Categories
links

links for 2007-05-27

Categories
Projects

A Note On The Licence

This weblog has a BY-SA 3.0 licence at the bottom.

Anything I write and any of my images that I can BY-SA are covered by this licence.

Any third party quotes and third party images are not.

This is the same as an all rights reserved weblog, where any quotes or review images retain their original copyright.

Any code snippets are not BY-SA either. Friends don’t make friends CC-licence code.

Categories
Aesthetics

Wendy Smith

Wendy Smith was my history of art (OK, OK, cultural studies) tutor at KIAD. She’s cool. She has a web site that has some of her art on it:

http://www.wesmith.co.uk/
Take a look.

Technorati Tags: ,

Categories
Aesthetics Reviews

Dubya Is A Drip

“Portrait of George W. Bush in the style of Jackson Pollock’s ‘Number 5’, 1948”, 2006, is a painting of the current president of the U.S.A executed in the manner of an Jackson Pollock action painting. This refers back to the paintings of Socialist Realist images of Lenin that Art & Language (A&L) executed in the style of Pollock in the early 1980s. Those images brought two opposed ideologies into collision within the same image, synthesizing a dialectic. So does this one.

The Cold War was still being played out in the early 1980s. Socialist Realism was the state art of the USSR and Abstract Expressionism was the high-water mark of American art. Lenin and Pollock were iconography of the mutually reinforcing and self-deceiving public faces of state capitalism and market capitalism. Putting the two in conflict criticised these self-and-other-images. But the map of the world seems to look very different now. Lenin has been disinterred and Pollock is admired for his surplus value not his inner necessity.

Bush is now the other of Pollock. Pollock, the epitome of rugged American democratic individualism and freedom. Bush, the epitome of privileged incompetence and reactionary illiberalism. A grinning idiot rather than a stern-faced revolutionary. This is not a picture of two drunks, it is a picture of two different historical periods. It is an historical dialectic. It is not that history has ended and that the world is politically unipolar. It is just that the best critical resources for America come from its own history, not from religious or nationalistic reactionaries.
There is a “map” of the painting, so this isn’t a visual puzzle where the trick is to find the image hidden in the drips. The portrait of Bush doesn’t seem like a straight travesty of A&L’s earlier work, like the hybrid or historically bogus images that made up part of “Homes From Homes”. A&L don’t refer to their own earlier work in the title, instead they refer to the Pollock directly as the earlier series did. This sets the opposition between Pollock and (media representations of) Bush rather than between Bush and earlier A&L work. The latter would not have the same power.

It is true and illuminating that Bush is the illiberty to Pollock’s freedom, but there is potentially more to the substitution of Bush for Lenin. Bush serves the same place in much mainstream leftist thought that Lenin once did. He is the icon, the person who determines how you are meant to think. But he is an icon for everything that is wrong in the world, and the person who determines how you must not think. Moral virtue simply consists in opposing everything that Bush is regarded as standing for during working hours. If that opposition is to erstwhile leftist values, so be it. Bush is a come-down from the world-changing words and actions of Lenin. He has the opposition he deserves in the form of an opportunistic, incoherent and part-time left-on-your-behalf that keeps the forms of opposition having long since discarded the social content that originally led to those forms. This is the “we” of “we are all Hezbollah now”.

Political Art is big again, but it is generally an art of mindless petulance and vapid recycling of established iconographic and technical resources. It is untransformative market-friendly gestures of resistance to whatever is actually being done at the time. It is hippy wigs at Woolworths. A&L’s Bush serves not as a parody of this so much as an example of how to do it right, how to produce an art that is aware and raises awareness, that gives the viewer something to think about that they have not thought about a hundred times before. It may just be a reacion to too-much, on the order of A&L’s song “Prisoner’s Model”. But even if that’s all it is, this is how you do it.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Categories
Aesthetics Reviews

Office Party

“Songs Held In Offices”, 2006, is a seried of works by Art & Language (A&L). They consists of colourful paper chains mounted in shallow wooden vitrines. The chains are modernist in their coloured formality, set in minimalist boxes. The effect is a kind of Art Povera postmodernism. Until you consider what the chains mean.

The chain-link looped strips of coloured paper are a kitsch decoration for cheap parties. They are ideal for transforming the office into the site of a crazy party. They are decoration and an inducement to social activity, to human relations. In these works they are frozen and sealed into wooden boxes, stretching across a shallow white space that they are mounted to either side of. There’s a literal reading to be had of the work with the paper chains somehow representing songs and the shallow featureless space representing an office.

From reading A&L’s writing about previous projects it is obvious that the title is from the text of a sado-masochistic pornographic novel. Originally it read “dongs held in orifices”, but Mrs. Malaprop got to it. The loaded fantasy of interpersonal relations is rendered inept. Songs in offices implies an office party, which reinforces the idea of an office party.

