work and higher education, getting your work seen will be difficult.  Disappointment, disillusion and confusion will be ready to pounce upon you at every corner, especially in an art world where a cat can receive artistic accolades, major publication and gallery shows.

While you may not all have nine lives, you have certainly been trained on more than kibbles and bits.  Hold on to the confidence you have in your talent and remember that you have an alma mater that will continue to support you as well as professors who are very proud of you.  I have every bit of confidence that you will do great things.  So here’s to you, Class of ’09 – may you find even greater success than Cooper.

/ jared

Its a real simple site.  All you need is hosting and a domain name.

-will

I have to say I am quite happy that I chose to review a large show, although originally I found myself leaning the opposite direction. Academically speaking, initially I would have preferred to dig in to a show that is more congruent with the level that my work is at, to gain a better view on where I fit into the continuum. Going to a place like the Hirshhorn fulfills something different in me, something more akin to my experiences with art as a child in such places, and the Louise Bourgeois show reminded me of what and why that is.
The artist herself is quite a force, her work spanning an incredible period of time and developing and changing with such ingenuity and continuity in a way that any artist should aspire to. The simple fact alone that well into her nineties she is still producing work (with her own hands) that is just as relevant as any she has ever made is daunting. To me, she symbolizes the fact that art first and foremost comes from the heart and the mind, and hers is just as sharp as it ever was.

While all of these facts are inspiring to say the least, they are aside from my real point. Above all the work, what the show really did for me was remind me of how art can communicate with and be accessible to everyone, whether or not they consider themselves to exist as part of the ‘art world’. The issues and symbols/symbolism present in Bourgeois’ work, while stemming from a highly personal place, manifest in ways that are utterly universal. Whether she is dealing with sexuality and femininity, memories and childhood traumas, pain, angst, and depression (to name a few), or any combination thereof, she reminds of the connection every individual has with our greater humanity. As I observed myself in relation to others moving through the exhibition, it was clear that, while assessing the work from completely different contexts, my experience and that of the nine-year-old girl and her father trailing through ahead of me could very well culminate in the same manner.

Of all the work in the show (and I must say Louise Bourgeois’ variety of talent in media and forms of expression is something to be rivaled) I was most struck by her Cells and her Spiders. The inspiration behind her Cells stems from her dealings with memory and the resonance that the Freudian concept of childhood trauma holds with her. Most of the Cells are arranged in a spiral form, a symbol that is as old as human history. They are physically inaccessible, forcing the viewer to crane from the available angles to try to get a complete view. They contain artifacts from the artist’s life as well as ones that she has crafted herself, and are arranged in ways that are just as meaningful and frustrating as anyone’s memory. Some of the works verge on quite disturbing, chiefly Cell (Choisy) (1990-93), which features a model of her family home surrounded by a cage above which is suspending a guillotine. Her work Spider (1997), is a confluence of the two aforementioned bodies of work: a giant spider (for Bourgeois a positive symbol of the maternal) crouches over a spot-lit cage which houses an empty chair and various time-keeping devices.

The show runs through May 17th, and I highly recommend anyone who hasn’t to go see it before it comes down (if my encouragement is not convincing enough, I will say that the artist who suggested I go has seen it six times)!

-Brianna Schroeder

(c) alex roman

A lot of work to get a Holga image…

Guantanimo was in the air as a new president promised to confront the issue of the detainees and as a new work was being shown at Washington DC’s Transformer Gallery. The artist of the work is New York based Julia Mandle; the work Fabrication of Blindness/Fabricating rain is an interactive instillation showing at Transformer Gallery, from March 21 to April 25.

Mandle’s inspiration for this work was a moving photograph by photographer Jean-Marc Bouju. The photo was of a hooded detainee covering his son’s eyes. The instillation as a whole has layering aspects that include – or exclude – participation from the viewer. Even not participating is in a sense answering a question about involvement and complicity.

There are many small details involved in the work. The first thing you see is a billowing instillation of military grade sandbags protruding from the ceilings down to the floor. This is reminiscent of Duchamp’s instillation of bags of coal that were suspended from the ceiling in the “International Exhibition of Surrealism” of 1938. It creates a sense of apprehension in the space. Embroidered bags were carefully arranged into an organized pile on the floor, allowing the curious a peek at details without revealing the whole story.

On the wall was a general statement from the artist that gave the viewer a direction ask to embroider a sandbag. Gallery staff was available to explain and give direction on how and what to sew. In the back of the gallery is a little table containing the extra bags, some sewing paraphernalia and files. On the exterior of the files are the individual stories of detainees and inside are the poems that were written by that person. What you had to do is find a poem that spoke to you and embroider it on the interior of the bag.

