The person who took this photo labeled it “Colors” with the following description: “Spectrum V (Ellsworth Kelly, 1969) + Tourists (2009)”(photo via flickr.com/abdijstraat)

It’s summer in New York and the focus of the city’s art fans shifts from the commercial galleries and nonprofits to museums, as many stage large tourist-friendly shows and turn up the air conditioning during the sweltering months. Visiting the museums I encounter people — often tourists — who discuss or react to art with refreshingly unfiltered opinions about what they are seeing. On a recent trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I overheard some very interesting commentary from the museum goers; commentary that sparked confusion, insight, and humor. The gallery space for whatever reason often lends itself to a different dialogue, one where the visitor feels a necessity, and sometimes a pressure, to respond to the work as if its stillness generates an uncomfortable and awkward silence.

Tourists galore in the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall (via flickr.com/esthereggy)

Being on almost every Top 10 list of “Must See” things in New York City, the Met is home to every kind visitor. The Museum welcomes a whopping five million visitors a year. This is not the crowd you will see at the Neue Galerie, or the Whitney Museum of Art, or even the more adventurous visitors of MoMA for that matter.

I don’t want to pick on the tourists and I don’t want to imply that all tourists are ignorant to art but the most interesting and out-of-left-field comments did come from the out of towners, particularly those decked out in white sneakers and Hawaiian-themed tops et al. They certainly add a different flavor to the museum going experience.

Listening to the tourists’ commentary was insightful, in regards to how art and artists are perceived by the masses, so I decided to write it down — and add some commentary. Thinking about it I realized that they tend to have a very 19th century outlook on what constitutes a work of art (usually something resembling paint on canvas hung on a wall). Sure their reactions to art can be naïve but they are also genuine. Part of me envies them for being able to look at art with fresh eyes — a blank slate. The world is a different place from that standpoint and informs my own ideas about art.

Robert Rauschenberg, “Canyon” (1959) (click to enlarge)

For my experiment, I chose to station my wanderings to the Modern Art department, because even though this time period is closer to us, and in my opinion more relatable, it is often the hardest kind of art to “get,” as it were.

On a crowded Friday, walking around the mezzanine level of the Modern Art wing I noticed the you-are-too-close alarms were going off every other minute. But the problem was, that one, no one noticed the noise — they probably attributed it to some annoying ringtone — and two, none of the guests realized that they were stepping too close to works of art, or that they were even art for that matter!

One woman was leaning on one of Rachel Whiteread’s white “Untitled (Pair)” (1999). Maybe confusing them for some high-class contemporary New York thingamajig made for leaning?

For example, Mother and daughter duo walk up to Rauschenberg’s Canyon (1959), daughter takes one look at it, shoots mother a look of shock and anger and storms off.

Mother:

Aw, well honey, I’m sure he didn’t kill the bird himself! (She squints at the painting) But … you never know …

Animal cruelty! A component of the work that I never realized! I know that the eagle was collected from a trash heap by a friend of the artist, but how are they supposed to know this? Are they even supposed to know anything? Let the art speak for itself! Right? The woman was clearly already very wary of the artist. You know those artist types, if anyone is going to kill an animal and lacquer him up it would be an artist! Freak.

A view of the “Masterpieces of French Art Deco” show at the Metropolitan Museum.

“Is this art?”

… or did you just walk into Ikea?

Wassily Kandinsky, “The Garden of Love (Improvisation Number 27)” (1912)

“Kandinsky? He did like, crazy amounts of art right?”

“Yeah, but, like, this is his early stuff, I think … but yeah, like so much art. What I wanna know is how he found the time to like, do it all, you know? Like geez.”

What was it, like his job or something?

Francis Bacon, “Head I” (1947-48)

“Here is that Bacon fellow. The one who took the painting of the Pope and mutilated it or something … changed it.”

“What a sick, sick man.”

Bacon is probably doing cartwheels in his grave!

Bridget Riley, “Blaze 1” (1962)

“That right there looks a mess. I’m sure he had some cleaning up to do after.”

“Which floor has ‘Starry Night’?”

“Wow! This one will throw you for a loop!”

“Yeah, take a look at it, Ron! It’s famous! This one’s famous!”

This comment was in regards to a Bridget Riley painting, but it seems strange that sitting next to this was a Warhol and Lichtenstein and this was the famous, the recognizable one. Maybe they have a copy of this on the coffee table at home? And good luck finding “Starry Night.”

Yves Tanguy, “Fantastic Construction” (1949)

“Oh my gosh, Dali! I love him. Oh wait. Tanguy? Isn’t this copycatting? Is that allowed?”

I wonder what they’d think of Sherry Levine … or Richard Prince … or Mike Bidlo … or, hell, a lot of people.

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Homepage image via flickr.com/onlyforward

Among those included in the show were Christopher Lee Sauvé, Scooter LaForge, Olek, Brian Kenny, Inbred Hybrid Collective, Gio Black Peter, accomplished fashion illustrators Marcos Chin and Fernanda Cohen, as well as, famed photographer and Warhol Factory veteran Christopher Makos.

The art show included a video exhibit featuring the work of Nick Hooker, SUPERM (Slava Mogutin + Brian Kenny), Desi Santiago, Deryck Todd, Julia Oldham, Christian Weber, J. G. Zimmerman and more.

T Minus 20 is organized by IGNITE, the artist representation and licensing company founded by Jason LeBlond and Ves Pitts

T Minus 20 continues until August 1 at Christopher Henry Gallery (127 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan).

How much does an artist’s chosen font tell you?

Self-branding has become a major issue of discussion among young artists, specifically with the self-named domain (YourName.com). Young artists spend a great deal of time and energy developing the structure, design, and style of their own self-named dot com or dot net sites, simultaneously trying to distinguish themselves from other young artists while following a prescriptive format. Similar to the importance of the curriculum vitae in terms of ubiquity, which is also unanimously available on all young artist sites, an artist website not only showcases artwork, but also employs style and graphic design in an attempt to reflect (or present) a certain impression of the artist. At $12 to $15 per month, and a set up time of under an hour through Google or Yahoo, anyone can be a dot com.

Having your own domain name marks you to society at large as a “serious artist,” and puts you on the same platform with other contemporary artists (see self-named artist websites such as MartinCreed.com, OlafurEliasson.net, or even highly styled sites like Terence Koh’s AsianPunkBoy.com, which features original drawings for sale at a piddly $1,000 each.) Because of its perceived seriousness, the practice of publishing your own dot com is elevated from mere blogging; many artists have both a blog and a dot com that are often interlinked: WilliamPowhida.com and williampowhida.blogspot.com, for instance. The artist website is also elevated from social media, which many artists also frequent (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr — a whole other can of worms.). The personal domain is an easy resource for gallerists, curators, critics, art bloggers, and other artists to refer, kind of a business card that incorporates your entire portfolio.

In setting up your website, you must ask yourself several questions: What font best describes you and your work? Should the images be framed on a white background, or should they dominate the entire page, or should they be clearly unedited installation shots? Do you include an artist statement, or project descriptions, or do you only exhibit obtuse unmarked images? Are you a vertical-scroll, horizontal-scroll, or a one-image-per-page kind of artist? Will you develop your own branded logo, or will it just be your name? The structure of artists’ websites cannot be separated from major galleries sites; many use the same style, layout and even identical Flash applications: compare PaulaCooperGallery.com and Gagosian.com to RBleckner.com and PhilipTaafe.info. Despite the diversity of designers behind these websites they all conform to a standard system (Your Name, Projects, CV, Contact). Advertising and branding, previously left to the discretion of art dealers and gallery owners, is now the responsibility of the artist — not that artists were immune to doing their own PR.

