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Journal entry for 30 Aug 2010 | Link
Governors Island Art Fair Is This Weekend
I was hoping you'd ask that. This Saturday, September 4, is the opening for the Governors Island Art Fair. I'll be there from 11 to 6 and probably traipse around Manhattan for a short time thereafter. Come see the art event that Ken Johnson condemned sight unseen in a virtual roundtable about the future of the arts on Governors Island.
It is a nice place for a picnic, but if Governors Island is going to become a destination for people seriously interested in the visual arts, then something has to change. Right now at least four different groups have mounted exhibitions, with quality ranging from O.K. to abysmal. Art just isn't the kind of thing that lends itself to no-budget, laissez-faire populism. You need a higher order of selectivity by and coordination among organizers to produce something that people in the art world are going to feel compelled to see and talk about.
True, no-budget, laissez-faire populism doesn't always get it right. Neither does high-budget, authoritarian elitism. No delivery system gets it right all the time. When it comes to contemporary art, the official one doesn't get it right more often than any other. One wonders whether Johnson's "people seriously interested in the visual arts" or his "people in the art world" include the estimated 6,000 attendees of the 2009 Governors Island Art Fair, or if he has disqualified them for not sharing his je ne sais quoi.
Works on view in houses occupied by the group No Longer Empty are about on the level of sophistication you would expect to see in Manhattan's Lower East Side galleries, which is not bad. More disappointingly, the outdoor sculptures presented by the group Figment are much bedraggled at this point (its miniature-golf course is an ugly mess), and they look more like the works of enthusiastic students and amateurs than fully fledged pros. The Sculptors Guild, a proudly conservative organization, is displaying abstract and semi-abstract outdoor sculptures in stone and metal that would surprise no one had they been exhibited half a century ago. ...
Its founders based Figment on ideas that come out of the Burning Man phenomenon, about which Johnson is unwittingly displaying his ignorance by criticizing it for unprofessionalism. Professionalism runs contrary to its very ethos; people participate in a spirit of disregard for gatekeepers like Johnson. One might as well criticize a bowl of matzo ball soup for not having any ham. It ought to occur to a writer employed by a newspaper to research the project's principles, which include Decommodification, Giving, and Communal Effort among others, or its reasons for being, one of which is "to lower the barriers to entry for audiences as well as artists," before remarking upon it with such cluelessness. These principles don't guarantee great art, but neither does anything else, and when pieces at Figment succeed they do it as well as their gallery equivalents. I know this because I volunteered at Figment Boston this year and saw for myself. As for the Sculptors Guild, likewise deemed undeserving of a link, its founding members include William Zorach and Chaim Gross and it has persisted since 1938, somewhat longer than Johnson's writing career and presumably not in accordance with it.
In September, a Brooklyn artists collective called 4heads will oversee production of "The Third Annual Governors Island Art Fair." The organizers are selecting 100 artists from online submissions, and each will be awarded a room somewhere on the island to do whatever he or she wants. Judging by a tacky video promotion for the exhibition on the group's Web site, this does not look promising. It is unlikely, at least, to attract the kind of international attention that the Venice Biennale, for example, does. It probably won't even draw local art fans the way the Armory Show does.
"Somewhere on the island" is a series of connected buildings that will make it easy to go from room to room looking at art. Last weekend I spoke with one of the four heads, as it were, about the above remark. He explained to me that he and his colleagues conceived the fair four years ago with the Venice Biennale and the Armory in mind—as their polar opposite. They made it artist-run, artist-friendly, serious but accessible, and designed to cut out the middlemen. Johnson didn't inform himself about GIAF's premises any better than Figment's. Again, those 6,000 people who came last year—if they're not local art fans, what are they? People who got lost on the way to the Statue of Liberty?
But hey, there's a thought: how about using the whole island for a major international art exhibition every two, three or four years: the New York Bi-, Tri- or Quadrennial? Sure, it would take a lot of money, and I can't begin to analyze what the payoff in tourist dollars might be. Perhaps it is not feasible. But what is going on artwise on Governors Island now is not nearly as thrilling as it ought to be.
