This is a piece I wrote some time ago that is unashamedly about the past. I seem to be writing so many thousand words on joculum.livejournal.com that I find it hard to focus on turning out Atlanta art reviews. This is about art that was (sort of):
As a devotee of the intricately argued concept and the physically intricate art object, I am intrigued when something that appears to have been a physical object turns out to have existed only conceptually.
In the age of Photoshop, we are used to seeing entire buildings and indeed entire cities that exist only conceptually, but that’s really just an extension of photocollage and indeed of painting and drawing, where what never was on land or sea nevertheless appeared to our wondering eyes.
I suppose the installation art I’m thinking of is more parallel to the intentionally deceptive photocollage or piece of Photoshoppery, such as pictures of political figures consorting with unsavory types who were never even in the same room as the figures in question.
The pieces I’m thinking of were offshoots of the wedding of art and technology, wherein the technology frequently never delivered the aforementioned art, or did so only long enough to take a photograph.
Though one local artists ambitious uses of virtual reality eventually paid off in installations that worked a good deal of the time, I used to joke that an installation by so-and-so consisted of the artist flat on his back under a table full of equipment, shouting to listeners to explain what they would be experiencing if everything were working, which it was not and never would.
Likewise, there was an interactive installation by a nationally known artist that consisted of a photograph of the component parts and an article written as though the piece had actually worked, which it never did.
And one of the site sculptures in Piedmont Park back in the day of the Arts Festival never functioned at all, except when the circulating-water component was replaced by the flow from an off-camera hose long enough to allow a photographer to document the piece in operation.
All of this was back in the day when Jean Baudrillard was enthralling the art world with talk of simulacra as copies without an original. I wonder why the idea resonated so well.
Nowadays, of course, it is taken for granted that the image probably does not correspond to anything in physical reality, but as recently as twenty years ago, the faith in the veracity of photographs still lingered. One would have thought that the notion would have gone away in the wake of the Victorians’ photos of fairies dancing in the garden, but faith in fakes (to borrow the British title of Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality) seems endemic.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
in the era of fictions about fictions
Umberto Eco may have been among its theoreticians and Joan Fontcuberta one of many artists making full-blown art out of fictitious history, but for most Americans the website for The Blair Witch Project really popularized the concept of apparent reality created out of nothing but visually-convincing false documentation, providing an elaborately presented back story for a work of cinematic fiction that by itself was a rather slender production.
Lately, the concept of the acknowledged work of fiction accompanied by riddles with a real payoff has been revived, having been pioneered by Kit Williams' children's book Masquerade. The Da Vinci Code was one of many books that carried into the twentieth century the sort of solve-the-riddles-before-the-characters-do fiction from the nineteenth century that never went away completely (if you count the detective novel as part of the genre, but there it is the plot that is to be disentangled, not riddles intended as stumblingblocks rather than clues).
So Jay Wilson is right on time with "The Middle Chapters of O. M. Norling: The first half, what was left behind," currently at Jill Celeste Gallery and Palate Wine Bar through February 21. The fourteen paintings, signed O. M. Norling, are visual riddles, the first half of an oeuvre intended to be a message for someone (but who?), as the owner of the cleverly named Hölderlin Gallery observed in his notes and sketches from 1932, translated on the website and in signage in the gallery. Whether the Hölderlin clue is at all relevant, I can't say.
Other signage in the gallery / wine bar indicates that this is chapter 3 of the O. M. Norling saga, and that more chapters will be made available late in 2009, with exhibition to follow in 2010.
Details are available on www.omnorling.com and, were it not for the very real paintings hanging on the walls, one would think this a completely digital work of imagination. Where it is all going, and why, we shall see, if Wilson carries out his original plans and we live long enough.