Artist websites typically attempt to remain as neutral as possible, taking most of their design cues from commercial gallery websites. White, gray and black backgrounds are preferred, with ultra-simple and typically understated logos that consist simply of the artist’s name — not unlike a luxury brand such as Thierry Mugler, Chanel, etc. Sans serif fonts are generally preferred over serif; gray text preferred over black; the less visual noise the better. Works are typically isolated on the white background of the website itself, rather than viewed as an installation shot; this indicates that Photoshop is highly utilized. What these online formats set up is really a virtual gallery with almost all the same conceptual issues one finds in the white-box method of gallery exhibition.

The majority of artist websites also feature a “Links” section where they link to galleries that have shown their work, perhaps collections they’ve been included in, or residency programs they’ve attended. The most bizarre aspect is the other young artists they choose to link to (equivalent of exhibiting themselves with) and those websites are interlinked in a small informal network. These networks of artist websites tend to be age/school/medium specific. The “Links” section eerily reflects Facebook’s display of your Friends in your Facebook Profile, or if we were to compare it to a gallery website, it kind of resembles a stable of artists.

Artist websites are linked via a wheel-and-spoke system to other larger sites such as White Columns Registry, Art Slant, Art Net, and One Art World. If they list you, can prove to be extremely useful in getting more shows; these curated databases of active contemporary artists use artist dot coms in their decision-making processes. Less useful (because it’s still self-publishing) but visible players also include Wooloo.org, and the somewhat horrifying Saatchi Gallery Your Gallery. One wants to be written up in very serious websites or local culture blogs — including Art Fag City, ArtCat, FREEWilliamsburg … — and a website is the best way to do that. The aforementioned blogs and online magazines cite you via hyperlink back to your self-named dot com. Clearly, young artists are expected to self-brand and self-publish early in their careers.

The stakes are high for the artist website, not only in terms of PR. Among innumerable graduate programs and residencies that now have online applications, they too will use your dot com as a viable, citable resource in reviewing your work, including the design you have selected for your website. Magdalena Sawon, director of PostMasters, stated in her Q&A at Winkleman’s #class exhibition, that she uses artist websites in lieu of studio visits. Elizabeth Dee notoriously requests her artists to remove works she has available on her website, or take their website down all together.

Where does this leave the artist? Is making your own website equatable to the rite of passage that is the BFA Thesis, or is it somehow more sinister? Does an artist even exist today without a dot com and without gallery representation? The result is that an artist is not only the images he produces or a persona he adopts, but also now a complete brand with a signature font, a logo, business cards, and a copyright. The effect this phenomena has on the art world, at least insofar as it is viewed on the Internet, is now a completely matrix-style system with large hubs but more importantly a network of artist websites, platforms that serve both as advertising but also as soap boxes. Everyone simultaneously has a voice, theoretically equal in value (YourName.com = Tillmans.co.uk) but in the multiplicity of the conversation, many voices will be lost.

Satomi Shirai, “Breakfast” (2007) (via Arario Gallery) (click to enlarge)

The postcard for “Irrelevant”

Last week, a show titled Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don’t Make Work About Being Asian opened at Arario Gallery’s New York branch. The South Korean gallery has a mission to exhibit Asian art but their latest exhibition, which includes nearly fifty artists and it is curated by Joann Kim and Lesley Sheng, seems more interested in changing New Yorkers’ perception of what Asian art is or could be than anything else.

Don’t expect your typical Asian fare, which the press release makes clear:

You will not find paintings about the Cultural Revolution or Mao Zedong that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. You will not find manga-infused characters performing acts of hypersexuality nor will you find decorative miniature drawings with motifs embedded within a specific cultural history.

After a curious description like that I set out to talk to curator Joann Kim about the parameters of her show and what we can expect from a visit.

*   *   *

Hello Kitty (left) getting no love from curator Joann Kim (right).

Hrag Vartanian: So, what do you have against Hello Kitty?

Joann Kim: She’s cuter and more generically consumable than I am. We also had a big falling out when Keroppi came to town and confessed he was looking for someone more “animated” and ran off with Hello Kitty. Also, she symbolizes all that is twisted and cruel in the underpit of sexually repressed Asian culture.

HV: So, we shouldn’t expect art in the show to address the sex trade, geishas or the whole “ping pong balls being shot out of the vagina” thing?

JK: No bukaki, no octopus arms gushing through open orifices. However, there IS a decapitated deer head, urination, nipple pinching, self-gorging, rotten bread squares, and various other aesthetic mindfucking creations.

HV: You sound like an angry Asian. What gives?

JK: Asians are by nature a cruel race (according to a quote from a movie I can’t now remember). We’re emotionally and psychologically stifled, our outlets are what come out of demented sex fetishes and hyper-realized cutedom. The Angry Little Girl in me comes out from a cultural ambivalence from Asians towards stereotypes and an unwillingness (or inability) to create a relevant identity that doesn’t pathetically adhere to American expectations.

Kikuko Tanaka, “A Tragic Bambi: Mother’s Tears” (2009 - Present) (courtesy Arario Gallery) (click to enlarge)

This may sound vague but I swear somewhere in my head it makes sense, this direct link to the art market and how folks fetishized contemporary Asian art during the market’s boom and bought anything related to the Cultural Revolution or had the stamp of a Chinese imported painting. It was frivolous and incestuous, this obsession that was so short lived, arbitrary and meaningless. Then the market crashed and no one cares about Asian art anymore.

Irrelevant is a sidetracked response to that, a mocking of what sprouted from this weak trend, and a highlighting of what occurred outside of this small community of know-nothings blossoming in this city, beneath the high towers of the neurotic art world. The artists in the show reveal their race whilst dismissing it, showcasing works that may not end up in the pages of a Christie’s auction catalogue but will leave the slightest dent within art history as a whole. I sound like a blinded idealizer but I swear, it all makes sense to me.

HV: How are you defining Asian?

JK: Majority of the artists in the show are of Japanese, Korean, Chinese descent. It was easy to find them according to their last names in art registries. There are also artists of Pacific Island and Central Asian backgrounds. We even have a few mixed Asians in there.

HV: What did the artists think of the concept for the show? Were they relieved? Confused?

Pixy Liao, “Intimacy will improve your relationship” (2007) (courtesy ArarioNewYork.com)

JK: They thought it brilliant of course. Seriously, they were excited to participate and found it a relief to not be scapegoated as an Asian artist, precisely by being scapegoated as an Asian artist, who doesn’t make work about being Asian or doesn’t make work about being scapegoated as an Asian artist.

There were also participating artist who found it slightly offensive to make an invitation card with the back of their heads to the camera because it might come off as defeating and “giving in” to the whole idea of what we’re “fighting against” with the show. Others thought it hysterical and was happy to contribute.

HV: Tell me about 3 people we should we excited to see in the show?

JK: Kikuko Tanaka’s performance July 29th titled “Tragic Bambi: A Mother’s Tears,” Tattfoo Tan’s urban agriculture and environmentalism infused social sculptures, and Yijun Liao’s photograph series Experimental Relationships.

HV: Any surprises curating this show? Did any major themes emerge?

JK: My only surprise was how good the works actually ended up being. And how themes emerged from these random searches for Asian artists who don’t make work about being Asian. Themes that found it’s way to the show is as quoted in the press release:

What you’ll find is a surging flow of creativity where artists actively engage in their practice, exploring the absurd within everyday experience, the use and misuse of materials both new and found, and the curiosity of defining artistic practice. Food and consumption is considered within an urban agricultural environment, and social interaction is taken out of norm and reenacted in refreshing alternative ways. Pictured narratives gear toward a dark and isolated realm and obsession is the source behind abstracted images.

