a commentary on art in the more distant regions of global artmaking

It occurs to me that though many artists well known in their communities are not necessarily earning a living from that fact (something that keeps me from being annoyed by who gets recommended for "genius grants"...usually they could use the money), some who deserve national acclaim are doing okay, and it would be nice if there were a way of separating out the vehicles of recognition from the cash awards.

There are indeed artists who have a decent income already who deserve to be better known in the world at large, in any city you care to name. And there used to be non-cash-award touring exhibitions that featured the art of the people who were already "emerged" locally but utterly unknown past the city limits or outer reaches of the conurbations within which they resided. But now cash awards and their attendant press releases seem to be the only vehicle with which to publicize such folks to the entire planet.

I remember well when the corporations yanked the funding for the touring shows during the last great economic downturn, which devastated the art world more lastingly than it did the corporations or the country.

questions which tend not to edification and answers that do

It came to me in the night that the artists in this burg (and longtime readers of my non-art blog or former venues in which to read my stuff know to which burg I refer) have no idea how marginal most of the art scene really is...not just the makers but the venues and the ones who write about it. When by default one of the best art sites online depends on writers who get around by bicycle, then the great tradition continues of art writers who get by via holding down a non-writing real job, or more usually two real jobs, or three if you count transient gigs.

But fortunately I have decided not to write an autobiographical piece, because it has occurred to me that there are exhibitions about to close about which I have not written because others have reported more than adequately on them. So since readers who can actually visit it have already read at least two excellent descriptions of the piece (both of which give away the surprise), I shall only remind you of the existence of Martijn van Wagtendonk's remarkable installation at MoCA GA:


And those of you who do not reside in Atlanta and have no idea what I am talking about can comment and then I'll know who migrates over to this blog from the one to which I devote most of my theory and energy. Probably nobody except my two most faithful readers, both of whom know me personally and one of whom lives in Atlanta.

And there is some extraordinary work at Mason Murer (as I know from photographs and from the writing of others) that I haven't so much as seen because I seem to run out of time or out of energy before getting there. As locals know, I miss much simply because I am so dependent on hitching rides with others to openings that challenge my waning night vision.

self-indulgent self-congratulation, a genre that the Web knows all too well

I was feeling morose about the number of Atlanta and Athens artists I have felt confident were headed for greater things who nevertheless didn't (some by self-sabotage, some by just plain bad luck) and was somewhat buoyed by the knowledge that I may (or may not) have written the first-ever fan letter to Sarah Vowell.

This unknown San Francisco writer named Sarah Vowell had sent an unsolicited book review to Art Papers sometime in the early 1990s, and I had looked at it before passing it on to editor Glenn Harper and resolved to write a note saying, "I don't know what Glenn is going to decide, but I really, really like your book review and hope you send us more of them."

I suspect I never actually wrote the letter but Sarah Vowell sent us a couple more book reviews and then disappeared from sight until one day we got a copy of Radio On and I said, to a general lack of interest from the rest of the office, "Hey, this is great, that reviewer I liked so much has written a book." After which I occasionally wondered whatever happened to Sarah Vowell until one day I was listening to NPR and heard her byline spoken before an op-ed piece. The rest is history, or a whole bunch of subsequently published books about history. (Looking again at my copy of The Wordy Shipmates reminded me of my writer's crush in the early '90s on this unknown sender of an over-the-transom review in a building that still has transoms.)

I tend to become rather passionate about work I believe in; when I decided decades ago that the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott was the only poet who interested me in an anthology of English-language Caribbean writers (so Aimé Césaire wasn't at issue), I ordered his books from England because they were unavailable here, and followed his subsequent career, including his poems as they came out in American Poetry Review. And I exploded when one day a local writer was sneering about the worthlessness of APR and wisecracked about their "house Jamaican, Derek Walcott." After correcting him that Walcott was from St. Lucia I went on a tirade about the plurality of poetry and why this guy's love for Charles Bukowski did not negate the value of Derek Walcott. (I shall refrain from telling the rest of the story, as the late Paul Harvey might have put it.)

It pleased me no end when Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature, though I am sure that this guy, like some others who I will not name, is of the opinion that if somebody wins the Nobel Prize, it means that they suck.

"und?" [Cassiel to Damiel, in Der Himmel Über Berlin]

Looking at a couple of tote bags filled with books and catalogues from past professional society meetings, I find myself wishing that the visual art and creative writing and literary professional associations could be compelled to hold one enormous joint meeting, just once, in which all the seminar presenters and plenary session speakers and publishers would have to meet and mingle and listen or at least productively ignore one another.

As it is, they exist in ignorance and/or contempt of one another, certain that they and they only constitute the only world worth knowing. (The same goes for any subgenre of the aforementioned worlds of art and literature where people of like mind get together.)