The strategy has been insufficiently used over the years, and I hope the conceptual framework provides an adequate payoff for the patience involved.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Bookforum online: a recommendation
I am left with the feeling that the Dec/Jan issue of Bookforum ought to be worked through in a seminar. To say the least, it is one of those opportunities to be brought up to speed on a whole host of figures about whom one hasn't thought recently, or hasn't thought at all. Of course, I like it because I already agreed with most of the revaluations, but not thought them out as clearly. I shall leave undiscussed the question of which revaluations I disagree with. And now that I have italicized part of a word, I should answer the question asked by the reviewer of William Spanos' book on Edward Said: Spanos italicizes the "ing" in "be-ing" because he wants to emphasize (I think) the individual events (what the classic philosophers would have called "becoming") within the whole shooting match known collectively as "being." Next question.
I should note, since this is Counterforces and not joculum to which I am posting, that there are some nifty reviews of William Eggleston, Marcia Tucker's memoirs, and the ill-timed Seven Days in the Art World, which posts its story in bright colors just as economic collapse paints its grey on grey, and Hegel's owl of Minerva hoots in the tree before taking flight at nightfall. Also a review of new books on Tarkovsky, for those of us who adore his movies.
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/
I should note, since this is Counterforces and not joculum to which I am posting, that there are some nifty reviews of William Eggleston, Marcia Tucker's memoirs, and the ill-timed Seven Days in the Art World, which posts its story in bright colors just as economic collapse paints its grey on grey, and Hegel's owl of Minerva hoots in the tree before taking flight at nightfall. Also a review of new books on Tarkovsky, for those of us who adore his movies.
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/
Monday, December 29, 2008
year-end notes towards 2009
As I focus increasingly on matters other than art (but with an eye towards getting the Atlanta art world through the year ahead of us) I find myself attracted to exhibitions for anything but artistic reasons. (Conceptually based art includes the theoretical agenda; I'm talking about exhibitions that ought to be viewed on formalist or documentary terms when it comes to the works themselves.)
Richard Fleming's "Walking to Guantanamo" photographs, opening at Whitespace on January 16, are the case in point here. Fleming apparently walked across Cuba, taking pictures and recording his own impressions of life half a century after the Revolution.
Having mined more than one exhibition of photographs of Cuba for evidence that the photographer wasn't looking for, I've gotten used to the pre-editing eye of the would-be perceiver. Thanks to Fleming's account of his travels, we have the verbal account that helps us to evaluate the visual evidence. (That's to say, we have more evidence of what Fleming saw and why he saw it, versus all the things he didn't notice and that we have no way of knowing about.)
Anyone who has read such books as V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South or journalistic accounts in whatever newspaper you choose to cite has intuitively learned the structures of interest and omission without having had to read the theory behind the perception. It's obvious that nobody ever gets the whole story; the whole story does not exist, because there are too many versions of the story, more versions than there are perceivers of it.
But quixotic ventures like Fleming's walk to Guantanamo add visual and verbal information that sometimes proves illuminating as well as visually beautiful. (He looks to be a good photographer.)
Fleming's book may well get things wrong for all I know (I haven't seen a word of it), but to paraphrase Wittgenstein, that too will be a useful piece of information.
I for one am happy that Whitespace is carrying on and that other galleries are hunkering down to get through the financial tempest already buffeting them.
Richard Fleming's "Walking to Guantanamo" photographs, opening at Whitespace on January 16, are the case in point here. Fleming apparently walked across Cuba, taking pictures and recording his own impressions of life half a century after the Revolution.
Having mined more than one exhibition of photographs of Cuba for evidence that the photographer wasn't looking for, I've gotten used to the pre-editing eye of the would-be perceiver. Thanks to Fleming's account of his travels, we have the verbal account that helps us to evaluate the visual evidence. (That's to say, we have more evidence of what Fleming saw and why he saw it, versus all the things he didn't notice and that we have no way of knowing about.)
Anyone who has read such books as V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South or journalistic accounts in whatever newspaper you choose to cite has intuitively learned the structures of interest and omission without having had to read the theory behind the perception. It's obvious that nobody ever gets the whole story; the whole story does not exist, because there are too many versions of the story, more versions than there are perceivers of it.
But quixotic ventures like Fleming's walk to Guantanamo add visual and verbal information that sometimes proves illuminating as well as visually beautiful. (He looks to be a good photographer.)
Fleming's book may well get things wrong for all I know (I haven't seen a word of it), but to paraphrase Wittgenstein, that too will be a useful piece of information.
