Has the Internet Made Everyone an Artist? panel at Internet Week (all photos & screencaps by the author for Hyperallergic)

Artists in the digital age and presenting art online, as well as exhibiting online art in offline spaces, were the focus of a couple of panels at Internet Week, a citywide festival examining the digital landscape that was held May 14 to 21. While art was definitely not central to much of Internet Week, these two panels, “Has the Internet Made Everyone an Artist?” and “Digital Gallery,” brought it into the wider dialogue on the involvement of individuals and institutions in the spread of ideas through the internet, and melding these ideas with the physical world. Both of these panels can be streamed online below.

Technical difficulties and crowd noise did make many of the Internet Week panels difficult to hear, and the titles of both panels were a little misleading, but they enabled some interesting discussion between arts professionals who are definitely participating in and influencing how art and the internet will continue to be intertwined.

“Has the Internet Made Everyone an Artist?” on Wednesday was moderated by CJ Follini, the Co-Founder & CEO of WelcometoCOMPANY.com, and it included Paola Antonelli, senior curator at MoMA, artist Ivan Toth Depeña, artist Sarah Small and Susi Kenna, the director of Contemporary Art for Excursionist. Despite its title, the panel was really more about the challenges for artists on the internet and for museums that collect and exhibit digital art. Click here to stream it online.

"Shape/Shift," an interactive installation by Ivan Toth Depeña, Jack Kalish, Catherine McCurry and Gabriella Levine

All of the panelists believed that the internet is a benefit to artists in terms of visibility and accessibility to opportunities for funding and exhibits, but that it is also a challenge to show work in a way that adequately represents it, or compliments its real world equivalent. Sarah Small, whose Tableau Vivant performances involve hundreds of participants, said that while the internet is a great form of exposure, she prefers to be hands on and personable. The videos of her work are meant to be documentation, not the art itself.

Ivan Toth Depeña, who worked on the “Shape/Shift” interactive video installation at Internet Week that used 3D data taken from the event to create an increasingly complex abstract visual, stated that the public access to the internet, and the curatorial launching pad it can be, are beneficial, but that presence doesn’t equal artistic existence. There’s still a tangibility that needs to be experienced offline.

However, there is also that art created to be experienced online, often for an early internet that no longer exists. Paola Antonelli of MoMA has worked extensively with design in new media through curating exhibits like Design and the Elastic Mind (2008) and Talk to Me (2011), as well as in her first MoMA exhibit Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design (1995), for which she even set up a website before one existed for the MoMA itself (which you can still view online). She emphasized that art has to be experienced in the context for which it was created and said that MoMA conservators look to get the code for digital art so that it can be preserved in spite of changes in online formats.

Antonelli also brought up that even online art cannot be completely fleeting, especially if digital art is to be something that is collected. Yet as Susi Kenna pointed out, people have long been buying art that is not permanent, purchasing more the idea. She and the other panelists all agreed that the internet was a discovery tool, not a place where they go to purchase non-digital art, though one wonders if that is true anymore since the rise of the VIP online only art fair and other online art services (Artspace, 20×200, Artsicle, etc.). Yet in presenting art, the internet still lacks the physical resonance of a studio visit.

On Thursday, the “Digital Gallery” panel was concentrated on bringing tech works into museums and transporting collections and art to the web. The panel was moderated by Julia Kaganskiy, the global editor of Vice’s The Creators Project, and included Piotr Adamczyk, data lead for the Google Art Project, Christiane Paul, the director of Media Studies Graduate Programs and associate professor of Media Studies at the New School, John Rothenberg, a partner in Sosolimited, and Zoë Salditch, program director at Rhizome. Click here to stream it online.

Like the “Has the Internet Made Everyone an Artist?” panel, there was a lot of talk on how work online is often a documentation of the original piece, and therefore a separate experience. There was also more discussion on accessibly, although this panel got deeper into the ideas of ownership on the web, exploring the fact that although all this art is viewable online to anyone at anytime, that doesn’t mean it is owned by the public. It can instead be a new form of public art, with Zoë Salditch mentioning Rafaël Rozendaal, who builds websites that are created as works of art that are sold to collectors, yet still viewable by the public online.

The platforms for experiencing art online have greatly evolved in design and functionality in recent years, especially through the Google Art Project, which Piotr Adamcyzk said aims to have the best and most standardized online documentation of the pieces on the site. While the Google Art Project still can’t replicate experiencing works in person, it does allow viewers to see at once works by an artist that may be scattered around the world.

With the internet being a great portal to discovering art, bringing digital art to a museum audience remains a challenge, with most museums not even having the infrastructure to display it. Christiane Paul, who organized Cory Archangel’s Pro Tools (2011) at the Whitney, said that a whole network had to be installed for that exhibition and an antenna placed on the roof, and that ongoing support came from the museum’s IT department, which technically was responsible for the offices and not the galleries. Then there are the conceptual challenges in communicating this art to an audience who doesn’t understand the material, and also to those who understand the technology, but not how it relates to art.

Like Pro Tools and art found online, it is hard to replicate the specific aesthetic attained through each piece of technology or a certain version of a browser. As Piotr Adamcyzk said, net art doesn’t expose its own process like paintings, and it isn’t possible to easily see all the original technology that went into a piece. John Rothenberg estimates only 5% of Sosolimited‘s audience sees its interactive environments and multi-sensory installations in their original form, with the rest experiencing representations online. Christiane Paul stated that it was important to move fast with best practices of conservation, and that some net art has already been lost because it worked with some glitch in an old web browser or other outmoded technology. Nevertheless, she said that the success of games preservation gives her hope, and that there are those collecting hardware and writing emulations so that these works can be preserved and viewable in their original platforms.  Zoë Salditch said this preservation is important as a legacy to the future of what was seen by the web audience of the past.

While art and technology have always overlapped, the panels at Internet Week on art in the digital age demonstrated just how much the lines have blurred between the two, and how discussing their relationship to the rest of the web and art at large is especially pertinent now.

Internet Week was May 14 to 21 in New York City. 