And while these rather elaborate worlds glide on in mutual ignorance, supported by the budgets and the esteem of their educational institutions and/or their peers and colleagues (and this is the operating procedure of plausibility-structure reinforcement from CAA and AAR and AWP all the way to Dragon*Con), most folks just want to read things and look at stuff.

And the procedures whereby these latter folks might be educated out of the worst examples of their preferences and into the better or best examples, or into other preferences altogether—those procedures remain unknown to most of those who engage in mutual self-congratulation that they belong to this supercool world and not to those dorky other ones. Yeah, right, you keep on saying that, guys. Meantime life outside goes on all around you. (Guitar chords, and a throaty voice singing, "And though the rules of the road have been lodged, it's people's games you got to dodge....")

conspiracies

Freudians will make much of who I left out of my Beep Beep Gallery list, since it couldn't have been very many people...but except for Chris Carder, whose work I left out because I haven't seen his work become quite as ubiquitous as that of the other seven artists (and perhaps it is), the website list was one name short of a full exhibition program if there are nine shows rather than eight.

I've missed more than one show I very much wanted to see at Gallery Stokes, where Dayna Thacker's curatorship is beyond reproach...Amy Freeman's "Wide Awake" consists of paintings that prove that a personal symbology can produce oddly discomforting yet utterly captivating visual effects. But that just happens to be the most recent exhibition, and I have no idea what the rest of the year's schedule is like.

So random cross-sections on this blog should not be taken as the Word From On High. That is not the function of blogs, nor is it the accomplishment of art magazines, much less of newspapers.

if I had time to write more now, which I don't, I would have much to say about this, and even more about some quite lovely exhibitions currently up around town...I happen to like John Cox's paintings of trompe l'oeil figure drawings overlaid on Chinese calligraphy and his replications of the effects of time's erasures on the art of antiquity, currently on view at Sycamore Place Gallery and Studios, but then, I'm a sucker for work that references the borders that angels cannot transgress between the material and the spiritual (another fan of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire) even if I prefer his trompe l'oeil tours de force. Almost everyone else was left stunned by his effects of texture, which are not inconsiderable. And so I honor them likewise; for what I like and what is likely to survive for the ages are not at all the same thing.

now this.

The 2009 season at Beep Beep Gallery proves that the gallery has become the Heath Gallery of the Atlanta alternative scene. (I would call it the Fay Gold Gallery, but the recent decision of Fay Gold to shut down her gallery and represent artists privately would make that a backhanded compliment.)

Everybody on the 2009 roster of solo shows is either a local superstar already or well on the way to getting there.

Dosa Kim, Michi, Bethany Marchman, Steven Dixey, Sam Parker, Alex Kvares, Born, and so on…these are clearly the names to conjure with (in Atlanta) in terms of artists who know how to make aesthetically defensible alternative art, and some of the works in the just-closed survey/preview exhibition (or it will be just-closed by the time anybody reads this) represent major breakthroughs for the artists on the list who were arguably still on the verge of local superstardom.

Some of them are even making their mark now in the national and indeed the global alternative art network, that paradoxical world of superstar fame that operates as yet another parallel network of being established, a system of recognition and reward that overlaps with but is far from identical with the global art world in general.

How artists from the realms of lowbrow and graffiti, visionary and pop surrealist, and all the other related and unrelated subcategories make it from that world into the lusted-after world of the global art fair and the global biennial…welll, wouldn’t you like to know.

Someone (and it won’t be me) ought to analyze the work that makes it and why, say, Raymond Pettibon is so obviously intelligent and multi-layered that he blows away the less complex sentiments of his competing users of text and cartoon-influenced graphic rendering. (He does, by the way.) He may also have caught the attention of an influential gallery owner early on (I have no idea) or been more marketable to some collector base than equally worthy artists of his generation, but I have no clue.

The social history of art is complex, and it’s understandable that we should perceive conspiracy where there is dumb luck, and dumb luck where there is recognition of genuine accomplishment, and recognition of genuine accomplishment where there is conspiracy.

What is curious is that the general plenitude of income and diversity of tastes among the collector bases of the planet made possible the evolution of such a curiously parallel set of art worlds in which each had no respect for the other, and that there were whole worlds of art beyond them in which work was made that got neither respect nor financial reward. There has always been work that got neither respect nor financial reward until the incessant demand for auction product gave the artists their long overdue due, but the era that may now be coming to an interruption rewarded a larger and more diverse percentage of lesser-rank artists than ever before in history, perhaps. (Perhaps. How would we know? We have no idea how many artists there were in proportion to patrons in societies we know only from their archaeological leavings.)

instead of a manifesto: on forces and counterforces, the world over

The routinization of the World Wide Web and its associates (more and more key sites every year aren’t prefaced with “www.“) has allowed the whole world to watch whether one wants or expects it, as we know all too well: it is possible to pop in on the art scenes of Moldova and Mauritius and Jacksonville, Florida, and to feel embarrassed that the website of Jacksonville artists was better than any in Atlanta, though that has changed, in both directions. (www.JaxCAL.org — the layout and content of which I still admire for ready legibility and for willingness to debate, on revisiting the site after Lisa Alembik's query below.)