I for one am happy that Whitespace is carrying on and that other galleries are hunkering down to get through the financial tempest already buffeting them.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
reasons for optimism (later)
I mistyped in haste and will have now corrected "in memoriam Jack Sinclair."
I am feeling the need to celebrate the gallery owners and directors who make the scene as vigorous as it is (frequently at the cost of their own profits, if not their own profitability) but that will have to wait for a bit. The last few posts have been too lugubrious and/or elegiac. I did intend to make the implicit point in the Sinclair homage that an economic downturn presents new possibilities for the sufficiently imaginative. The alternative scene flourished during the recessions that bracketed the Reagan-Bush years and the recovery in between the two downturns.
I am feeling the need to celebrate the gallery owners and directors who make the scene as vigorous as it is (frequently at the cost of their own profits, if not their own profitability) but that will have to wait for a bit. The last few posts have been too lugubrious and/or elegiac. I did intend to make the implicit point in the Sinclair homage that an economic downturn presents new possibilities for the sufficiently imaginative. The alternative scene flourished during the recessions that bracketed the Reagan-Bush years and the recovery in between the two downturns.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
de mortuis: in memoriam Jack Sinclair
first drafts are frequently a bad idea. “First thought, best thought” does not mean that first writing has any merit at all. Even Kerouac modified On the Road. But it seems desirable to get some perspective out quickly regarding a too little known enabler and anti-commodification gadfly from the Atlanta alternative art scene of a generation or so ago. So, here, with regrettably minimal edits, is:
A first draft towards a proper memorial for Jack Sinclair
The names of most installation artists are written in water (sometimes literally).
These days, the odds for remembrance are slightly better. Everyone takes digital photos of everything, and the vast majority of those photos get posted to Flickr or Photobucket or the art websites. (Not that this exhaustive documentation is necessarily secure; the days of a site’s popularity are numbered, and how many of those photographs will have been backed up to more secure modes of storage?)
But back in the day, long before the advent of on-demand online publishing, few exhibitions had catalogues. Even in informal records of the event, hard-to-photograph installations designed to exist temporarily were documented badly. Few images of them ever appeared in print, and descriptions even in long reviews were enigmatic.
Thus it is that Jack Sinclair dies in New Mexico and the news is greeted in Atlanta mostly by ”Who?”
I am not sure where Jack’s site-specific installations should stand in the history of art in Atlanta, but his interventions in the 1980s stretched considerably beyond site sculptures.
Jack was one of the instigators of the annual Great Mattress Factory exhibitions (so named because the first of them was held in the disused Southern Cross Mattress Factory) that brought together upwards of three hundred Atlanta artists working in a range of aesthetics from romantically decorative to in-your-face confrontational.
Two steps (and increasingly only one step) ahead of the developers, Jack and his collaborators—I omit the names and focus on Jack because we are talking about Jack here, even if John Payne’s death this year has the others feeling their mortality—ferreted out vacated factory buildings that could be rehabbed sufficiently to install art. (The structurally dangerous sections could be cordoned off.) And under their supervision, three hundred artists marked off their individual territories and some of them helped clean up the site sufficiently to admit a few thousand guests.
Towards the end of the Mattress Factory and Mattress Spring exhibitions' history, the buildings in which they were staged were already under contract, and the developers had recognized that big come-one-come-all art shows were wonderful marketing tools that cost them nothing.
The anarchist impulse that drove the Mattress Factory collaborations was finally done in by a combination of events: the impending Olympics (which led to the retention for speculative purposes of every semi-ruined site in town, by developers who didn’t want a bunch of artists cluttering up the neighborhood) and the sheer success of the Mattress Factory shows themselves.
Jack was one of the organizers who believed that since the artists put in the sweat equity and the upfront entry fee to pay for publicity and lighting, the artists should share equally in whatever profits remained from the memorable art party of the opening night. Others wanted to use the funds to institutionalize the annual collaboration, and the surviving members of that inner circle ought to write a history of those shows to supplement the few reviews that can be found in back issues of Art Papers, Creative Loafing, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (For that matter, who has archived even the maps and the rosters of artists, who ranged from the recognized to the deservedly unknown?)