A sculpture from the Getty collect reassures itself that everything is alright (via flickr.com/thegetty)

Earlier this month, the J. Paul Getty Trust announced that it was cutting 34 jobs in its museum division. In and of itself, this wasn’t huge news; despite the absurdly booming art market, the national economy continues to sag, meaning museums have to contend with smaller endowments and less generous donors.

While museum cuts are nothing new, the Getty case is notable because of the fact that the cuts fall almost entirely on the institution’s education department. The education staff will decrease from 51 employees to 32, according to the LA Times, and Chasing Aphrodite reported that of the 17 gallery teachers employed, only five will keep their jobs. Curatorial and conservation staffs remain untouched, although there are a handful of layoffs in other areas, such as visitors services.

The Times summed up the major change to the education department:

Volunteer docents, trained by the remaining professional staff, will replace the paid teachers who had led tours of the galleries by students and other groups of visitors. “I think that was unique to the Getty,” [Getty President James] Cuno said, so reassigning the tours to volunteers would bring it in line with the standard practice at other museums.

But are docents really standard practice at most other museums? And even if so, does standard practice mean best practice? The Getty has long been known for its fantastic education program, which no doubt derives in large part from the number of highly skilled, paid museum educators employed the museum. “They have a world-famous reputation for providing some of the highest quality museum education instructional materials available anywhere,” Bob Sabol, president of the National Art Education Association, told Hyperallergic. This begs the question: Why gut and restructure a department that already works so well?

The Getty’s James Cuno offered two reasons for the cuts. The first is saving money, an expected total of $4.3 million annually, which will be redirected to acquisitions. “Acquisitions are at the heart of the Museum’s mission — education, exhibitions, and research flow from the Museum’s collection,” Cuno told Hyperallergic in a written statement. “The funds we saved from the reorganization restore the Museum’s acquisitions budget to its previous levels.”

At the Getty Museum (image via Flickr user CAHairyBear)

Still, it’s hard not to be skeptical of how helpful an extra $4.3 million will be in today’s market. Lindsay Ash, a former Getty educator, wrote to Hyperallergic via email:

The Getty is not known for being an institution with a world renowned art collection. They were famous for their Education Department. Now they have neither. I can’t see how the financial savings from one will contribute significantly to the other. Did you see what ‘The Scream’ sold for recently? What does a $4.3 million savings per annum get you in the art world?

Of course it’s worth noting that not every piece that goes up for auction is “The Scream” — presumably smaller, lesser-known works would be more affordable. But George Hein, a former Getty visiting scholar and a museum education expert, told Hyperallergic that when he was there, “the museum spent $45 million on one painting.” And considering the Getty’s $5.6 billion endowment in mid-2011 and its $269.8 million budget in 2010–11, $4.3 million does seem somewhat meager.

The second reason given for the changes is that by reducing costs in the education department, i.e. by bringing in volunteers, the museum can then offer more tours — essentially, increasing tours while decreasing professional, paid staff. Sound familiar? This seems to fall in line with today’s all-too-common workplace phenomenon that less can somehow be more (and that unpaid interns or volunteers can do much of the work).

“If this is happening with just increasing the number of docents, they may have an increased number, but they may not meet their educational mission,” said Sabol. “The museum education staff play a vitally essential role in meeting the museum’s mission. Without that, the docents will basically be relying on their own knowledge.”

In other words, docents are great, but museums need professional educators to train them.

In his statement to Hyperallergic, Cuno countered that the quality of the department’s offerings would not suffer:

This new approach will not reduce our educational programs or the quality of teaching available at the Museum. We have a staff in the Education Department of more than 30 professionals. Five gallery instructors will remain on staff to work with college, adult, VIP, and some school-age audiences. They also will play a major role in the training of a new corps of volunteer instructors, who will enable us to provide far more guided tours than we were previously able to provide.

He went on to provide some numbers, saying that last year, only 39,000 out of 114,000 students who visited the Getty had guided tours given by gallery instructors; the rest were self-guided or had “minimal assistance” from the museum. “An expanded docent teaching corps, carefully selected and expertly trained by our experienced gallery instructors, along with the development of multimedia tours, will enable us to meet our goal of 100% guided tours within the constraints of our budget,” Cuno wrote.

But students aren’t the only group that need or receive tours, and the fact remains that there are only five gallery instructors left to handle college, adult, VIP and some school audiences, as well as to help ensure that the new docent “corps” is, in fact, expertly trained. That sounds like very few people spread very thin, which could affect how good the training is, and thus the tours.

Hein elaborated on the issue of quality: “The big question is what is the museum educator’s background?” he said. “Educators often come out of art historical backgrounds. They know about education, human development, leading groups. Whether volunteer docents are likely to be as good is a good question.” One would assume they have the potential to be, but only after learning extensively from the professionals. And what about the consistency, dedication and creativity of a volunteer docent who comes to the museum one or two days a week versus those of someone who’s pursued a full-time career in museum education? (Not to knock docents — we think they’re great! They’re just different.)

Hein also brought up another interesting and related problem — the diversity of tour guides:

The probability that volunteer docents will reflect the range of society that you want to reach in your tours is very low, because they are people who are free on weekdays during working hours who volunteer their time. It’s very unlikely you’re going to get a lot of working-class folks in that category. If you want to have people who are more able to reflect your community, then I think you would work hard to get a larger range of people and you would pay them.

It’s too early to say how exactly these cuts will affect the Getty’s education department and the quality of its output, but people in the museum education world are concerned — and seemingly with good reason. A 2004 article in Spiked quotes Cuno’s book Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust, in the process offering insight into what the current Getty director sees as the limits and pitfalls of museum education:

“‘ … [M]useums can supplement education, but the classroom has proved to be the best way of educating people. … Museums are saying: ‘we can keep children off drugs, we can improve test scores. When that doesn’t happen, what have you got left?’ Once they’ve abandoned their mission, ‘museums are left with no justification.’”

But Bob Sabol has a different view:

You think about the museum more as a classroom rather than a warehouse. It’s a place where people go to learn about art. It’s not simply a place where a collection is housed so that it can be protected — it’s there for a purpose. Everybody that goes to a museum is there to learn, whether they realize it or not. If the people that come don’t feel that they have met their reason for going, they’re not going to continue to come.