Perhaps these chains are a record of social acivity. If so they have missed the point, parties are a collection of people, not a set of decorations. Perhaps they are meant to induce social activity. If so they have missed the point, they are too sterile and in too sterile a place in the gallery to accompany a party, and in themselves have not the power to start a party. They are indices of social activity, but to what end it is hard to say. They would look different during the private view, but we are not all invited to that. Ironically they will have caused that particular social context by being part of the work on display, but they will have done so only in as much as non-relational art does.

This is the social illiteracy of the managerialism-that-protests-too-much of Relational Art laid bare. The happenings and flea-markets of Relationalism are a socially exclusionary art hiding behind gestures of democracy and collaboration. Only the rich and/or well connected can afford to participate in the actual event or to buy a record of it. Relationalism looks like crowd-sourced art as Koons’s art was outsourced art and Warhol’s was mass-produced art. It is not. It is a socioeconomic allegory, but a mystificatory and inept one. Don’t look behind the curtain. This is not crowdsourcing, it is art by Steve Jobs.

These are embarrassing photos of Relationalism trying to dance at the office party. The competent Relational viewer will be frustrated and excluded by the work. The rest of us are actually given something to talk about amongst ourselves by it, although the Relationalist may not like what we have to say.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Categories
Generative Art Projects

Like That

“Like That” now has a page in the art section of my site:

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/art/like_that/
As it says, this is a work in progress. First up are the simple coloured square burst pieces.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Categories
Aesthetics Reviews

I’m Just Going To Try This

Two of the most interesting pieces of writing on art that I know of are misunderstandings of paintings by Art & Language (A&L).

A review of the later series of “Hostages” that I now forget the details of made the mistake of treating the paintings as metaphors for a literal hostage situation. The relations of figure and ground were taken as indicating the uncertainties of unfolding reposts of a hostage situation. What is interesting is that the reviewer saw the painting as constructed of these relations but didn’t see (or read) what they represent.

A review of “Index: The Studio At 3 Wesley Place (Painted By Mouth)” by Barbara Kruger made the mistake of judging the painting from a black & white photograph. This renders her confident disparaging of the technical effects of the work funny, and her consideration of the work’s content and ambitions bogus.

I mention these reviews because I am probably about to make the same mistakes as both. I don’t have access to Art & Language’s writings about their latest work and I am going to be looking at photographs of them. A&L’s work is always rewarding in real life whether or not you are in on its textual content, but some of it is designed to resist reproduction. I am deliberately opening myself to embarrassment here. Hopefully A&L will have a show at the Lisson soon and I’ll be able to find out just how embarrassed I should be.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Categories
Free Culture Satire

Idiot Screw-Ups

One of the advantages of Free Screwdrivers is that anyone can screw together anything they want. To some this will appear as a novel technological and social phenomenon rather than as simple reform. For corporations this novel phenomenon is another example of society’s progress that can be rerouted into private profit. They could just let their products be opened or taken apart freely by anyone with a screwdriver, but this will not directly maximize shareholder value. So they set up special events and organizations to induce and capture this new value.

To corporations this obviously has nothing to do with screwdriver freedom. They are in charge, it is their playground and their ball. Any idiot can use free screwdrivers, and they can use them to screw up anything they want. A corporate-sponsored event isn’t Free Screwdrivers, it is an Idiot Screw-Up.

Some people may not like being called idiots, and some may not like being told that what they are doing is screwing up. These people are most likely thieves, and so should be ignored.

Some people may not like the fact that because they are regarded as idiots and because what they do is regarded as screwing up the corporations regard it as of no value to them and take it without giving them any rights over it. These people misunderstand how little what they do is worth compared to what the coporation originally provided, and can be ignored as commies.

Idiot Screw Ups provide less shareholder value than the old fashioned way of doing things (sic). That both the increasingly untenable old fashioned way of doing things and the half-hearted embracing the new of Idiot Screw-Ups do not provide as much shareholder value as just letting people tinker and help their friends as they always have done relative to technology is neither here nor there.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Categories
Free Culture Satire

Complete Tools

People who see or construct the need for a market friendly name to replace “Free Screwdrivers” can look at incidental features or epiphenomena of screwdriver freedom for inspiration. Screwdrivers are a kind of tool. And restricting their use makes them functionally incomplete. So a good market friendly replacement for “Free Screwdrivers” would be “Complete Tools”.

This will cause confusions of its own. How exactly do you ensure a tool is complete, surely any tool that has been manufactured is complete when its manufacture is finished? What happens if you are using a screwdriver as a tool other than the one it is meant to be (e.g. as a lever or chisel), is it still a tool?

This will also spread confusion further into society. Artists will start using paintings as ironing boards and producing ever more elaborate gesamtkunstwerks. Activists will protest at corporations that don’t sell Swiss Army Knives. Philosophers will produce lengthy tracts attempting to combine functionalism with completeness under Lacan or set theory.

Despite all this confusion, those who abandon the Free Screwdrivers banner and brand as zealots any who fail to agree with them will not get any richer than they would have otherwise. Sadly for them, nobody wants to be associated with complete tools.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Categories
links

links for 2007-05-23