Irrelevant continues at Arario Gallery (521 W 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) until August 6. It features work by Seong Min Ahn, Shin Young An, Sophia Chai, Louis Chan, Karen Chan, Rona Chang, Gigi Chen, Yoon Cho, Micah Ganske, Hyoungsun Ha, Geujin Han, Takashi Horisaki, Jane V Hsu, Hidenori Ishii, Hong Seon Jang, Kyoung Eun Kang, Heige Kim, Seung Ae Kim, Nancy Kim, Hein Koh, Shizuka Kusayanagi, Amy Fung-yi Lee & Caroline Jung-ah Park, JaeEun Lee, Sinae Lee, Soo Im Lee, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge, Yijun Liao, Juri Morioka, Tadashi Moriyama, Joel Morrison, Dominic Neitz, Christian Nguyen, Asuka Osawa, Eung Ho Park, Youngna Park, Jung Eun Park, R&D, Ruijun Shen, Satomi Shirai, Hidemi Takagi, Tattfoo Tan, Kikuko Tanaka, Jason Tomme, Mai Ueda, Kako Ueda, InJoo Whang, Wenjie Yang, Mika Yokobori, Yejin Yoo, Jayoung Yoon, Seldon Yuan

A view of Jennifer Dalton’s “What Are We Not Shutting Up About? (Five Months of Status Updates and Responses from Jerry Saltz's Facebook Page)” (2010) (via Jennifer Dalton’s Facebook profile) … better photos to follow

Now that Jerry Saltz has proven himself — yet again — to be an attention whore with his role on the Work of Art reality TV show, I’m starting to like him more … yes, I love a car crash. (I’m complex, I know.) And just when we were all jonesing for another fix of “What is crazy uncle Jerry going to do next?” Artist Jennifer Dalton is opening a show today at the Flag Art Foundation called Making Sense, which is an:

… attempt to make sense of Artforum’s yearly “Best of” roundup of shows and events, the New Yorker magazine’s representation of artists, and New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz’s incredibly popular Facebook page.

Detail of Dalton’s “What Are We Not Shutting Up About? (Five Months of Status Updates and Responses from Jerry Saltz's Facebook Page)” (2010) (click to enlarge)

Sure, some of us have moved onto curator Dan Cameron’s Facebook profile — he recently mentioned that he spent the holiday weekend going through his personal papers from the 1980s & 90s, which are about to be handed over to the Archives of American Art … JUICY!!! – but I still lament what I call the golden age (ok, maybe tin) of Saltz’s Facebook profile and its rough-and-tumble typos, ALL CAPS TIRADES, and non sequiturs … oh, Jerry. Where have you gone? Oh right, you unfriended me and I stopped reading. Nevermind.

But alas, I still care for you Saltz, ok, maybe worry is the right word. And now that artist Jennifer Dalton has resurrected what were probably intended to be ephemeral posts, she has — in essence — written your biography, kinda.

Some other facts about Dalton’s Saltz project (via an email from the Winkleman Gallery, which represents her):

She analyzed the period from January 1, 2010 through May 31, 2010 … color-coded all Jerry’s posts by subject topic so one can see which topics tended to generate the most responses and the most “likes.” The two posts that went through the roof with over 800 responses were on two of the more “bland” seeming subject topics: “old dead artists” (a post on Picasso’s auction sale) and “art in general” (a post on the best artists’ names).

There were over 155,000 words published in response to Jerry’s posts during this time. From the five months of comments, Jen then concentrated on January’s approximately 20,000 words and a few of the things she gleaned from them were that:

• more men than women posted responses
• the word “disagree” is used nine times more often than the word “agree”
• five of Jerry’s “friends” post almost 20% of all the responses

So, now that Dalton has a Ph.D. in Saltz I couldn’t resist interviewing her about the latest C-list reality TV celebrity and what looks like a fascinating exhibition that travels down the rabbit hole of New York’s art world wonderland.

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Hrag Vartanian: Why is the online art world so obsessed with Jerry Saltz?

“What Are We Not Shutting Up About? (Five Months of Status Updates and Responses from Jerry Saltz’s Facebook Page)” (Detail - Photo of Printed Facebook Pages) (via Jennifer Dalton’s Facebook page)

Jennifer Dalton: I think my friend Gina Magid said it best when I was trying to figure out this piece in my studio a couple of months ago. I wrote down what she said and pinned it on my studio wall, because it rang so true: “Artists are fairly desperate to hear from someone else who thinks what we’re all doing is important.” Jerry Saltz makes himself very accessible, and he makes it clear that he values what artists — and not just famous artists — do and think.

HV: Are you suggesting that Saltz’s Facebook page is dominated by artists desperate for attention?

JD: Nice bait! But no I don’t think so. Jerry Saltz cares about about what artists and others around him *think*, and none of us gets that very often. That’s not really the same thing as wanting “attention.” Or, perhaps I should say it’s a very specific kind of attention, and it’s not just from Jerry but also from the other members of the community he’s created. I think what people crave is dialogue and community, and Saltz’s page has become a mecca for that.

HV: Did all the data you amassed reveal any surprises?

JD: Yes, I was surprised that some of the most popular discussions were on on topics that did not seem to be “hot button” ones. There were 845 responses on a post in which Jerry Saltz asked what are some of the best artists’ names. In some other ways I was less surprised. Responders were more likely to disagree than to agree with other posters, and more likely to agree than to disagree with Jerry Saltz himself. And during the month of January 2010, which I analyzed in the most depth, the top five responders generated 18.5% of the responses.

HV: But isn’t some of this a form of “inside baseball?” Meaning, what is the importance of this in the bigger scheme of art and your work. What was it about this topic that intrigued you?

JD: Sure it is “inside baseball.” But like other microcosms it can be seen as having wider implications and meanings for the culture as a whole. Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page is a community of colleagues and competitors, supportive, and antagonistic alternately, or sometimes at the same time. I am fascinated by it as an archive of conversations and emotions that ebb and flow, flare-up and smooth over.

For the purposes of this work I was only able to dig deep into the posts for a five month period (January – May 2010), but when I looked back that far and further Saltz’s Facebook page is an amazing record of events in both art and the larger culture and an archive of what was being argued about at the time. Reading those discussions of the very recent past makes me feel like an archaeologist of contemporary history. We forget so quickly what was a really really big deal a year and a half ago. One thing that has always driven my work is my own obsession with figuring out to what extent what I think is true is really true. I tend to say, “Is it just me or are my impressions all wrong? What’s happening here and what does it mean?” and then I want to go somewhere I can count things up and categorize them to try to figure it out.

HV: Do you participate in the conversations on Saltz’s profile wall?

JD: I have occasionally, but I don’t very often. I am guilty of being a major lurker on online forums. I read them all the time but I am very shy in certain ways so when I post something first of all it takes me an hour to compose even if it’s just a couple of sentences, and then I lose the next few hours watching to see if people respond to what I wrote. So I have a hard time participating very often because it takes up my whole day!

Installation view of Jennifer Dalton’s “Making Sense” at the Flag Art Foundation (via JenniferDalton.com) (click to enlarge)

HV: Who do you think is the ideal audience for your recent show? What kind of response do you expect?

JD: I make work for the same reason I think many artists do, which is that we hope for other people to see the world in the same way we do so we might feel less alone. In terms of my ideal audience, I can’t really profile who that would be. People who are interested in issues around contemporary art will perhaps get the most out of this piece we’ve been talking about, but there are other works in the show that focus on our culture as a whole. “What Does An Artist Look Like?” shows every photograph of all different types of artists, from actors to designers to writers, that appeared in the New Yorker magazine in the years 1999 and 2009, and ranks each photograph on my own made-up scale from “genius” to “pinup” (that seeming to me to be the axis of representation of artists in mainstream culture). I always just hope to get other people interested in the same things that I can’t stop obsessing about.

Making Sense is on view at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea (545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor) until September 10, 2010.

The suicide of Chinese tech workers inspired these street sculptures. (via Xylo.me) (click to enlarge)

Yesterday, I received an email from street artist Xylo who has started mounting fake iPhones to walls in London. The cement objects look quite realistic in the photos and they are surfaced by black and white paintings that depict suicides, which Xylo says, is in reference to the recent news stories about the shocking suicides at a Chinese electronics factory.