This conflict, between those who view collections and conservation as the most important part of a museum’s mission and those who think education is equally important is, Hein pointed out, “nothing new.” He quoted Nathaniel Burt’s 1977 book Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art Museum. In it, Burt writes, “There is that battle, still contentious, between Instruction and Joy. Are museums Universities of Vision or Churches of the Eye?”

Thirty-five years later, we’re still fighting it.

Pippin Barr, "The Artist Is Present" game screen shot (image courtesy moma.org, click to enlarge)

It’s a sunny Friday morning in midtown Manhattan, and at the education building of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the second day of the conference “Critical Play — The Game as an Art Form” begins its debates. I’m no video gaming expert, but with 50 other physical attendees and many more over live stream, I vow to learn how video games can be better understood within an art context, as they’ve been the new art frontier for some time. Why are they less recognized in the art world than, say, video art? The obvious and overwhelming plus to video games are their interactive capabilities. How does this quality relate to artistic and exhibition practice? And the big question for museums: how can it be effectively assimilated, or creatively reappropriated, to engage audiences?

The day begins with a discussion about the role of video games in our society, culture and politics. James Paul Gee kicks off by introducing Plato’s criticism of painting and writing: both were frustrating, the philosopher said, because they couldn’t “talk back.” Gee suggests that Plato would have liked the interaction of video games, adding that, “Video games are art in that conversation is art.” Gee’s ambition to afford video gaming the same credibility as literature is outlined on his website, where he offers this rather radical assertion:

Books are a powerful technology. They can lead to aggression and violence (witness the Bible, the Koran, and the Turner Diaries in the wrong hands). Nazi Germany was a highly literate society. Games, so far, do not have this much power, but some day they may.

James Paul Gee showing how players use theory to build their game in the video game Spore (all conference photos by the author for Hyperallergic; click to enlarge)

There is, however, a strong point to his argument that, unlike books, video gaming’s strengths are in its immersive, discovery-oriented interaction and its possibility for collaboration. Video games like Spore encourage players to understand the statistical underpinnings of the game design in order to improve their play. This type of game changes the role of the player from passive consumer to active producer by successfully merging science (game theory) with art (game design). A curator from the the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art asks Gee what role the art museum plays in regards this infinite video game space. For time being, the question remains unanswered.

Instead, the topic turns to violence, and for a moment it seems like the conference may fall into the abyss of video game bashing. Instead, Christopher Robbins gives a talk titled “The Play of Punishment in the Culture of Cruelty,” which intelligently discusses the way the latent conditioning of societal role-plays perpetuated by video games are often affiliated with the agenda of “Big Brother.” Robbins highlights the close relationship between the U.S. Department of Defense and video gaming. Given that video games are a $7 billion dollar industry, it seems curious that the U.S. Army uses venture capital to fund video games in the real world. Games such as Ghost Recon: Future Soldier are used to increase interest in the army and even recruit new soldiers.

Robbins asks four important questions:

• Who frames social problems posed in games?
• Who produces materials, and in whose interest?
• Under what conditions does play take shape?
• How are the attitudes of community translated through games?

Still from Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (image via kotaku.com)

Interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco begins her presentation with the disclaimer that it is impossible to gauge the relationship between video games and violence. Her stance is one of a parent concerned for her child’s well-being. Building off of Robbins’s talk, she attempts to give an overview of both the positives and negatives of social and cultural paradigms portrayed in video games. Some interesting facts and figures emerge: By the age of 18, the typical American child has seen 40,000 murders on screen. A random and isolated statistic, no doubt, but quite harrowing.

In addition, 80% of video games are based on the action of killing. Despite this, the American Psychological Association states, “Psychological research confirms that violent video games can increase children’s aggression but that parents moderate the negative effects.” Fusco responds to this with a pointed reality check, explaining that parents, especially from lower income groups, are too busy working to be able to monitor their children’s use of video games.

Next comes “From Hello World! to Hello Nails! Videogames and Design,” moderated by MoMA Senior Curator Paola Antonelli. This discussion looks at the aesthetics and design of video games, from the cosmic to the banal — and finally engages video games as artworks. Artist Scott Snibbe’s mildly interesting presentation references his own work, including “Boundary Functions” (1998), which uses the presence of physical bodies to create a kind of projected visual game; it feels dated.

However, this is succeeded by MoMA Curatorial Assistant Kate Carmody, who offers an upbeat discussion of Area/Code’s “Conqwest” (2003–05) and “Crossroads” (2006) [pictured in the video above], both “video games” that are played in real time. The latter, in true Pac-man style, has participants run away from virtual characters through the streets of the West Village, tracking their progress on their mobile phones. The game is simultaneously ephemeral and real, requiring physical immersion and player improvisation. The conversation finally begins to address the interactive potential of the medium in art.

Online video games for conference-goers to play

Carrying through on this in the break, conference attendees are invited to play a series of games around the education wing. These include online computer games, iPad games and physical interaction games set up by artists in classrooms, including a series of actions mapped out by artist Pedro Reyes that playfully border on performance.

The final respondent panel offers a fiery and poignant discussion. Three of the four panelists offer provocative ideas:

The final respondent panel (click to enlarge)

Kevin Slavin, independent consultant:

Video gaming allows one to step outside of consequences or conventions of taboo. In this way, play allows us to interrogate what we desire to enact and opens a space to think about these systems of interactions.

Erica Gangsei, manager of interpretive media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:

Appropriating games into a fine art context can be very interesting, as artwork can subvert a game by refusing to use its mechanics or adhere to its specified goals.

Daphne Dragona, independent new media curator:

The difference between the museum and the video game is a sense of place. The museum is embodied by the aura and sacredness of objects, versus a video game that challenges borders and breaks rules.

Kevin Slavin again:

Exhibition infrastructures are designed around the eye, which is only one part of a multi-sensory experience of a video game.