Jack also ran his own anti-profit exhibition space for sculpture and installation art on Edgewood Avenue, for as long as he could afford to do so. Meanwhile the young Turks (and other ethnicities) were staging alternative-space shows of their own, and some of them, such as Michael Jenkins, went on to run distinguished New York galleries. Others sank into unsurprising anonymity.
But Jack just kept on keeping on until there was nothing more to be kept. Eventually he started his own letterpress operation in the Little Five Points Community Center, for which I contributed the poem for the press’s inaugural broadside.
After his marriage and move to New Mexico, Jack continued to create new work. He had projects that were interrupted by his hospitalization.
Atlanta is a town where all that counts is what you did yesterday, and even the most spectacular of accomplishments from the day before yesterday tends to be disparaged when it is not forgotten altogether. This is as it should be: the days of taking over whole ex-industrial sites for community-wide art shows is over, and I shudder to think of the number of safety laws that were productively overlooked (because many of the organizers worked construction in their day jobs and knew which laws they could safely overlook). Nostalgia gets us nowhere.
But one wishes that there would be at least critical evaluations of what was done in the past and why. (There should be a separate blog post devoted to the reasons why Atlanta artists are regularly fated to reinvent structures and strategies that once existed and have ceased to do so.)
In collaboration with other artists and in productive contention with them, Jack maintained an artist-organized face for contemporary art that addressed and/or involved the public, especially a public that was not ordinarily inclined to go to art galleries. The Thursday Night Artists group in which Jack and I were involved staged one such community intervention in Virginia-Highland at a moment when the lower-middle-class neighborhood was being revitalized by new arrivals (solidly single-family, it never required the kind of reinvention that other intown neighborhoods had needed).
The Reliable Paper Company distributors of, I think, restroom towels and toilet paper had recently vacated the storefront next to George’s Bar, and a number of us (you could look it up) installed our paintings and our site-specific pieces as the Reliable Art Show, planning to interact with passersby who were taking their children for a walk or looking for a quick beer and a sandwich at George’s.
In a ceiling-to-floor corner installation, Jack created a giant hornets’-nest-cum-tornado from the felt sheets then used to insulate buildings. We noted that every afternoon, the wasps building a nest in the eaves outside would fly through the open door into the space, looking anxious at the new arrivals in the neighborhood.
Just before the show opened, George himself stuck his head in the door to see what was going on. He remarked, glancing briefly at Jack’s sculpture, “Why, why…that’s insulation.” “It sure is,” organizer Miles Boyd replied.
Going next door for lunch the following day, I heard George declaring to a customer at the bar, “You know what they got next door? They got a bunch of insulation hanging down from the ceiling, and they say that’s art.”
“I’m with you, George,” the customer replied. “That’s not art. Norman Rockwell’s art.”
Norman Rockwell got his own retrospective at the High Museum in the years following.
And even though we tried hard to get High Museum director Gudmund Vigtel to walk in when he showed up by chance for a lunch meeting at George’s, by and large Jack made damn sure that nothing he made would ever end up in anybody’s permanent collection. His principled stance against the commodification of art preserved the best of an earlier idealistic decade in the era of Reagan and the first George Bush. Unfortunately, it also ensured his eventual near-disappearance from the public record.
I would be curious to know how much documentation MOCA GA owns of the site sculptors and installation artists of those years.
A first draft towards a proper memorial for Jack Sinclair
The names of most installation artists are written in water (sometimes literally).
These days, the odds for remembrance are slightly better. Everyone takes digital photos of everything, and the vast majority of those photos get posted to Flickr or Photobucket or the art websites. (Not that this exhaustive documentation is necessarily secure; the days of a site’s popularity are numbered, and how many of those photographs will have been backed up to more secure modes of storage?)
But back in the day, long before the advent of on-demand online publishing, few exhibitions had catalogues. Even in informal records of the event, hard-to-photograph installations designed to exist temporarily were documented badly. Few images of them ever appeared in print, and descriptions even in long reviews were enigmatic.