It should be noted that China generally has a very high suicide rate, but this story directly ties the shocking incidents to devices that people in affluent societies use everyday, and that association makes the facts feel more powerful.

He pointed me to the online post that prompted his response, which includes this passage:

The Shenzhen plant in Guangdong province houses 400,000 workers, making products from iPhones and iPads to PlayStations for international brands like Apple, Sony, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Analysts estimate that about 70 percent of Apple’s products are manufactured there.

Most of the 13 workers who tried to kill themselves [since January] jumped from buildings because they were unable to bear the stress, alienation and humiliation they experience daily.

Xylo’s visual response is a combination of curious and skillful. He has taken something that most people have a positive association with and revealed a more sinister side to state-of-the-art technology. He seems intent on making electronics consumers realize that their buying power impacts people around the world. As an iPhone user myself I found the images quite disturbing, and they evoke a very real feeling visual association I didn’t have when I first read the reports about the suicides last week.

Xylo, who has been creating street art for a few years but still hesitates to call himself an artist since it the “term feels a bit pretentious and elitist somehow when I apply it to myself, plus I don’t sell the things I make, so it’s not a profession,” answered some of my questions via email about his latest fake iPhone series.

*   *   *

Crafted out of fine cement, these fake iPhones are designed to raise awareness in the streets of London. (via xylo.me) (click to enlarge)

Hrag: Why are you concerned about the death of electronic workers?

Xylo: When I saw the news reports about this wave of suicides I felt very disturbed about the militaristic prison camp type conditions and abuse these workers have to endure. It feels like a hidden dystopian nightmare has been created that contrasts sharply with the affluent consumers I see every day in London staring vacantly into their phone screens, seemingly oblivious to the suffering embodied in the devices they have increasingly become slavish to.

Shortly after this I then saw a much greater amount of news coverage of people queuing overnight to buy the latest versions of these items and upon having made their purchase and exiting the store some were even punching the air and repeatedly kissing the box that contained the phone in a triumphalist act of devotion. I was shocked by the skewed sense of priorities that appeared to be in effect and felt a strong sense of injustice that made me decide to attempt to redress the balance in whatever small way I could.

Another street piece by Xylo (via xylo.me)

H: Are your street sculptures designed to influence people’s relationship to electronics?

X: I’d hope they will make some of them consider the choices they make regarding the social and environmental implications of all the products they use, whether electronic or not.

H: Tell me about how you crafted these. They look like pretty realistic sculptures, but they’re casted, aren’t they? What are they made off?

X: I made a mould of an iPhone and then cast them using a smooth cement type mixture that I concocted myself. Once they’d dried I then painted the pictures and other details onto them by hand.

One of Xylo’s earlier posters mashes up 9/11 and the London skyline. (via xylo.me) (click to enlarge)

H: How many have you put up and any idea how people are reacting to them?

X: I’ve only just started putting them up in the last few days, The reactions I’ve encountered so far have mostly been quite perplexed. It seems that hardly anyone here has even heard about the suicides and maltreatment of the workers, as it didn’t really seem to be a priority for the media.

Someone said to me that they had interpreted the depicted suicide victim as being the phone user. I found this to be an interesting way of looking at it, especially considering a recently published scientific report which concluded that the proliferation of technology has made people more isolated and lonely.

H: Why use stark black and white graphics on the faces of the iPhones?

X: As the subject matter is so psychologically dark, a bright color scheme might have seemed joyful, and therefore somewhat inappropriate in the circumstances.

H: What do you think is the role of street art?

X: I think it offers a very necessary arena of expression free from the constraints of commerce, and has an important role to play in providing a physical manifestation of dissent. This in turn then makes people feel slightly more liberated by it’s presence, perhaps looking on it as something essential to the human spirit which defies an increasingly sinister type of sanitization and control of public space.

On a more personal level, I’ve found that making it can help lessen feelings of alienation and powerlessness that arise due to various negative aspects of society. Hopefully through the use of street art to highlight some of these issues people will become more aware of the need for change and thus form a critical mass of consciousness to overcome inertia.

Dread Scott’s arrest during his protest flag burning in defiance of the Flag Protection Act in 1989. Photo via DreadScott.net

Happy Fourth of July! — because no matter where you are or how you feel about the state of politics in the United States, you can at least celebrate the fourth of this month, which marks American Independence Day and the 234th anniversary of the approval of the final draft of the Declaration of Independence.

In recognition of this occasion, I interviewed artist Dread Scott, whose work is directly engaged in challenging public perception of and reactions to US politics and history.

His 1988 piece “What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?” resulted in a landmark Supreme Court case, ultimately coming out in favor of protecting “flag desecration” as freedom of expression, although there have been numerous attempts to pass legislation and constitutional amendments banning desecration of the flag. In a recent performance, he criticized the financial industry by burning $250 on Wall Street — to bankers’ and passerbys’ bemusement. His works often do the difficult work of making audiences and critics alike uncomfortable, recognizing the contradictions ingrained in American culture and its culture of politics.

*    *    *

Dread Scott performing “I Am Not a Man” (2009) in Harlem (photo via dreadscott.net) (click to enlarge)

Janelle Grace: Where does your desire to engage come from? How do you sustain that motivation for conflict?

Dread Scott: The world as it is is intolerable and it doesn’t have to be this way. Wars of plunder and occupation; oil spills wiping out whole ecosystems and devastating many people who depended upon them; youth killing each over nothing and with no future at all under this system; immigrants criminalized; women afraid to walk the streets at night and unsafe in their own homes; fundamentalism on the rise; and people terrorized and shamed because of who they love.

This system is horrible and it all this horror is unnecessary. So my desire to engage starts from recognizing all of this and wanting to contribute to humanity getting to a whole new era. As for conflict, I don’t actually have a desire for conflict. I have a desire to make powerful work about a world that is profoundly polarized. And if you do that people are bound to have strong opinions about the work and some of those will want to see it suppressed and keep it from finding a wide audience.

JG: The American Flag and US currency are treated as inherent symbols of the country — the language and legal issues around them, the flag especially, suggests that a person is literally burning the country if they are to burn either. Your work directly challenges those symbols and raises questions about the role and potential limitations of dissent in an American context. What do you think about the history and state of dissent and the US’s relationship to freedom of expression today — either in general or within the contexts of your work and the legal issues around it?

DS: There is not nearly enough dissent in this country, or for that matter the world as a whole. There are many courageous people who find ways to resist and there are many important dissident voices in the arts. And this dissent is often met with repression. But I believe that the main thing that is stifling dissent is not repression or threats to freedom of expression but rather that far too many people continue to place their hope in this government and this system. Many are opposed to the war in Iraq, they don’t like the mass foreclosures and the greatest transfer of wealth from Black people in the modern era, they are deeply troubled by the oil spill … but they think that this government or this or that politician or some law will somehow resolve these problems in a way that they would like. And the bitter truth is that this system stands above the people and the elected officials don’t work for us. Stopping the crimes of this system will take a movement of millions from below.

As for challenging symbols, I think that this is very important and my work often does that. Burning money on Wall Street, a symbol of capitalism, and US capitalism in particular, points to the absurdity of a system based on profit and shines a light on the profound polarization of wealth in the world. I hope that this performance helps people reflect on this. And because this was resonating with people and challenging a taboo, police moved in to stop the performance. This system can “burn” hundreds of billions of dollars and steal people houses and this is all legal. My burning $250, an infinitesimal sum by comparison, ends up with a citation and a day in court.

Dread Scott during his “Money to Burn” (2010) performance (photo via Heart as Arena)

JG: How do you feel about nationalism in general, what benefits and disservices and purposes does it serve?

DS: These are big questions and I feel that a real answer would take several pages which would be inappropriate here. That said, briefly, nationalism for and in imperialist countries is a real problem. Should people support the invasions and occupations and ugly national chauvinism? Or the “sealing the southern border” and all the racism (and defense of land stolen from Mexico) that this is founded upon? Ultimately, I think that humanity needs to get beyond nations, but how to do that and what roll national liberation struggles can play in that and how nationalism of oppressed people should be viewed would require a blog for that topic alone, so we’ll leave that for another time.