I leave the conference hall feeling like the potential to use video gaming “for good” is a no-brainer. Why are museums reticent to use it in education and exhibition practices if it makes the audience experience that much more interactive and engaging? And why are artists less prone to working in this medium when video itself has been successfully integrated into mainstream creative practice? Is it because video gaming is considered, in the words of panelist Kevin Slavin, a “low form of culture”?

A tweet on the MoMA “Critical Play” website two days prior to the conference preempts this less optimistic view of video games becoming a valid artistic medium:

Roger Ebert (2010): “no living video gamer will survive long enough to experience games as art form.” #MoMACriticalPlay http://t.co/9Ya0XEkF

May 16, 2012 2:29 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@rflouty

Rosanna Flouty

(Images of bees via thevintagemoth.blogspot.com)

I waited a week to see what reaction there might be to Holland Cotter’s summary dismissal of 21st-century art, but so far, few takers.

Cotter’s pronouncement — laid out in the third and fourth paragraphs of his review of the Frieze Art Fair — was relatively matter-of-fact:

The gentrification of contemporary art itself is an old story in two parts. Part one is about a 20th­century model of an avant-­garde, with artists as feisty cultural delinquents and idiot savants who set themselves outside the mainstream to make baffling things and think deep thoughts.

In part two, set in the 21st century, the model has changed. Now artists, whether they know it or not, are worker bees in an art-industrial hive. Directed by dealers and collectors who dress like stylish accountants, they turn out predictable product for high-­profile, high-­volume fairs like Frieze.

One blogger, Paul Corio of No Hassle at the Castle, responded this way:

The fact that Cotter was able to run this down with such brevity shows not only his knack for concision, but also how familiar the story is by now. Just about anyone interested in reading a review of Frieze already knows this stuff; very little historical framing is required.

While Corio acknowledges that there are many who “find the whole thing extremely distasteful,” including “participants and beneficiaries,” he reminds us that art “has always been a career path” and that those who create “the best examples of the art” most prized by a particular culture also “become highly paid professionals.”

I have no argument with that, or with much else in Corio’s post, which includes a critique of the institutionalization of institutional critique.

As he suggests, it should be a given that if a society wants art, it must support its artists in a material way.

But in the U.S. (as opposed to the government assistance distributed in pre-financial-crisis Europe), the cultural support system for visual artists is rife with ethical issues related to the high cost and commodification of the art object — the very object that happens to be the prime focus of fairs like Frieze.

Cotter’s assertion, as Corio notes, is a familiar story — that is to say, a recapitulation of received ideas.

But what is most bothersome is its glib disregard for historical nuance, romanticizing the past’s makers of “baffling things” and thinkers of “deep thoughts,”  while categorizing current artists as either the willing pawns or the unwitting dupes of high rolling “dealers and collectors who dress like stylish accountants.”

Perhaps it’s because I have yet to attend an art fair (its novelty has never had enough appeal to carve out the time to go, which I suppose would be a journalistic failing if I considered myself a journalist), and so my nerve endings remain unsinged by the reputed toxicity of an art mall.

Consequently, it would seem, I haven’t developed the requisite degree of cynicism to properly navigate the shoals of 21st-century art.

Cotter isn’t the first to refer to art-world worker bees. That distinction might rest (as far as my Googling can tell) with Jerry Saltz, who used the term in a review of the 2009 Venice Biennale (though he is referring not to artists but presumably to those without whom the show could not go on — fabricators, art handlers, installers, registrars et alia):

… by my having skipped last week’s press preview and the opening hoopla  … I missed the international bigwigs, artists, dealers, curators, and thousands of art-world worker bees.

This quote is apropos of nothing other than to segue (vis-à-vis the Biennale and the art-world class structure Saltz inventories) to the question that I believe cuts to the heart of the matter: who chooses?

Like it or not, we have an official visual culture, and that culture is determined by an entrenched hierarchy. This is no different from any other historical era, though the hierarchy has evolved from emperors, popes, cardinals and kings to museum directors, biennial curators, collectors, gallery owners and select members of the media.

And this official culture is no less fallible than the one that once considered Guido Reni (1575–1642, aka “The Divine Guido”) to be the greatest of all Italian artists.

But it can also bring to the fore the most noteworthy artists of our time. I first saw the work of Regina José Galindo in the Venice Biennale of 2005, El Anatsui in the Biennale of 2007, and Adrián Villar Rojas in this year’s Triennial at the New Museum.

These artists cannot remotely be considered “worker bees in an art-industrial hive.” Rather, their art reflects Robert Henri’s sentiment from The Art Spirit (1923):

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.

And so does, oddly enough, the work of the artists I know and care about.

These artists are by and large laboring in the shadow of official culture. Of course they would like to make a living from their art — who wouldn’t?  But they see the act of making as the primary goal. And their choice to live an artist’s life is not subject to the whim of the hierarchy or the market.

The danger that Cotter senses, I assume, is that the art fair will usurp (if it hasn’t already) the museum and the biennial in the official culture game — that the determination of quality will shift from connoisseurship to the price tag. But that dichotomy is such a cliché I could barely bring myself to type it.

If fairs like Frieze draw art and money into uncomfortably close proximity, all that does is state the obvious. To separate them — to pretend that the former can float free of the latter — might appear to be a clean, ethical stance, but that’s a misperception.

To be ethical means to make uncomfortable decisions. Not to avoid the mud, but to understand that everything worth doing entails both gain and loss.

This is the real texture of art and history. Was the Borgias’ money any cleaner than the Rockefellers’?  And did the artists supported by their patronage “turn out predictable product” for their collections?

Perhaps some did, but the ones we still esteem, even as they took the same money, made their own choices and followed their own lights.

If that’s the way it was then, why should it be any different now?

Marianne Slevin, Doolin, Ireland (site)

There is nearly always music in my studio. Two unstretched canvases of dresses and roses hang from driftwood and another one out of view, though these are pieces from a different body of work. The stone floor is covered in driftwood that I collected from the beach. I have been going to our local beach a lot lately, I find it really inspiring, and always come back with more things I find as well as ideas.