It’s obvious that the global art scene has become a global competition in ways that were never true before the major redistributions of capital that preceded the current planetary economic collapse. A couple of videos that have gotten press in more than one international art magazine come from southeastern Europe and West Asia: one shows an artist fretting over what kind of art could possibly attract the attention of an international audience from the base of his recently emerged country, and the other has our two artists trekking over the hills and valleys, asking passing shepherds how to get to Tate Modern. (One answer: make a video asking that question, since the video has been in biennials, if not at Tate Modern.)

But of course the world’s art worlds are as multiple as the world’s worlds in general. And for every artist aspiring to global biennials, there were ten sweating over creating new and different landscapes and abstractions that would hang in hotel corridors. (This was no bad thing, for before the current downturn there were ever more hotels interested in installing art of a higher quality than “hotel art.” That was an intrinsic part of gaining international credibility as a destination lodging, and it is fascinating when accidents of history such as the burning of the not yet opened Mandarin Oriental Beijing lead one to look up online the design scheme and incipient art collection of such an entity.)

And I suspect that each system is and was essentially autonomous, even if the systems service the same sets of people in different aspects of their lives. It is for those who actually function in the worlds in question to explain how they work; the rest of us just kibitz from outside, and it is possible to function as an outsider for one’s whole career in the world’s second-tier cities.

In some ways, the second tier is a more uncomfortable place to occupy, because the scene is always full of people who think they ought to be in the first tier and resentful because they aren’t. But most of the people from such places who are thought of by their peers as being privileged denizens of the first tier are in fact only slightly higher up in the second tier.

Third- and fourth-tier places don’t have that problem, except when someone really does make it unexpectedly. One artist from such a place gained a moment of national recognition (more noted in the region than in the nation) very late in life, and when the place in question brought in some regional critics to tell them how to go and do likewise, I couldn’t find a nice way to say, “She got famous because her work is uniquely compelling, so it grabbed the attention of the decision-makers.” Instead, I talked about how a regional scene might present its unique context to a national audience so as to make its local concerns comprehensible to others.

It’s why I like large-scale juried regional exhibitions; the winners and the whiners are completely different every year, depending on the preferred aesthetics of the juror. Every year the local heroes get slapped down and the nobodies are raised to their level of due recognition, even though every year the worthy nobodies and the justly recognized local heroes are also omitted because, as the sociology of knowledge teaches us, all knowledge is partial knowledge. We know in part, and we understand in part.

Most critics don’t seem to understand the multiplicity of knowledges. That particular knowledge certainly won’t get you very far in terms of the global art world, which functions in terms of the self-validated sets of argument that determine, not what is hot this year, but which of several possible ways of knowing will be deemed respectable. This is not the same as elevating one aesthetic arbitrarily; even that which will be deemed to be crap two decades hence has a certain plausibility structure within which it responds to the questions that interest the global art world this season. It’s just that there are intellectual contagions that sweep the planet with regularity. It doesn’t mean that the truly talentless are snatched from obscurity for no good reason, as every grumbling artist in, say, Lower Gnat’s Fork remarks when some artist who grew up in Upper Gnat’s Fork makes the Whitney Biennial. (There may be a causal relation between the imaginary artist in question being a consummate jerk and the degree of success; or there may not, as in my oft-cited case of the truly wonderful painter who got in because his canvases had been moved against the gallery wall to make room to show the curator the work of the edgy, ambitious photographer who also got in. And that particular edgy, ambitious photographer is not a jerk, but rather generous overall…especially as compared with his competition. )

My personal opinion, firmly contradicted by everyone else, is that local critics ought to match artists with audiences…leaving it to others to validate and elevate, the liaison between the audience and the venue ought to present a reasonably nuanced “If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing that you will like.” That is the function of newspapers, whereas art magazines serve a completely different function, and art websites can afford to do all of the above: to educate an already interested audience and to publicize the existence of work that would excite a certain audience, even if that audience does not share the personal preferences of the critic. One needn’t and shouldn’t reward ineptitude and stupidity, but one ought to recognize the virtues of work well on the way (it’s a risk worth taking even when the work never gets there…there are too many pleasant surprises).

Sites such as artrelish.com and burnaway.org have the advantage of forcible deadlines. If the critics writing therefrom suffer the mistakes of writing too fast to get the stuff posted, they also suffer the agreeable discipline of writing about work that they would rather not have to write about at all, as well as the work about which they have interesting things to say. Lacking that discipline, it is possible to fiddle with refining one’s observations until the show is over, or never to say anything at all even about the work one truly loves. It is occasionally the work that one finds most deeply involving that leaves one unable to say anything meaningful about it.