JG: What are your goals — in terms of how the government frames theses issues, and how the public reacts or takes action around these issues?

DS: I don’t have a goal for how this government frames these questions. What I care about is how people look at the world. Whether they are increasingly able to confront it as it is and imagine how it could be radically different and far better. And whether they take joy in the work and are inspired, even when experiencing and thinking about difficult topics.

JG: What legacy do you expect your work to have? (versus what do you want it to have?)

DS: I don’t know. There isn’t a lot of critical writing about my work. However my work is often discussed in mainstream newspapers and on TV and in radio. So it is a bit unclear what legacy my work will have. That said, if people think that my work is important and is looking at significant questions and is formally innovative, then I hope that they would write about it and contribute to more people now and in the future knowing about the work.

JG: Why do you think there’s a lack of criticism about your work?

Dread Scott, “Imagine a World Without America” (nd) (via dreadscott.net)

DS: I think that the limited amount of critical writing around my work is the result of two things. The first is that taken as a whole my work is about revolution and humanity getting to a radically different and far better world. This perspective is not what most people in the arts and society more broadly are thinking about most of the time. And related to this it is sometimes dismissed as “political art” or put in categories where people think they get what the work is but don’t really end up engaging it because it is not how other artists they are familiar with are approaching related questions. And beyond this my work is challenging and it makes some people uncomfortable. This is fine and absolutely necessary for the art but I suspect it is a bit off-putting to some writers. The other reason for the lack of critical engagement is the same problem most artists face. There’s a lot of art out there and not all of it is going to be the subject focus in the arts. So part of it is just luck and timing and perhaps that will change.

JG: How do you feel about the Art World or art world today? What artists are you excited about? Who do you draw inspiration or influence from?

DS: There is a lot of good work being made today and the arts is one area in this society where there are a lot of critical thinking, dissenting voices, and inspiring ideas. That said, I wouldn’t say that dissent in the arts is the dominant thing going on. A lot of it is really boring and not compelling and some is actually fucked up. Volta NY (one of the major art fairs) this year had several misogynist works by several artist and even some really racist art, which was surprising. I’m influenced by many things, music and movies, particle physics and cutting edge Marxist theory. As for artists, I’m excited by, I think William Pope L, Cai Guo-Qiang, Kyle Goen, Jenny Polak, Hank Willis Thomas, and Waafa Bilal, are all doing great work. I really liked the Abramović show.

JG: What do you think about the ways the American public discusses or celebrates the country/its freedoms or symbols thereof/etc?

DS: Frederick Douglass gave a very good speech on July 5, 1852 — “What to the Slave is your 4th of July.” This speech is still very relevant and is well worth reading. Sure the barbecue is tasty and fireworks are nice, but what this holiday is about is celebrating a country that was founded on genocide and slavery and is now an imperialist superpower. It plunders the planet and gives a comparatively high standard of living to some and allows a little bit of room to make minor criticism. America uses predator drones to kill Afghan children as they sleep. It imprisons 10% of young Black men and its police murder and terrorize people in staggering numbers. America’s so-called freedoms are nothing to celebrate. Quoting Douglass:

Go where you may, search  where you will, roam through all the monarchies, and despotism, of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every-day practices of this nation, and you will say with me that for revolting barbarity, and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without rival.

Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column” in the workshop (1909); right, John Powers, “Die Die Die” (2007)

“Sculpture is dead.” — John Powers

“Nothing grows under big trees.” — Constantin Brancusi

Left, Carl Andre Family Plot, Quincy, Massachusetts; right, Chris Burden, “Exposing the Foundation of the Museum”(1986)

“A thing is a hole in a thing it is not.” — Carl Andre

“What should replace the missing object?” — Wassily Kandinsky, Reminiscences

“The world is like a hole and the hole itself is not hollow.” — Kazimir Malevich, God Is Not Cast Down

Left, Daniel Buren, “Eye of the Storm” (2005); right, Janet Cardif, “Forty Part Motet” (2001)

“Let us throw away monuments, sidewalks, arcades, steps: let us sink squares into the ground, raise the level of the city.” — Tommaso Marinetti and Antonio Sant’Elia, “Manifesto on Futurist Architecture”

“I’m interested for the most part in what’s not happening, that area between events which could be called the gap. This gap exists in the blank and void regions or settings that we never look at. A museum of different kinds of emptiness could be developed. The emptiness could be defined by the actual installation of the art. Installations could empty rooms not fill them.” — Robert Smithson, “What is a Museum” (1967)

“Minimal art was only trying to answer Pollock’s challenge and to capitalize on what lay latent and undeveloped in his work – that is, to expand the holism and purity into communal practice. If Pollock had been the prophet, minimalism was the church … The practitioners of pop art were farting in church.” — Robert Morris, “Size Matters” (2000)

Left, Image from Dario Gamboni’s “The Destrucion of Art” (1997); right, A view of Celso’s “Art Burn” at the Miami Art Fairs (photo by Hargo) (click to enlarge)

“ … The dead were burnt and their ashes placed inside of the sacred totem poles … Slaves used to be sacrificed in the post holes.” — Kalervo Oberg, The Social Economy of the Tlingit Indians

Left, Robert Smithson, “Partially Buried Woodshed” (1970); right, Cornelia Parker, “Dark Matter: An Exploded View” (1991)

“When Christians built Churches on the sites of pagan sanctuaries, incorporating the old capitals and columns in their naves, they were behaving as Hercules had with the Nemian lion, or Athena with Gorgon. In the hero’s relationship with the monster, what matters is this: … To kill the monster means to incorporate it in oneself, to take its place.” — Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Left, Michael Heizer, “Double Negative” (1969); right, Philip Johnson’s Kunstbunker (1965) at the Glass House compound in New Canaan, Connecticut.

“Speaking of the hidden by means of the hidden, Is this not content?” — Wassily Kandinsky, Complete Writings

Left, Dirk Skreber, “Untitled Crash 1” (2009); right, Donald Judd, “Untitled” (1968)

“I looked around at everyone bathed in the blood red light of the back room. Dan Flavin had conceived his installation in response to the mounting death toll of the war in Vietnam. No one in the backroom was slated to die in Vietnam, though few would survive the cruel plagues of a generation.” — Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010)

Left, Tom Friedman, “A paper representation of the artist violently torn apart” (2000); right, François Girardon, “Louis XIV - foot fragment” (1699)

“We dropped abstraction off its sacred throne ’and spat on its altar.” — El Lissitzky, “Abstraction in the Twentieth Century”

Left, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled - Orpheus, Twice” (1991); right, Robert Morris, “Two Columns” (1961)

“And finally, above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and had a good purpose and that is why I made art.” — Felix Gonzalez-Torres in an interview with Tim Rollins (1993)

A sign yes … but from what? (image by the author)

Lost and hungry is not a good combination. Imagine driving in an unfamiliar place, stomach growling, and not exactly sure how close or far away you are from any landmarks. Many miles ago you’ve dropped all your pretenses about needing to eat all-organic food and your concerns about maintaining your diet. Your diet has been compromised. The urgency of hunger is upon you. The onward-stretching road seems like a dim and unhappy place, and you’re starting to wonder if previously chewed gum still contains enough calories to sustain your energy.

Then suddenly you see it, a huge billboard with the words: MCDONALD’S NEXT EXIT. At that moment, you’re probably not thinking about the fact that it’s typeset in Arial without consideration for negative space, that it lacks attractive colors or that it’s just not a very nice-looking billboard. No, all you see, blazing from atop the trees and urban wasteland, is a glorious sign from God telling you all you need to know at that very moment.

Now, if said billboard had been dressed up with lovely graphics, scripty fonts, beautifully-lit interior photos, and text describing their new value menu in great specific detail, you may not have noticed it. You’d still be driving along, wondering how you’re going to find a place to eat. The ugly billboard has arrested your attention by screaming essential information to you as plainly as possible.