On the driftwood I have written in cyan ink my version of Haiku poems, which are usually even more minimal than the three lined ancient Japanese poems. I am quite a chaotic person, as you can see by my studio, but the work I am making at the moment is economic and sparse. I get excited about using a limited amount of materials at a time, working with things that are fragile and almost not there at all!

A series of very delicate rice paper scrolls, with burns from the cinders from a driftwood fire lie on top of my “very organized” giant tupperware boxes of materials and things I will probably need one day. On top of them more rice paper scrolls with ink drawings of shells imitating waves on them. The old shower curtain on the floor was laid out with some shells on it, and I used it as if it were a real wave to disperse them . In view there are drawings on Japanese paper with two colours of ink these are kind of splatter maps.

All of my artwork floats somewhere between accident and intention. If I am not conjuring up interventions I am imitating nature in my studio, using materials and techniques that allow accidents and unexpected surprises to happen. I try to get out of my own way and learn things I could never have imagined.

Ryan Hoyda, Burns Harbor, Indiana (site)

The space is a basement. It’s dry with fluorescent lighting, and covered with tools that adorn pegboards. It’s kind of like a hardware store. On the shelves, I primarily reserve the bottom shelf for acrylics, the middle for oils. I have a variety of premixed colors left over from various pieces. They have sat for a while, but I can’t bring myself to discard them. Brushes tend to be strewn between both, not too haphazardly. I tend to prefer soft brushes. The top shelf typically contains whatever I happened to use most recent, beside the energy drink (Monster Rehab, a friend recommended it after a nasty hangover.)

I use multiple pallets, in constant rotation as they become too saturated with paint. I also like the colors that form, and the way they harden like the skin on top of pudding. I use multiple pieces of wood, or rulers, as straight edges. Yes I cheat. Some of these are made from brick molding, which I use to build my frames. Brick molding has a lip, and its less expensive than stretcher bars, though you need to have the tools.

Rollin Leonard, Portland, Maine (site)

My studio is a squash court on the third floor of a creaky old house. The walls are layered with ovoid marks from thousands of rubber balls and several decades of hasty repainting. I live in a small apartment just off the studio with my girlfriend, a textile designer, who also shares this work space.

The way I work varies but most often involves photography. Seen in this picture are large aluminum frames for screen printing, boxes of tiny wooden blocks I’m sanding for a sculpture, a paper folder that I use to make notebooks, six tables and a dress form that often helps me focus the camera for self portraits.

I rearrange my work space often to make room for sets or large paintings. I find reshuffling my working environment also helps reset my thinking. The great stack on the left (mostly out of view) contains an assortment of tools and materials. Boxes are labeled with masking tape: rope and string, canvas and green screens, lighting, glue, tools, blades, hardware and so on. Usually there are more plants, but they had to be removed for their own safety while I tore the place apart. As a kid my brother and I had a small room designated as the “play room” and with this space I maintain that tradition.

Svava Thordis Juliusson, Hamilton, Ontario (site)

This is my new studio. It’s downtown, on the corner of Canon and James Street North, in the city formerly known as Steel Town. It has the best light, the nicest floors and friendliest spirits.

My work starts on the floor then moves up the walls, and gradually makes its way to the ceiling. The sun moves through the space in much the same way.

Judith Rushin, Tallahassee, Florida (site)

My studio is a converted garage at my house where I live with my husband and two teenage kids. Family life and studio practice are integrated. I like it this way because I no longer see a big difference between the two.

Right now the studio is very messy, meaning I’m in it a lot. My practice is sporadic — slower during teaching months and intense in the summer. On the other side of the windows is a lovely, shady garden. I go there to think, take a break, visit or write.

The column you see on the right side of the image is a stack of canvases. I wanted to literally building with paint, so the canvases became bricks and house paint became the mortar. This piece, like a lot of my work, is modular, so it might be exhibited as a wall in one place and a column in another. Behind the column is a partial view of another work — two salvaged sections of old aluminum siding. I stripped one section bare and had the other powder coated in metallic gold. There was something about the idea of classy garbage in that piece, as well as being naked and clothed.

On the table I’m making paint skins for that flat screen TV mount you see just to the left of the column. And then under the table and beside it are salvaged materials I’ll use at some point. What is not visible in the photo is a wall of storage, some power tools, and, most importantly, a sofa where I spend a lot of my time.

Jayson Musson in conversation with Josh Kline of EAI on Tuesday night (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

Jayson Musson aka Hennessy Youngman aka Mr. AKA’s might proclaim himself to be many things (including Mitt Romney’s drug dealer), but Tuesday night at Electronic Arts Intermix’s (EAI) screening of his web series Art Thoughtz, Musson seemed reluctant to embrace his identity as an art world celebrity. He pointed to the fact that in total, his videos had only received under one million views, which is nothing special in comparison with other YouTube video stars and rather small compared to the truly huge video acts.

And yet, despite his relative insignificance on the world wide web, there he was, in front of a live audience, accepting institutional recognition and an offer to preserve his work in perpetuity offline. (Art Thoughtz is now available through EAI’s distribution service as a hard copy, and an archival purchase of Musson’s best videos, “How to Make Art,” “On Beauty” or “Relational Aesthetics,” costs around $1,000.) Though he started Art Thoughtz on a whim and with nothing more than a webcam, Musson is now more than just a dude on YouTube; he is a prominent voice of the art world on the internet, an embodiment of the changing parameters for success. Although he claims to have no long-term plans, so far he’s been able to parlay his achievements online into ones IRL: a recent curatorial project for Maurizio Cattelan’s Family Business gallery, an upcoming show at a New York gallery and a children’s book to be finished by the end of the month.

Watching "Art Thoughtz" at EAI

Musson’s real-life humility seems perfectly incongruous with his alter ego’s self-aggrandizing persona. Whereas Hennessy Youngman has no qualms about addressing “the internet” at large, Musson seems aware that his reach is actually quite limited. While at first Art Thoughtz might come off as an attempt to make obscure art world ideologies approachable, Musson made it clear while speaking Tuesday night that he didn’t intend for the series to be some sort of populist project. For one, he originally made the videos to be seen in a gallery context, and he doesn’t think the YouTube platform matters, including its comment system (something Will Brand pondered in his write-up on Musson’s EAI inclusion). Musson might care less about his notoriety on the internet given that his primary goal is to be taken seriously as a painter, but his web success has certainly opened doors, and I don’t think he should shy away from claiming to have contributed to a cultural discourse that reaches beyond the art world proper.

