Dissing the Stedelijk Museum’s new Mels Crouwel–designed wing, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman off-handedly compared the building to a “ridiculous” bathroom tub that suggested to him the sensation of “hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit.” On the speed-rail ride back to Paris from a visit to the Amsterdam institution, it occurred to me that he completely got it wrong. Mels Crouwel did not give the museum a tub; he gave it a captivating sarcophagus, an often tub-shaped funeral receptacle designed to hold a corpse. And that is as it should be. After all, modernism is long dead.
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The NEA Four, now in residence at the New Museum, were denied National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants in 1990, after Congress passed a “decency clause.” How has arts funding changed in the past 20 years? Its current state would certainly “disabuse just about anyone of the idea that pursuing an artistic career in 21st-century America is a romantic enterprise.”
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Lately there has been a rising trend of artist-run schools and programs popping up throughout the country: Trade School, the School for Creative Activism, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and New York Arts Practicum, to name just a few in New York. While this is not an entirely new phenomenon, perhaps the current manifestation is a response to exponentially rising tuition prices as well as stagnant employment opportunities for people (such as myself) who have already spent a great deal on their education thus far. Discontent with the current art school model also seems to be an increasingly common attitude among students and faculty alike.
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Stylistically innovative painters outnumber those who have reassessed the accepted conventions of painting. For the most part, artists engaged with issues of style accept certain conventions, particularly regarding spatiality, while those who reevaluate painting find ways to undo assumptions and received tropes. Catherine Murphy belongs in the latter group. Her painting, “Snowflakes (for Joyce Robins)” (2011) is square, a format we associate with high modernist abstraction and artists such as Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin.
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CHICAGO — In case you haven’t been keeping up with the school closing crisis in Chicago or the continuing escalation of gun violence, the experience of youth in the hella screwed-up public education system just became even more brutal. The Chicago Board of Education is now defending the classroom ban of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis in 7th through 10th grade classrooms, satisfying its desire to dictate and restrict how the book is read and taught.
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When I first heard about Tilda Swinton’s “The Maybe,” an ongoing performance piece in which the actress sporadically sleeps in a glass box at the Museum of Modern Art, I sighed and shrugged and laughed a little. Another unoriginal work becomes a cultural flashpoint — cause for media outcry, cause for real, live spectacle, an unexciting performance sold to ticket-buying tourists as avant-garde. What can you do? But “The Maybe” wormed its way into my head, and I found myself confoundedly returning to it often. It was only a week or two later, and after reading Jason Farago’s takedown in The New Republic, that I realized why I cared: middlebrow.
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I met Edward Avedisian by chance at Max’s Kansas City when I sat down next to him at the bar. Otis Redding filled the air. “You know,” Edward turned to me and said, “Ultimately what pop-music is all about is hiring someone to cry in public for you.” He watched for my response, eyes alert beneath his remarkably high forehead. I would come to know that ‘ultimately.’ It was a regular conversational preface, because, as Edward later explained, it was his desire “to describe everything without reference to any convention.”
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We’ve heard the argument that everyone’s a curator online by means of blogging and reblogging, but what about the professional curators who are responsible for producing major physical exhibitions — how are they using social platforms? The ability to publicly explore new theories, archive research, and participate in creative communities, has signaled a new era of openness and transparency in curatorial practice. One example is the research blog that accompanied Paola Antonelli’s Talk to Me exhibition in 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art. The site, stunningly bold and rigorous in its approach, chronicled projects to research, readings, and inspirational ideas for exhibition design. By providing visitors with a backstage tour, Antonelli and her team aimed to shed an honest light on curatorial process, revealing over a year’s worth of research that lead to the exhibition.
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On the eve of web 2.0, there were a few sites emerging like Zing.com, an early place for photo sharing. The technology of self-surveillance wasn’t up to speed at that point to make them stick though. Facebook and smartphones would go on to complete the social shift to “sharing.” “Overexposed Dancing” was one of our early works that anticipated this change.
From 1997 to 2003, we worked together on a series of internet art performances, all of which were archived on Cary’s website, Restlessculture.net. Our performances took place on eBay, Evite, Ofoto, MySpace, and a host of other early social media sites that no longer exist. Taking off from Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade, we called these performances “digital readymades.”
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This brief essay will focus on something that I think is important to Tumblr — the need to negotiate with media already in circulation. It is a desire that has been expressed variously throughout the 20th century by other artists and writers who negotiated, or thought about how to negotiate, with a world overflowing with images. Already in the 1980s you have media theorist Vilém Flusser describing a “telematic society of image producers and image collectors.” Before that Susan Sontag had already discussed how just about everything had already been photographed. Today, Hito Steyerl emphasizes that “postproduction has come to take over production wholesale.”
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