Thus it is that Jack Sinclair dies in New Mexico and the news is greeted in Atlanta mostly by ”Who?”
I am not sure where Jack’s site-specific installations should stand in the history of art in Atlanta, but his interventions in the 1980s stretched considerably beyond site sculptures.
Jack was one of the instigators of the annual Great Mattress Factory exhibitions (so named because the first of them was held in the disused Southern Cross Mattress Factory) that brought together upwards of three hundred Atlanta artists working in a range of aesthetics from romantically decorative to in-your-face confrontational.
Two steps (and increasingly only one step) ahead of the developers, Jack and his collaborators—I omit the names and focus on Jack because we are talking about Jack here, even if John Payne’s death this year has the others feeling their mortality—ferreted out vacated factory buildings that could be rehabbed sufficiently to install art. (The structurally dangerous sections could be cordoned off.) And under their supervision, three hundred artists marked off their individual territories and some of them helped clean up the site sufficiently to admit a few thousand guests.
Towards the end of the Mattress Factory and Mattress Spring exhibitions' history, the buildings in which they were staged were already under contract, and the developers had recognized that big come-one-come-all art shows were wonderful marketing tools that cost them nothing.
The anarchist impulse that drove the Mattress Factory collaborations was finally done in by a combination of events: the impending Olympics (which led to the retention for speculative purposes of every semi-ruined site in town, by developers who didn’t want a bunch of artists cluttering up the neighborhood) and the sheer success of the Mattress Factory shows themselves.
Jack was one of the organizers who believed that since the artists put in the sweat equity and the upfront entry fee to pay for publicity and lighting, the artists should share equally in whatever profits remained from the memorable art party of the opening night. Others wanted to use the funds to institutionalize the annual collaboration, and the surviving members of that inner circle ought to write a history of those shows to supplement the few reviews that can be found in back issues of Art Papers, Creative Loafing, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (For that matter, who has archived even the maps and the rosters of artists, who ranged from the recognized to the deservedly unknown?)
Jack also ran his own anti-profit exhibition space for sculpture and installation art on Edgewood Avenue, for as long as he could afford to do so. Meanwhile the young Turks (and other ethnicities) were staging alternative-space shows of their own, and some of them, such as Michael Jenkins, went on to run distinguished New York galleries. Others sank into unsurprising anonymity.
But Jack just kept on keeping on until there was nothing more to be kept. Eventually he started his own letterpress operation in the Little Five Points Community Center, for which I contributed the poem for the press’s inaugural broadside.
After his marriage and move to New Mexico, Jack continued to create new work. He had projects that were interrupted by his hospitalization.
Atlanta is a town where all that counts is what you did yesterday, and even the most spectacular of accomplishments from the day before yesterday tends to be disparaged when it is not forgotten altogether. This is as it should be: the days of taking over whole ex-industrial sites for community-wide art shows is over, and I shudder to think of the number of safety laws that were productively overlooked (because many of the organizers worked construction in their day jobs and knew which laws they could safely overlook). Nostalgia gets us nowhere.
But one wishes that there would be at least critical evaluations of what was done in the past and why. (There should be a separate blog post devoted to the reasons why Atlanta artists are regularly fated to reinvent structures and strategies that once existed and have ceased to do so.)
In collaboration with other artists and in productive contention with them, Jack maintained an artist-organized face for contemporary art that addressed and/or involved the public, especially a public that was not ordinarily inclined to go to art galleries. The Thursday Night Artists group in which Jack and I were involved staged one such community intervention in Virginia-Highland at a moment when the lower-middle-class neighborhood was being revitalized by new arrivals (solidly single-family, it never required the kind of reinvention that other intown neighborhoods had needed).
The Reliable Paper Company distributors of, I think, restroom towels and toilet paper had recently vacated the storefront next to George’s Bar, and a number of us (you could look it up) installed our paintings and our site-specific pieces as the Reliable Art Show, planning to interact with passersby who were taking their children for a walk or looking for a quick beer and a sandwich at George’s.