The most interesting part of Musson’s shtick is that his critique of MFA-level art world dialogue also serves to highlight the dearth of high-minded content on YouTube and other web video sites. I see Hennessy Youngman as a jester of two courts: the art world, of course, which takes itself too seriously and where laughter is much needed; and web culture, a realm that has become incalculably important, but also known for tomfoolery that rarely demands the intellectual effort often required by fine art. Musson seems to play with the notion that a YouTube video, let alone a meme image, could function as a work of art. He mocks the impossibility of finding (on the internet) some deep insight into the human condition or anything close to the sublime as described by Hennessy Youngman: “The incalculable immensity that will allow me to grasp the finite nature of my own being, y’know what I’m saying?”

Musson and the crowd at EAI

With this in mind, I felt the need to ask Musson a very stupid question: Would you rather have an art-related show on MTV or a solo exhibition at MoMA? “MoMA?!” he retorted, implying that I’d hardly suggested an alternative to the mainstream. So instead I offered the permanent collection at the Met. Musson responded by saying that MTV sucked, and proceeded to discuss the pitfalls of pop culture celebrity, which was encouraging to hear. His idea of “real world” success is finding a place where Jayson, not Hennessy, can make it. And though I wouldn’t mind watching Hennessy Youngman host a Yo! MTV Raps edition of Art Thoughtz, I bet finding a piece by Jayson Musson in a corner of the Met would be better than a double rainbow.

Artists Andy Meerow and Rose Marcus and Recess's Maia Murphy and Allison Weisberg in front of the Soho storefront (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

It’s hard to believe that Recess, the Soho-based nonprofit, is only three years old and has already made significant waves in the city’s art scene as a place where artists are free to explore process in every which way. “It’s a space where you realize projects you can’t realize anywhere else,” founder and executive director Allison Weisberg says, and she really means it.

Situated in a short block and slightly removed from the commercial chaos of Soho, Recess seems to thrive on redefining its complicated role as an incubator of artistic ideas, no matter how seemingly incomplete or conceptual at first. “In the same way that the role of the artist is complicated in this space … they take on the role of curator, art handler, art writer (in terms of press releases) … we wear those many hats too,” Weisberg says. “Our biggest strength is simultaneous clarity in our purpose but openness to stretch and fit the goals of each artist.”

While the clarity of Recess’s mission is apparent when you talk to Weisberg, this is not a nonprofit that can easily be reduced to a blurb. There’s no one-liner that will unlock the door to what the organization does, and that complexity is part of its beauty. Recess is, I’ve learned, a place for conversations and ideas; it doesn’t privilege objects and doesn’t pretend to critique the market as its purpose. Everyone’s initiation into Recess — and don’t call them Recess Art — usually starts by asking the important question, “what exactly is going on here?”

“Recess isn’t a critique of the market or replacement of it but a complement. We want artists to work parallel to the market rather than in it,” she says. “If an artist makes an object — it’s not something we prioritize — and sells it, we don’t take a cut,” Weisberg says. She makes it clear that their goals are creative, not monetary.

The two resident artists, Andy Meerow and Rose Marcus, took some time to speak to me about their current project at Recess. (click to enlarge)

I remember my first complicated — of course — experience at the storefront space a few years ago. I walked up to the door and felt confused by what was going on inside. The space seemed in the process of installation, so I assumed it wasn’t ready for visitors and walked away. Only a few days later during a conversation with a friend did I realize that Recess, in many ways, is always in the process of installation: that’s where the art lies, in the process.

Weisberg explains that Recess was born during her time working as an educator in museums. There she witnessed the difficulty of mounting process-based art for the public in a museum context. She worked as an educator in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and fell in love with the part of the show at the Park Avenue Armory, because of the art’s need to negotiate space. When she decided to open Recess, she chose a Soho location partly for her desire to give emerging and more established artists a place in one of the city’s most commercial districts, while also allowing them to negotiate with a New York streetscape in a direct way.

A year after its founding, Recess brought on Maia Murphy as project manager. Murphy is as committed to the mission as Weisberg: “I didn’t know any other space like this because … [many spaces] are usually about preparing for the unveiling of opening night. Here we don’t have openings or closings but middlings,” she says, echoing Recess’s love of process. “It’s when the artist is halfway there,” Murphy explains.

Artists in Residence

During my visit I met with current artists in residence Rose Marcus and Andy Meerow. They had just started their project, which involves them exploring their friendship, their art and their collaborative impulses in an a way they’re still figuring out.

“Both of use are coming to the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new one,” Marcus said. “We both talk a lot via email, we talk on the phone and we’re classic artist friends. But we’re both shifting a little bit, and we are also asking, ‘what is collaboration?’”

During my visit, the duo were chatting in a space that looked like a cross between a studio and a work room. They had just finished painting the title of Twyla Tharp’s The Collaborative Habit on the window of the storefront, and Meerow said that he had brought in stacks of large, colorless paintings dominated by stark forms.

“We’re aware of the complexity of us making work about us making work. We’re aware of the possible pretentiousness, but we want to play with that,” he said.

Marcus brings to the collaboration her background in art history and her love of conceptual projects. I first met her when she was manning “Booooooth,” a site-specific project in the Napoleon Hall of the 2010 Nada art fair in Miami. It was an exploration of the art fair booth without reducing it into a cliché.

The Recess space on Grand Street

“[At Recess,] we’re available to be observed as an artist, but that begs the question, ‘what’s observable activity?’,” Marcus said. “The private doesn’t exist much [here] unless you plan it.”

In the past, Recess has invited artists to build a water slide in the space or transform it into an artistic version of a hair salon. More recently, they are thinking of ways to accommodate an artist who is interested in the issue of access, so they may have to remodel their bathroom as part of the project. That openness is apparent as soon as you step inside. Anything is possible. It’s that embrace of the new, without the need for novelty and packaging, that makes the whole Recess Art project so very appealing.