The work, on it’s own, is powerful. The casual viewer doesn’t need a degree in art to understand the subtleties of the piece and take allot of meaning away from the work. However, unless you were brave enough to ask to sew, you would miss allot of the little gems that were offered by the staff, as direct information that was needed to instruct you or as asides that would be dropped while they were talking to you.

Like Duchamp, she has considered how to use the space available to her advantage. Transformer being a more intimate gallery forces you to get up close and personal with the work, but it is made clear by the watchful eyes of the gallery employees that you are not to touch. This adds the tension of the work in the space.

When all is said and done, this was a powerful work. Considering the current political climate, the instillation is not necessarily designed to insight you to a great rage. On the contrary it is designed to influence and inform. I found the delicate subtleties of the many layers of the entire instillation to be simple but very clever and very refreshing. It is not always easy to make political work without being heavy handed, but she does manage to walk a fine line with extreme grace and thought.

Why Cats Matter as Never Before.

via: Hoogrrl.

-w

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/magazine/2009-inauguration-gallery/index.html

I located a transcript of the essay hosted on a Georgetown website, and found her list of random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp to be particular interesting.  One of these was “certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards,” which got me to thinking about a Campy contemporary turn-of-the-century picture postcard maker I referred Jake to last week, Wilhelm Staehle.  Staelhe describes himself as “a horribly dis-figured gentleman who often frightens small children when he emerges from the seclusion of his sprawling estate on the eastern coast of the Americas” and enjoys “sporting for wild game and dressing his disturbingly broad collection of taxidermy.”  His punny paper cutouts are combined with cheeky captions and vintage painting.

Besides his own blog and site Staehle runs a zine, the Dollar Dreadful Family Library, featuring work that seems best suited for your favorite steampunk pal.  The Dollar Dreadful is advertised as follows: “There is something to be found for all, be it occult adventures, mysterious crimes, woodsmen, foreign lands, or domestic disputes!“  Its all completely Campy, but fun and lighthearted and visually interesting.

The resurrection of an outmoded craft like paper cutting certainly makes camp in Camp, and as I thought about the resurrection of antique processes like Jake’s resurrection of the stereograph, I stumbled across some great stereographs from the 40′s or 50′s from the Square America website entitled “The Bar Mitzvah and Other Tales of Living in Stereo.”  Square America collects all sorts of snapshot pictures – much like those featured in the recent “Art of the American Snapshot” show at NGA.  In regarding photographs like these Sontag writes:

“…the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don’t perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own. This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It’s not a love of the old as such. It’s simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment — or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.“

Above is one half of a fantastic Weiner dog stereograph that you MUST see in full effect HERE.

Great, huh?!? Definitely not banal…

On a final note on camp as it relates back to Siobahn’s pictures, I found some connection to editorial/fashion photographer Lars Botten’s beautifully strange and sensual pictures of models in masks.  His “Disguise” portfolio falls somewhere between Meatyard’s photographs and Aerosmith’s “Crazy” video. How about that for a connection of references, huh?

Oh, the joys of Camping!

/ jared

First, a pretty film put together by West&ByDesign group, that is less artist bio and more artist statement for Brit photographer Luke Mitchell.  If only we could all have artist statements like this.  I enjoy what he says about his work and his approach to making photographs – especially the idea of chewing up influences, having a cup of tea and then photographing whatever you spit out.  I’ve transcribed his words from the opening statement below.

“…its been a lot about taking influence from different things, and you start off by taking influence from kind of just one sort of area.  It has worked out better by taking a bite of what’s in the newspaper, or the music that gets to you the most, the painter who you most want to be, the poet thats speaking about you, the book thats talking about the life you want to have…and you can just kind of chew that up, have a cup of tea and depending on how angry you are at the time, spit it out and take a photograph of it.  So these pictures are all about the act of something – the act of something that is quite universal to people.  I want to kind of make them in a way that you could just always paint yourself into them – they’re not going to be that blank looking, but you could put yourself into the situation; maybe not see yourself there, but certainly make it yours because each picture has such a solid story behind it or idea, but lots of other things kinda get roped in along the way.”

—–

And for the second film in the double feature, “Hello Goodbye” (view it HERE) by Thomas Webber, which reminds me a great deal of Will’s film work – specifically his “Misty Men” piece.

/ jared