So instead of four successful artist-run efforts already in operation on the island, Johnson suggests an event that would benefit the same group of vetted insiders who fare heartily from the New York art establishment as it stands. Who would pay for it? Can it even be done? Who can say? All Johnson knows for sure is that everything not subject to his higher order of selectivity is destined to bore him.
Johnson spent most of his yearlong tenure at the Boston Globe while I was in California, so I asked my studio-mates about his time here.
"He was mean," one of them said.
"Mean is not a liability for an art critic," I answered. "Mean and useless is another story."
"He was an irritant," added another. "He got people riled up for a while because he had a low opinion of everything. But he didn't seem to think much of Boston, period."
They weren't surprised, nor sorry, that he ultimately returned to New York. Last Friday, Johnson reviewed some outdoor sculpture of recent vintage, and reserved highest praise for a Miranda July trifle from the 2009 Venice Biennale...
The beauty of Ms. July's deceptively slight, poetically touching social sculpture is that the pictures people take will circulate among friends and relatives, reach [sic] an audience that someone like the magisterial Joseph Beuys could only dream of.
...and Tom Otterness, whose clammy bronze cartoons litter swards all over the world. In retrospect it's easy to reconstruct what happened to Johnson in Boston. Only official taste matters to him. Coming here deprived him of regular contact with officialdom. One thinks of some bureaucrat assigned to a lowly post in the British Raj, leaving him to file sour dispatches about the poor hygiene of Madrassans whose language he would never learn because it would insult the dignity of his tongue. I understand that an art critic can't see everything, and may have to choose based on Web presentations. I admit that 4heads.org could use some tweaking. I could understand someone rejecting a viewing of this or that project knowing that its premises didn't accord with his take on art. But a critic whose discrimination veers off into incuriosity forfeits the privilege of having his opinion taken seriously. The rest of us, faced with the problem of forming an audience outside of officialdom, glean from this the mighty scale of its disregard, and get a hint about the extent to which we can expect its cooperation as we reach out to Johnson's uncounted thousands.
If the prospect of over a hundred talented artists and the opportunity to spite Ken Johnson doesn't sufficiently entice you to the Governors Island Art Fair, also taking place Saturday on Governors Island is the main event of the New York City Unicycle Festival.
More Fall Schedule Details
The Charlottesville show has a beautiful title and the Miami Beach show has dates. Fall looks like this:
September 4-26, opening reception September 4, 11 AM - 6 PM: Governors Island Art Fair, Governors Island, NY.
October 1-30, opening reception October 1: Leaf and Signal, a group exhibition at The Bridge in Charlottesville, VA. Curator Warren Craghead has put up a blog for the exhibition, and The Bridge now has a page for it.
November 4 - December 19, opening reception November 18: The Talk That Walked, a solo exhibition at Main Library, Downtown Miami.
November 26, 2010 - January 2, 2011, opening reception December 1, 7-10 PM : Good and Plenty, a group exhibition at Artcenter South Florida, Miami Beach, FL.
Not So Much Rockstar As Shoegazer
"Are you a rockstar?" asked the job ad. "See if you can answer our programming quiz." Okay. I clicked over. Question one: "What is your least favorite aspect of your favorite programming language?" That's easy.
delicious cake not available in python standard library
Question Two: "Show us some code that convinces us of that."
>>> import cake
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#0>", line 1, in <module>
import cake
ImportError: No module named cake
>>>
Question Three: "A grid of numbers can be generated by a clockwise spiral of incrementing integers:
21 22 23 24 25 20 7 8 9 10 19 6 1 2 11 18 5 4 3 12 17 16 15 14 13
"The sum of the numbers on the diagonals of a five by five grid generated like so is 101. What is the sum of the numbers on the diagonals of such a grid at 1111 by 1111?"
Well...
Thus printing 914839061. Which was the right answer, making me a rockstar, but they didn't get in touch for some reason.
[Update: after posting this I suddenly saw a better way to solve it. The terms in new_corners could be reduced further but leaving them this way makes it clearer. Oh well.]
[Update Two: Thirty more minutes of hacking proved that this could have been a one-liner, excepting an import statement:
I wouldn't have gotten in touch with me either.]