Hyperallergic is  proud to be the exclusive media partner of this year’s Recess Benefit, which will take place on Thursday, May 31 at The Salon at the Tribeca Grand Hotel.

More information and tickets are available now at recessart.org/benefit. You can also support Recess through an online auction launched yesterday on Paddle 8 featuring works by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Terence Koh, A.L. Steiner, Spencer Tunick, Liz Magic Lazer and many others.

There is possibly no better place to witness the titans of the art market — the auction houses — duke it out than in New York. The economic and artistic center of America has become the venue for some of the largest and most important auctions in the world. Perhaps this is due to the incredible amount of art fairs and critical museum retrospectives that come here. (It isn’t just coincidence that many auctions happen to take place during these seminal events.)

Sure, China may have accounted for 33% of global fine art sales in 2011, but New York also has the statistics to prove its central — if not critical — place: 5 out of the 10 most expensive paintings in the world (two Picassos, a Van Gogh, a Renoir, and most recently, a Munch) and the two priciest photographs to date (Andreas Gursky’s “Rhein II” and Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled #96″) were purchased in New York-based auctions, at, to no one’s surprise, Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

These two have managed to maintain an almost hegemonic presence in the New York auction house scene. Their ability to cover a wide scope of the art market, while being able to offer up quality works and exceptional services, easily make them the go-to houses for most dealers and collectors. If you’re looking for a Willem de Kooning lithograph from an earlier part of the artist’s career or a Chinese jade pendant from the Arthur M. Sackler Collection, you will probably see it show up at one of their auctions. That’s certain. What’s also fairly certain is that no matter what the auction is, these two are bound to perform very well.

But despite what many may think, Christie’s and Sotheby’s do see some competition, particularly in the contemporary space — which just happens to be where the money lies. Phillips de Pury, which focuses exclusively on contemporary art, ranks right behind the two. The house is smaller and may not be able to ever capture a similar share of the contemporary market (According to Artprice, an independent provider of art market information, reported sales of contemporary art between 2009–2010 reached over $200 million at Christie’s, over $150 million at Sotheby’s, and over $63 million at Phillips), but it fulfills gaps that are critical to the market.

With sales like “Under the Influence,” Phillips offers up the works of young, global, 21st century artists and tests their value in the secondary market. The house also tries to sell slightly more affordable product. “We’ll take that chance … we’ll take that risk,” says Amanda Stoffel, evening sale cataloguer at Phillips, when describing the house’s emphasis on lesser-value pieces. Because of these unconventional undertakings, the house has become known for luring a slightly different clientele — young collectors, early in their careers, who can take the plunge in hopes of hitting it big.

Bonham’s, which trails closely behind Christie’s and Sotheby’s across most metrics, recently joined the contemporary bandwagon by devoting a department (headed by ex-Phillips de Pury specialist Anthony McNerny) to the space. Best known for its niche specializations, such as contemporary ceramics, and the sale of kitschy, pop-culture objects like Paul McCartney’s birth certificate, the house has already hosted two London auctions, Contemporary One and Contemporary Two, and is awaiting its first New York sale this May.

While some, like Stoffel, believe Bonham’s is bound to be a major contender in the space, others, like art advisor Erica Samuels of Art & Advisory, are not as certain. “I don’t think that Bonham’s has the market share yet … I think it’s probably hard for them.” Be it what it may, Bonham’s has the capabilities to make it big in the Contemporary Art market: it’s a well-known house with a massive global presence. Plus, it’s already attracted some major contemporary auction veterans to run its department.

For houses that lack the resources to contend head-on with the top 4, however, the ability to make it in the New York art auction scene requires an edge. Swann Auction Galleries is widely known for its works on paper — it sold a Jackson Pollock print last November for $102,000, the highest ever paid for a print by that artist — and is the only house in the world with a sale and department devoted exclusively to African American Fine Art. Since its start in 2007, the department has become a crucial venue for the works of many notable artists, including Kara Walker, Romare Bearden and Carrie Mae Weems. The house’s most recent African American Fine Art sale in February of this year totaled $1.73 million with buyer’s premium and included some hefty purchases, such as Kara Walker’s “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)” for $120,000, a record price for a print by the artist. To date, Swann remains one of the leading places to purchase African American art at auction.

Nicholas Lowry, president of Swann, argues that collectors are also attracted to the house because of the tailored, personal, and “much more involved experience” one gets. “You walk into Christie’s or Sotheby’s,” describes Lowry, “and you feel like you’re walking into a huge monolith.” This is perhaps the reason why houses like Doyle New York win a fair share of the market — they’re small and accessible but still able to offer up quality works and personal services for those wishing to sell their valuable art pieces. While Doyle is largely known for its estate sales, the medium-sized house also holds a wide range of other successful auctions. Its recent March sale of Asian Works of Art, for example, competed fiercely with the likes of Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Gianguan Auctions, an auction house that deals exclusively with Chinese and Asian Art.

Ultimately, the power in the market and the success of any house lies solely within the buyer, who is driven by the art being sold. For this particular reason, Christie’s and Sotheby’s will probably stay strong for years to come. But that doesn’t mean other auction houses in New York won’t either.

Where the auction houses are:

• Bonham’s (580 Madison Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan)
• Christie’s (20 Rockefeller Plaza, Midtown, Manhattan)
• Doyle New York (175 East 87th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan)
• Gianguan Auctions (295 Madison Avenue
• Phillips de Pury (450 Park Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan)
• Sotheby’s (1334 York Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan)
• Swann Auction Galleries (104 East 25th Street, Gramercy, Manhattan)

Marina Abramović wearing the model for her eponymous Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (all images courtesy OMA)

So I clicked on Jillian Steinhauer’s post — “Is Marina Abramović Trying to Create a Performance Art Utopia?” — and the first thing that popped into my head was, “Why does it look like a suburban public library, circa 1962?”

What I’m talking about is the architectural rendering from none other than OMA’s leading lights, Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, gracing the head of Steinhauer’s article, which was published by Hyperallergic on Monday.