Sometimes, ugly design is really what we’re looking for.

While the definition of ugly is subjective to some point, there is a collective understanding of what is pretty to look at versus something that gets the job done. The kind of ugly we’re talking about here isn’t about what’s in or out of vogue. It’s a visual product demonstrating the essential purpose of design: to communicate and get a point across.

This is where we start to see the two different priorities in design. Form versus function. Form being “oh, this is lovely” and function being (as Larry Cable so eloquently puts it) “git er done.” Ugly falls into the category of function by default, while beauty is the form which builds upon it. For those who are dessert-lovers, let’s just say that “pretty” is icing on the “ugly” cake.

Function must proceed form. Design and creative briefs almost always begin with a statement of purpose and desired message. Not a checklist of color palettes, typographic choices or whatever. Those design elements are absolutely a part of it, but are subsequent to a higher priority.

I sell potatoes. My primary objective is to have you buy my potatoes, and I don’t care if you paint “POTATOES” (or “POTATOS” for that matter) on wood or metal or on your torso or just paint an image of a potato — I just want people to know I’ve got potatoes.

No matter how you pretty things up, it’s still just a potato … umm potatoe — apologizes to former US Vice President Dan Quayle (via politicalhumor.about.com) (click for reference)

But suppose potatoes become endorsed by Justin Bieber for some weird reason, and they become the hottest ingredient in town. Kids and teenage girls go crazy over french fries (I know, it’s a stretch), hash browns, baked potatoes, perogies, potato chips, you name it. So I paint my sign in bright colors, slap some Comic Sans on there with a blown-up pixelated image of Bieber’s face that I found on Google Images.

The potato fad gets picked up by Dolce & Gabbana, and potatoes become the new statement of the year. I drop the family-friendly look and hire someone to design an immaculately-kerned Potato Sans for my unique typeface, which will be etched onto pristine sheets of high-polished platinum.

By now, potatoes have risen in value to the point that they’ve flooded the stock market. What goes up must come down, so inevitably the potato market becomes ruined and no one wants them anymore. What else can a poor potato-seller do? So, I find the largest surface-area possible and paint in big red letters, POTATO LIQUIDATION SALE ALL SPUDS MUST GO 90% OFF ALL MERCHANDISE.

Bankruptcy ain’t pretty. Neither is my sign, but in the end, I just want people to know that I’ve got potatoes.

Obviously, this is a ridiculous analogy, but in design (signs or not), getting a message across is the ultimate goal. Graphic trends come and go; beautiful or in vogue styles are afterthoughts that eventually fade or are replaced by other fashions. Designs remaining steadfast for so many years are often the ones that are unashamedly base and cut out the frills. You can’t negate the worth of beauty for utility, but when you’re starving and lost, function always triumphs over form.

Editor’s note: This nonfiction story by Nancy Agabian explores the intersection of art and science and was written in response to her recent performance at “Wonder Cabinet,” which we wrote about on April 19. Occidental College, where the event took place, has posted photos from the event on their Flickrstream and we’ve reproduced some here with their permission. For your convenience, we’ve also attached a PDF version of Agabian’s 4,500-word story (without images) for those who may prefer the convenience of an electronic reader, computer or just to print out.

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People at A Wonder Cabinet, which was curated by Remsen Bird Artist in Residence Lawrence Weschler, in Thorne Hall at Occidental College on Saturday, April 24, 2010. (Photo by Marc Campos, Occidental College Photographer) (via flickr.com/oxyphotos)

Sometimes I have strange feelings for my computer. In the 13 years since I set up an email account, I have had a wide ranging series of emotional experiences while facing a screen. In the early days of email, I wrote long letters to friends, like the ones I used to write by hand and send through the mail. I received long letters too: messages of friendship and love and the occasional breakup, though these missives have become increasingly more brief and less frequent since Facebook. Through my writing, I’ve connected to communities — lesbians in Armenia, disaffected teenagers in Rochester, and immigrant writers in Queens (where I now live) — on my computer. I’ve written a memoir on it, which required that I carefully and honestly analyze my life over a period of nine years. I’ve cried while working on my computer, summoning up painful life experiences and learning of terrible tragedies. I have also received a lot of good news on it: word of grants and awards and new opportunities. Lately, with this recession coinciding with mid-life crisis-ish concerns, I have felt addicted to the computer, just waiting for some more good news to arrive to get me out of my predicament: at work, I’m an artist trapped in an academic’s body. I get paid to usher young students into institutions of higher learning. This means that instead of fostering creativity, I sometimes get stuck preaching academic objectivity. So when I got an email from writer Lawrence Weschler asking me to resurrect Guitar Boy for the “Wonder Cabinet” at Occidental College in Los Angeles last April, I jumped on it. Guitar Boy was the folk-punk/performance art band that I had formed with artist Ann Perich in LA when I had lived there in the 90s. I wasn’t exactly sure what the Wonder Cabinet was, but Ren (as he is known by his students and friends) was one of my favorite professors in grad school; I was confident it would be a worthwhile event.

Weschler won a National Book Critics Circle Award for his book Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, a tome that illustrates and documents parallels in visual images and world events, often in the most uncanny, unfathomable ways. He has also become an academic impresario as the director of the New York Institute of the Humanities, putting together events with films, lectures and discussions on such topics as modern reportage, comics as art, and relations between religions. Sometimes they get funky, such as people who are crocheting a model of the coral reef. When I Googled his name with the term “Wonder Cabinet,” I discovered that the event relates to one of his books, Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. The nonfiction book is about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, an odd little place with real exhibits (like microscopic sculptures mounted on the heads of pins) and fake (a bat that can fly through matter but gets stuck in a lead wall eight inches thick). In the book Weschler gets into the beginnings of the museum in the late 16th and early 17th centuries when collectors started displaying curiosities in their homes. These Renaissance cabinets or rooms were called Wanderkammern, or Wonder Cabinets, and they included things like supposed horns of humans and Madonnas made out of feathers and other weird items both real and suspicious. It was a time of the “New World,” when the West met up with the East and elsewhere. In a way, the Museum of Jurassic Technology calls up this time period, with its creator David Wilson presenting exhibits that appeal to our sense of wonder. As Weschler puts it, “The visitor to the Museum of Jurrasic Technology continually finds himself shimmering between wondering at (the wonders of nature) and wondering whether (any of this could possibly be true). And it’s that very shimmer, the capacity for such delicious confusion … that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human.”

The entrance to Thorne Hall at Occidental College (Photo by Marc Campos, Occidental College Photographer) (via flickr.com/oxyphotos)

Weschler, as a modern day collector of curious people and ideas, started creating day-long events called “Wonder Cabinets,” coordinating connections between artists and scientists in homage to the ways that art and science were more unified during the Renaissance. “In fact, with the rise of the Internet and social media we may be returning to an era in which scientists and artists, historians and digital innovators have all kinds of things to say to each other,” Weschler says in the press release for the event at Occidental, where he is an artist-in-residence. I thought of the role of the computer in my life as a writer; I tend to get distracted by digital innovation, on Facebook and celebrity gossip websites, instead of creating with it anything of wonder. Also, I wasn’t sure how Guitar Boy would fit into the program, but I didn’t question too much, since Occidental was going to foot my travel bill to Los Angeles.