Readings
Caleb Neelon, Ten Short Memos to Young Boston Artists, a must-read for artists of all ages and cities:
Keep your expectations reasonable when it comes to what success in Boston will mean. Let's get this out in the open: Boston is, at best, an okay art town. If you've relocated to Boston from somewhere else in New England, you may be a bit wide-eyed right now at the variety of cultural stuff going on. But you should proceed under the assumption that the cultural activity here in Boston simply won't be enough to make an art career for you. Even the best-known local artists have side jobs in something else that pays their real bills. In fact, it's a challenge to come up with names of Boston artists who I know support themselves solely through their art sales. Boston is not a great place to sell art, and Boston art venues don't get the visibility we would hope. There may not even be a venue in town here that shows art anything close to what you do or even what you like, and it's important to remember that that isn't your fault, it's the fault of the narrow scope of what's financially viable for venues here. Part of succeeding here is figuring out a way to get your work visible out of state and in front of the broader community of taste that digs what you do. If you go to enough art openings in Boston, you'll see the same 100 people over and over again. It's also worth noting that plenty of Boston galleries make more than half their sales to people out of state. Making your art a road warrior means putting it in front of new people in new places. If all your checks are coming from in-state, it's a bad sign.
Some readers may recall the ICA's Publicness exhibition of 2003, which—in ways never quite specified—"interrogated globalisation" and "notions of the public realm." The exhibition's four-page press release promised the thrill of "proposals for projects that may never be realised." In other words, the artists were so heady in their conceptualism they could short-circuit the tiresome business of actually making or finishing anything, and could instead be acclaimed, and paid, simply for airing "proposals." One almost had to admire the efficiency.
Because the responses to Kara Walker are often intense, discussions of her work infrequently revolve around the formal characteristics themselves. If they were to, they likely would not be lengthy conversations. Kara Walker has succeeded in creating an inimitable style for herself that is actually based on little formal growth and innovation. Though an excellent draftsman in her own right, Walker is most closely associated with the stark silhouettes that comprise the bulk of her oeuvre, and it is this work with variations that have comprised the majority of her creative output for the past 12 years. Her brand is now so distinct and instantly recognizable, that to deviate from it would probably spell critical or commercial suicide.
An unsigned editorial in The Independent about the looming cuts in British arts funding:
What one is not hearing, apart from that brief mention in Edinburgh, is the notion that the cuts, however savage, could also present an opportunity. Instead there is a refusal to accept that the current model of public funding may not actually be the only reasonable and civilised one, or that the present reliance on largely unaccountable quangos to fund and administer most arts bodies, small and large, is not necessarily a democratic one, even though it would be pilloried in novels, plays and films if it existed in any other walk of life.
That is the huge irony of the way the arts are paid for and run in Britain. On stage and screen there is a constant message of imagination, radicalism and challenge to the status quo. But in the way it runs itself, the arts world is one of the most unimaginative and conservative industries in Britain.
I met Frank Kermode, who died Tuesday at age 90, more than 20 years ago over coffee at Columbia University, where he was teaching. ... I wanted to write about Kermode because I admired him. In my years in academia, I had watched the study of literature go down any number of rabbit holes — chasing after theory and ideology and system. The very point of reading and talking about what we read seemed to have been lost in a kind of strangulating self-seriousness and alienation. That’s where Kermode came in.
He was drawn to the entanglements of the text and its rational mysteries rather than some scaffold of theory. In his many books and essays, he protected the reader’s freedom to be interested in whatever was interesting. That meant writing a prose that was never wholly academic and over the years became more and more open to the intersection of literature and the lives we’re actually living.
Sometimes it is helpful to think of maps as stories, fictions, artworks. Making up stories doesn't seem avoidable. Stories just appear in the mind, bidden or unbidden, like the sight of a tree when you round a bend. There is nothing wrong with making things up. You blame yourself, you blame other people, you guess at reasons—these are examples of made-up stuff. There is a plotline, and what you are making up is drama; it is art. Yet if you think that this art is real, then you begin to suffer. You are building a prison cell to live in. It is the job of a koan to take down the walls of such prisons, to undermine your fictions. Then you might discover that you are not really suffering from other people or from circumstances. You are suffering from you maps, your stories, your fiction, your prison. You are suffering from bad art.