In a ceiling-to-floor corner installation, Jack created a giant hornets’-nest-cum-tornado from the felt sheets then used to insulate buildings. We noted that every afternoon, the wasps building a nest in the eaves outside would fly through the open door into the space, looking anxious at the new arrivals in the neighborhood.
Just before the show opened, George himself stuck his head in the door to see what was going on. He remarked, glancing briefly at Jack’s sculpture, “Why, why…that’s insulation.” “It sure is,” organizer Miles Boyd replied.
Going next door for lunch the following day, I heard George declaring to a customer at the bar, “You know what they got next door? They got a bunch of insulation hanging down from the ceiling, and they say that’s art.”
“I’m with you, George,” the customer replied. “That’s not art. Norman Rockwell’s art.”
Norman Rockwell got his own retrospective at the High Museum in the years following.
And even though we tried hard to get High Museum director Gudmund Vigtel to walk in when he showed up by chance for a lunch meeting at George’s, by and large Jack made damn sure that nothing he made would ever end up in anybody’s permanent collection. His principled stance against the commodification of art preserved the best of an earlier idealistic decade in the era of Reagan and the first George Bush. Unfortunately, it also ensured his eventual near-disappearance from the public record.
I would be curious to know how much documentation MOCA GA owns of the site sculptors and installation artists of those years.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
no sooner asked than done
This press release arrived in my inbox while I was typing the foregoing post:
FORT!/da?
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
866 Hill St SE
Unit A
Atlanta, GA 30315
404.627.0790
Opal Gallery, in conjunction with A Cappella Books, presents Robert
Cheatham¹s book release and signing of Bad Infinity
Atlanta, GA, December 13, 2008 - Opal Gallery invites Robert Cheatham to
introduce his new creative venture, FORT!/DA? Books with a reading of his
book "Bad Infinity" on Saturday, December 13 from 7 to 9 p.m. An excerpt
from the book's accompanying DVD - a joint project with videographer Chea
Prince - will be shown at Opal. Immediately following, A Cappella will host
a question and answer session moderated by Chad Radford and a book signing.
A Cappella Books will carry FORT!/da? Books.
Robert Cheatham, an independent scholar and artist, is often described as a
modern day Renaissance Man. Working in the Atlanta art scene for more than
30 years, Robert Cheatham's influence prevails throughout the city. He was a
main player in the Destroy All Music Festivals of the 80¹s; a co-founder/
creator of Public Domain Inc. - incorporated as a non-profit arts and
information organization devoted to art, theory, and community in 1991.
Public Domain hosts the online listserves Artnews and Word-L, as well as the
podcast series Live From Edge City, a video series, and an archive of ten
years of improvisational music. Since 2001, he has filled the executive
director's position at the Southeast's premier avant-garde gallery Eyedrum.
FORT!/da?
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
866 Hill St SE
Unit A
Atlanta, GA 30315
404.627.0790
Opal Gallery, in conjunction with A Cappella Books, presents Robert
Cheatham¹s book release and signing of Bad Infinity
Atlanta, GA, December 13, 2008 - Opal Gallery invites Robert Cheatham to
introduce his new creative venture, FORT!/DA? Books with a reading of his
book "Bad Infinity" on Saturday, December 13 from 7 to 9 p.m. An excerpt
from the book's accompanying DVD - a joint project with videographer Chea
Prince - will be shown at Opal. Immediately following, A Cappella will host
a question and answer session moderated by Chad Radford and a book signing.
A Cappella Books will carry FORT!/da? Books.
Robert Cheatham, an independent scholar and artist, is often described as a
modern day Renaissance Man. Working in the Atlanta art scene for more than
30 years, Robert Cheatham's influence prevails throughout the city. He was a
main player in the Destroy All Music Festivals of the 80¹s; a co-founder/
creator of Public Domain Inc. - incorporated as a non-profit arts and
information organization devoted to art, theory, and community in 1991.
Public Domain hosts the online listserves Artnews and Word-L, as well as the
podcast series Live From Edge City, a video series, and an archive of ten
years of improvisational music. Since 2001, he has filled the executive
director's position at the Southeast's premier avant-garde gallery Eyedrum.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