I had decided to move there twenty years before, as a college senior majoring in art, when I had read in ArtNews or Artforum about the burgeoning LA art world; two days after graduating in 1990, I drove across the country (from Boston) and lived there for nine years. It was in Venice, my old neighborhood, that I had found an artistic home. Now upon my return, after living in New York for eleven years, I couldn’t believe how exotic Venice looks: palm trees and bouganvillea and jade plants growing outside. I would walk down Venice Boulevard from my apartment to go to work at a printmaking studio run by self-proclaimed Modern Primitives. And completing the triangle of home, work, and art was Beyond Baroque, the literary center in the old Venice Town hall where I started writing. Previously in college, at a seven-sister’s school, I had trouble expressing myself among all the well-spoken young women, except when I could escape to the silent realm of the painting studio. In the multicultural 90s of LA, I was now given the means to tell my angst of growing up Armenian American. I suddenly became aware of my existence as a person with a past, walking around Venice. I made performances from the insane/drug-induced propositions that were uttered to me by various sun-addled men as I shuffled by in my cut-off jean shorts and Doc Martens, just 22 years old and still squishy in my body. In my art, I became subject and object at the same time.

Guitar Boy’s Nancy Agabian and Ann Perich perform in front of hundreds of people during Lawrence Weschler’s “A Wonder Cabinet.” (Photo by Marc Campos, Occidental College Photographer)

Ann Perich was drawn to this subjective-objectedness, too. A musician and mixed media artist, she saw me doing a performance wearing a dress made out of rocks on Valentine’s Day, ca. 1997. I am sure I was spilling my guts about being alone, bisexual and Armenian — the subjects of all my performances. She called me on the phone the next day and said she could relate and proposed we collaborate musically. I was like, Hey, I’m kind of tone deaf, but Ann didn’t mind. In her garage, she played a dulcimer with a pickup or a Casio keyoboard, and I sang improvised words, sometimes providing accompaniment on a screechy violin. We eventually called our collaboration Guitar Boy, since we did not play guitars nor were we boys; before the millenium shifted, it seemed critical to comment on the appalling way that popular music had been dominated for decades by the same type of instruments and people. I also wanted to make songs about topics other than love or longing or whatever sexual disco dittie was playing on the car radio. So we composed songs about Norman Rockwell, the Kmart Portrait Studio, and lactose intolerance, playing to small but knowing audiences at performance art spaces, dive bars, and Jewish delis. Our claim to non-fame was a folk-punk tune called “Don’t Fall Off the Getty Center (It’s a Long Way Down)” that people just went bonkers over. The Getty was so mammoth and lofty — literally and figuratively — that it seemed unlikely to contain it as a subject within a song, never mind tear it completely down. Its narrative lyrics were classic David and Goliath: an impoverished contemporary artist pitted against the most wealthy museum in the world; it hit the consciousness of the underclass of struggling artists in LA just at the right moment. To celebrate, we wore outrageous costumes: old prom dresses, middle-aged lingerie, mini-skirts made of clear plastic shower curtains — how Lady Gaga would dress if she were limited to a thrift store budget. I basked in the attention of our locally contextual stardom, a new kind of subject/object.

For some reason, when I moved to New York to go to grad school shortly thereafter, I gave our CD to Lawrence Weschler. In college I had read Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, his book on Robert Irwin, the text that was probably more influential (than the art mags) in sending me West after graduation. I was taking a class with him called “The Fiction of Nonfiction” in which he showed us words in nonfiction pieces that were delicately and deliberately chosen to create moments of poetry. He was the first professor I had in grad school who spoke about writing as if it were an art form, rather than a medium to record the thoughts in our minds which were supposed to come out in such a way that no one would ever second guess our intelligence.

One day I was meeting with Weschler in his office, and he told me he couldn’t reconcile my person with my prose, since I was so mousy in class and I was so outspoken in my writing. The first of my family to go to grad school, and newly transplanted from the-opposite-of-New-York, I didn’t feel comfortable that I could reveal my thoughts in class in such a way that no one would second guess my intelligence. I gave him the CD as a way to say, You thought my writing was out there? I must have had some kind of faith that Weschler would get it. Sure, he looked academic, with his beard, glasses, and a corduroy blazer with leather patches on the elbows, and he was a Pulitzer nominee and former New Yorker staffer. But he also told us that he had grown up in LA, had gone to school at Santa Cruz, and had started out as a writer for the LA Weekly. I liked that he made fun of articles in which the writer goes out of his way to stick to journalistic standards of objectivity, to such an extent that he can’t even acknowledge his own existence, with phrases like, “It was noted that … ” or “Mr. Jagger was asked … ” Likewise, popular songs, though they often use the first person, often try to tell a universal truth, and as such, veer away from anything grounded in specific personal experience, dealing instead with cliché. But specificity brings out the universal — that’s what I learned from “Don’t Fall Off the Getty Center,” anyway. I thought Ren would like Guitar Boy’s specific songs, and he did.

We have kept in touch over the last ten years since meeting in his class, and now he wanted Guitar Boy to play at the “Wonder Cabinet.” He had invited an art historian with a theory that Norman Rockwell was a huge pervert, and our song about him would work perfectly, but it turned out the guy couldn’t make it. Ren had also been hanging out at the Getty Research Institute and playing our song around their offices, I imagined to rouse morale. But we still didn’t seem to fit in with the theme of science and art very well.

I tried to put aside this concern when I got to Ann’s house to rehearse. She now happened to live in the same Venice neighborhood that I did, composing music for theatre and art projects and working at a law firm for her day job. She looked the same as she did ten years before, still wearing her white girl dread locks. For three days, in between her work schedule, we practiced and laughed. The songs came back to us easily, engraved in our brains. But Ann thought it was weird that we were going to play at what seemed to her like a stodgy academic affair. Stuck doing academic grunt work, I saw things a little differently. I have been to many a stodgy academic affair and usually artists aren’t invited nor consulted. It sounded like a fun and funky event to me, though I was still confused as to how we could contribute to the theme of science and art converging in our present era.

On the day of the Cabinet, we arrived in time for the lunch break and set up our musical instruments and did a little sound check. Our little Casio keyboard sounded bizarre amplified back to us in the massive space. We were in Thorne Hall, once of those classic academic spaces, long and wide, that one usually does associate with boring lectures. But the first lecturer we heard, Walter Murch seemed kind of cool. He is an Oscar-winning sound mixer and editor, but his side interest has brought him here to give a Power Point presentation about the similarities between the ratios of the orbits of planets and moons to the frequencies of notes in octaves. Or something like this. It is interesting for about 45 minutes, especially when he talks about the early astronomers who believed that God wouldn’t create imperfectly measured orbits. But I start to lose the thread of his hypothesis, as he continues to give more complicated technical info in a series of charts. Ann gives me the “I told you so” look.

The next guy up is Ken Libbrecht, a physicist from Cal Tech who photographs snowflakes. He has a North Dakota accent and is quite earnest about describing his process. He explains how he lays out a piece of white foam core when it’s snowing to catch the flakes, transfers them to a slide, then gets out his special microscopic camera to photograph them, his hands freezing the whole time. The photographs themselves, projected onto the massive screen at Thorne Hall, are colorful, transparent designs, multifaceted works of art. The audience oohs and ahs. It is very wonderful to see a world that we live with but don’t know in detail. At some point, he tells us that he uses filters on the photographs, to add dimension to the flakes; otherwise, they’re just clear crystals in black and white. Then he says he didn’t use Photoshop, right as he admits that he used Photoshop to doctor the particular image on the screen and the audience laughs. He is an odd and likable character. For no reason at all, he says as a kind of conversational tic, “I have lots of photographs of snowflakes,” like a kid showing you his collection of marbles.

The snowflake guy outlines the various components of snowflakes. He uses words like “sectored plates,” “duck feet,” “six sentinels,” and “stellar dendrites” to describe the formations. He shows us some flakes that have stuck together that look like lattice work. One fun fact I did not know is that some flakes are made out of needles and hollow columns — two flakes might form at the end of one long needle. The longer a flake has to form, the more developed it will be. Besides time, the two main factors in shaping flakes into patterns are temperature and humidity.