The rendering depicts the proposed Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, revealed to the world by the artist and curator Klaus Biesenbach at MoMA PS1 that very morning.

Rendering of the institute's southwest façade (click to enlarge)

Reading further, the reason for the Institute’s retro façade became apparent: the building is “an old community theater-turned-tennis-court” which Abramović acquired in the gracious (and notably artist-friendly) upstate town of Hudson, which is around a two-hour drive from Manhattan, with Dia:Beacon as the designated halfway point.

Leaving aside personal qualms over the ripple effect that such an industrial-strength art institution might have on Hudson’s artistic gentility, not to mention its economic and racial diversity, it is heartening that the architects plan to allow a degree of harmony with the building’s context.

But in a case of unintended signifiers, don’t those Doric columns and keystone arches — the emblems of fusty historicism — imply something very different from what we understand of the history of Performance Art?

And that history goes way back — Tristan Tzara, Dada and the Café Voltaire; George Maciunas, Yoko Ono and Fluxus; Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg and the Happenings; Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, Billy Klüver, John Cage and the Experiments in Art and Technology — a century‘s worth of bad manners, gibberish and indiscriminate anarchy.

And each movement was steeped in a specific social, political and cultural soup, from World War I for Tzara’s Café Voltaire to Vietnam, Civil Rights and Feminism for 1970s-vintage body-based Performance. And each cohered out of a desire to subvert the preciousness of the object and to redefine art in terms of the experiential and the ephemeral.

What Abramović proposes is outside that historical strain (dare we call it a tradition?), seeking to create (according to an article from Architectural Record) “a school for the public” and “a training ground for the variety of demanding, durational, and often grueling performance work that she has pioneered throughout her four-­decade career.”

In her Hyperallergic post, Steinhauer writes:

Visitors will be schooled in the Abramović Method, which blurs the line between audience and artist by turning spectators into performers themselves. Upon arriving at the institute, visitors will don white lab coats, check their belongings, sign a contract — “Give me your word of honor that you’ll spend two and a half hours in the exhibit,” is how Abramović explained the current version, at an exhibition at PAC in Milan — and then move through the different experiences and rooms, receiving a certificate of completion at the end.

The central performance space

But that’s not all. To my mind, Steinhauer nails it in her description of the interior’s architectural program:

The architects used three guiding principles in their planning, the first of which is the idea that everyone and every space should stay connected. So a circuit of rooms devoted to the Abramović Method will ring the main performance space, and wherever a visitor is in the institute, even eating a sandwich in the cafe, she will have a view of that central space. It’s hard not to find this constant ability to watch and be watched a bit creepy, rather than a utopia it even has the makings of some kind of performance-art police state …

Once upon a time, Performance Art was synonymous with shock and danger. In contrast, the control, pedagogy and research embedded in those contracts and white lab coats come off as, to say the least, the tools of predictability.

By creating a safe environment for a notoriously unsafe art (whose perilous reputation is due in no small part to Abramović herself), these measures seem designed to clamp down on the raging id of Performance Art like an equally monstrous superego.

What Abramović has in mind — a theater, bleachers and viewing platforms for watching performances as well as watching audiences watch performances — not only threatens to transport Performance Art out of the wild and into a petting zoo, but the Institute’s other attractions — a Crystal Chamber and a Levitation Room are two of its novelties — smack of the relational aesthetic shenanigans recently visited upon the New York scene by the echt-shallow Carsten Höller show at the New Museum.

The Crystal Room

The emphasis of the Institute will be long-form performance, potentially lasting for days on end, which is a subspecialty of Abramović’s but would seem, even to the casual observer, to be tangential to both ’70s-style performance and its practice today.

And then there’s the preservation side of it. As noted above, Performance’s raison d’être is historically anti-object, if not anti-art. Its importance rests on its experiential paradigm, a here today/gone tomorrow aesthetic that thumbs its nose at museum culture.

Whether documented or not, a performance’s existence in space and time is a deliberate one-shot deal. If you missed it, well, too bad for you.

Abramović’s countervailing perspective has been held up for scrutiny in such outings as Seven Easy Pieces (2005) at the Guggenheim Museum, in which she reenacted performances by other artists (Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman and Gina Pane), and her 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present).

Abramović’s marathon performance at MoMA, "The Artist Is Present" (image via flickr.com/dlprager, click to enlarge)

For the latter exhibition, Abramović enlisted a team of (often perfectly sculpted) men and women to recreate the works she originated as a solo performer or with her longtime partner, the singly named Ulay.

This action — much more than Abramović’s embodiment of her fellow radical experimenters at the Guggenheim — fundamentally changed the character of the performances, turning them from body-centered expressionism to museological spectacle.

And they felt as embalmed as a natural history diorama, especially when experienced against the magnetism of the artist’s concurrent marathon performance in MoMA’s atrium, where she sat all day and stared into the eyes of visitors occupying a seat opposite her, and the frisson of the black-and-white video documents of Abramović and Ulay in full flower, despite the ratty quality of the visuals.

The disconnect between form and context in The Artist Is Present and, by extension, what is slated for presentation in Hudson, results from a failure to take into account the uncontainable nature of Performance Art.

As practiced by Abramović and her peers (those mentioned above, along with Chris Burden, Linda Montano, Lorraine O’Grady, Carolee Schneemann and Ana Mendieta among many others), Performance was born of ideas unbound by traditional media, that could be expressed only through the human body.

Taken to its logical extreme, that art would live and die with the body of the artist who made it. This is essentially the step that choreographer Merce Cunningham embraced when he planned that his company would disband two years after his death: it was a decision that understood the fatality, and the beauty, of the irretrievable moment.

A classroom for teaching the Abramović Method

Instead, Abramović’s cultural tourism destination, designed by the requisite team of starchitects, refuses to accept that finality, and proposes to recycle a fleeting mode of experience, however ersatz, into infinity.

In this regard, the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, with its attempt to mummify the renegade artists from one era for the enlightenment of audiences from another, is not all that different from Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — where street kids with guitars and drums are encased forever inside I.M. Pei’s steel-and-glass pyramid, when all they wanted was to dance the night away.