At some point he shows us some man-made snow; after some of the elegant, intricate, fern-like flakes we have seen, the man-made flakes look totally crude, like misshapen clods of dirt. The audience chuckles. It made me realize that people just can’t ever be superior to God. But then I have to give humans credit, since they have created incredible moments of genius; some might cite Bach or Van Gogh or Patti Smith. But something about seeing those primitive man-made flakes reminds me of how I cringe when I see old paintings I have done, or read texts I have written years ago, or watch films that I thought were great as a kid, only to find as an adult they are completely sophomoric. (Rent “Breaking Away” if you want such an experience.) Everything we make seems retarded, unless it has something of God in it, I guess.

The snowflake guy decided to make his own flakes in the studio, I mean laboratory, with equipment that can control the temperature and humidity (or saturation). He shows us proof sheets of flakes taken at various temps and saturation points. He describes how he can watch the flake forming on his monitor, and thus adjust the temp and saturation as it’s growing to alter formations, to get more ducks feet or plates or stellar dendrites. It is at this moment that I realize the science/art connection. This guy sounds like an artist working in his studio, playing around with his media. He is filled with wonder.

But, he is human, too. His lecture goes on maybe half an hour too long. Ann and I are zonked out from sitting in the dark air conditioned auditorium for three hours straight. At the break we head outside to the California sunshine and walked around the campus to stretch and get psyched up to perform. In the meantime, the artists took the stage. Lauren Redniss was showing her project about Marie Curie. Matt Shlian was discussing folded paper. Ryan and Trevor Oakes, college-aged-looking twins had these pen and ink line drawings that were set inside concave shapes; in the green room backstage, I stuck my head into one and told them that it was cool.

Before we went on, Ren insisted that I watch a film that David Wilson had given him by a Soviet Armenian filmmaker, Artavazd Pelechian. It just happened to be April 24, Martyrs Day, the day of commemoration of the Armenian genocide. I felt a bit guilty for getting gussied up in clashing tights and an animal print leotard with a tail and gallivanting around on such a sober date, so I was relieved he took a moment to honor the day. The film shows a flock of sheep being guided through a tunnel. It’s in black and white, and at one point, one of the sheperds loses a sheep in a river with many rapids. He dives in after it, and you watch him holding on to that sheep as they keep getting sucked under, his feet disappearing into the waves. It is incredibly poignant.

At Ren’s request, we start with “Victim” (“I’m not gonna be a victim anymore”) which ties into the subject of the film, with its echoes and suggestions of genocide; then I give a little speech about wonder being the opposite of genocide, since genocide is stupidity and hatred taken to its ulitmate form. The “Wonder Cabinet,” I explain, values and studies and loves the unusual, so we’re going to celebrate unusual and tortured artists today. We sing a song called “The Artist’s Way” (with a chorus of “We’re all artists, we just don’t know it”), and the one about Norman Rockwell (“Norman, oh Norman, you weren’t normal … ”). Sitting on chairs next to each other, I make sure to yell and scream in the right places, and Ann plays her dulcimer with dramatic flourishes. But things aren’t going well. We’re making tons of mistakes; it’s the worst time we have played, when in rehearsal we were doing so well. And the audience doesn’t match up with my memory. The Cabinet-eers seem dead; there are far fewer numbers from when the snowflake guy gave his talk. They’re just sitting there catatonic instead of looking delighted. I remember moments of glory from the Guitar Boy days, when I once had a bowl of Matzo ball soup sent to the stage at Canter’s Kibbutz room, and Ann and I played an homage to it, to the tune of “Girl from Ipanema” (“Large and round and spongy and starchy, the Matzo ball soup at Canter’s is yummy”) or the time when Sonny Bono died and we paid tribute to him to the tune of “Sunny” (“Sonny, thank you for the Sonny and Cher show. Sonny, you had a really really really big nose.”) Thinking about it now, I realize those inspired moments were few and far between. There were many times, I am sure, when audiences just stared at us, not knowing what to make of us, like they are now.

I feel very disconnected from this audience. So as part of our onstage banter, I tell Ann that we don’t belong here. I ask her, “Do you think they think we’re weird?” Someone from the audience yells out, “Nooo!” and he sounds like Weschler. “Judging by the weirdos we’ve seen here today, I’d say we do fit in,” she says, and the audience laughs. I tell Ann that we’re old, and outdated, and we’ve been taken out of context, the way that items in a museum are often plopped into a sterile environment; this is the segueway to “Don’t Fall Off the Getty Center.” When we launch into it, people wake up a little bit. I have updated it with some lyrics about how the Getty can’t hold onto any museum directors, because these poor souls always have to report to the head of the trust to make any purchases. I purport that it is fundamentally a stingy place because of the cheap legacy of J. Paul Getty himself, who let his grandson’s ear be cut off by kidnappers and later demanded that his son, the boy’s father, pay him back the ransom.

Nancy Agabian speaks to the crowd after her performance. (Photo by Marc Campos, Occidental College Photographer)

Afterwards, old friends appeared, people I hadn’t thought of in a while, and we got caught up and reacclimated our eyes to each other. We are all invited to the Occidental president’s house, where we eat tacos and talk about the event and reminisce. My friend Jennifer Gentile, a filmmaker and set decorator, was telling us about the Oakes twins and how they identified a more accurate way of drawing perspective by acknowledging human biology and structure.

They reminded the audience that when we see an image, we don’t see it as a rectangle in an unobstructed frame; in fact our noses usually get in the way, but our visual cortex works to leave it out. So they compose images within a series of small sections, which are measured to be the same width as the space between their two pupils. They also believe that we experience space spherically and thus, the surfaces that we draw on should be concave. Jen said the talk was mind blowing, given that the artists twins; here you have two different people with four eyes working out a theory on perspective. I found it interesting that the subject made its way into what’s meant to be an objective process.

As a nonfiction writer, I often have to think about subjectivity and objectivity and how they play out in writing. When you are a subject, you act. An object is acted upon. To be objective often means remaining completely separate from the action, to just observe, like an emotionless scientist. Being subjective doesn’t just mean being a subject of a piece of writing, but inserting yourself into the action to acknowledge your limitations to see a subject clearly. Embracing the subjective means embracing your humanity. Maybe God is objective, the ultimate omniscient observer, but humans can never be anything more than subjective, no matter how hard they try to play God. And yet God is in the details, the ones that we create. So are artists human and god, subjective and objective, at the same time?

The university has been structured around subjectivity and objectivity, with its different disciplines, categorized and separated from each other: colleges of science, colleges of liberal arts, colleges of arts. In English departments, you have people dissecting literature like frogs, and you have kids getting inspired to compose their own poems. I started teaching English because I needed a job after graduate school; as a performance artist, I had always hoped an MFA would give me more stability to get a salary and benefits. Academia was a refuge I entered only because public arts funding had been drying up for a while. I found my English students weren’t looking for a wacky artist, and neither were my employers. But I did the best job I could, since I liked my students, and I didn’t have a big beef with academia: it encouraged having an open mind, something artists have to rely upon. Artists sometimes need to do research, and they have to stretch their minds around new information in order to inform their work. Academia also focuses on having a discipline, which artists need when they go to their studios every day. In a way, I am creative with teaching, structuring writing exercises around readings. And I bring my performance persona into the classroom to improvise during lessons, based on the students’ comments. So as an event — and as a tradition — the Wonder Cabinet reminds me that there are even more possibilities for bringing together the disparate parts I have been struggling with: the sober, objective professor, and the crazy, impulsive performance artist.

At the after-party, some of the Getty research fellows approached us to buy our CDs. They really liked our Getty song and they gave us some dirt about the institution, which warmed my heart. I started to feel like it all now made sense, the reason for Guitar Boy being here, the convergence of our songs with the topics and projects of the day. We were the entertainment for these art and science nerds. Jennifer said that today was essentially a day about people who are weirdos, and we exemplified that most directly, with our bizarre songs. She saw people who became totally committed to an idea that might not be especially popular, hip, or even practical. I was happy that I had kept Guitar Boy’s flame burning. For in essence, creativity — whether scientific, artistic, objective or subjective — is a wonder.