Shooting Wide Open

Marina Abramovic, Balkan Baroque still

Like the Pulse Room, Balkan Baroque has a sheer visceral simplicity that really works for me, although clearly in a very different way. Marina Abramovic, in a white dress, cleaned the meat and gristle off that huge pile of bones and placed the clean ones in a new pile. She continued for days until all the bones had been cleaned. I can’t say that I’d really buy any specific message from this piece, but I definitely get a sense of war and genocide from it that’s informed by what happened in the Balkans in the ’90s. I don’t like my art take-aways to be too clear-cut.

And then. I love music with a dose of melancholy and lyrical ambiguity. I plan to use this Liars song in my final light project because to my ears it seems so suited to the dark.

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I wonder what the Abramovic piece would feel like with this song playing in the room.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Beautifully simple. His other work seems a bit overwhelmed by tech and the ideas are a bit inscrutable to be emotionally resonant for my taste, but he’s done a lot of work and I haven’t looked at it all.

Pulse Room is an interactive installation featuring one to three hundred clear incandescent light bulbs, 300W each and hung from a cable at a height of three metres. An interface placed on a side of the room has a sensor that detects the heart rate of participants. When someone holds the interface, a computer detects his or her pulse and immediately sets off the closest bulb to flash at the exact rhythm of his or her heart. The moment the interface is released all the lights turn off briefly and the flashing sequence advances by one position down the queue, to the next bulb in the grid. Each time someone touches the interface a heart pattern is recorded and this is sent to the first bulb in the grid, pushing ahead all the existing recordings. At any given time the installation shows the recordings from the most recent participants.

See the videos for a better rendering of what the room does.

A shot from work in progress. Click for larger view.

Plus, excerpts from a couple of interviews we’ve been reading:

Time-Space-Existence: A Conversation with Wolfgang Laib (PDF)

WL: I know that some people think I am an apolitical nature romantic who sits in the meadows and takes no interest at all in social relationships. But a politician has influence today, at most he influences tomorrow, but culture and art exert influence over centuries. This sounds very naive to some people because they claim that matters are decided on entirely different levels – in politics, in economics – and art plays absolutely no role. But this is not hte case if you look at matters over longer periods of time. You can see it from the past: ultimately art and culture, not wars and confrontations, have stimulated change in people. Wars may have shoved this or that boundary or shifted the balance of power back and forth, but art and culture have carried mankind further, brought them somewhere else, and it has always been this way. I am still of the opinion that – and this may sound insanely naive – art changes the world.

When I see the best and most beautiful figures at the Metropolitan Museum, they have been scrubbed, and everything important about them has been polished away. This is what art historians consider good, the purely material form – but what is really important is gone. By contrast, there is the way that people in India treat these figures every day, how all kinds of things are poured over them, like milk and honey, and how the figures turn black from the votive lights and incense.

Dirty Toys: Mike Kelley Interviewed

MK: One of the big lies of Modernism is that certain changes in aesthetics would change culture completely, forever. Instead, I think it’s a continuous process – art may not effect lasting changes, but by changing certain representations, art changes ideas about things. If you make certain notions of behavior hip enough so that enough people want them, then the culture has to accommodate those behaviors. Things might flip back, but at least it shows that the possibility of change is there.

In Vancouver, an artist collective called Instant Coffee is doing a show called Light Bar:

Instant Coffee presents Light Bar, a full-spectrum light bar installation and venue for light therapy, light lectures, light shows, light reading and light rock. Instant Coffee’s Light Bar is an ongoing art project that investigates the potential and power of light. The artists come to this idea through necessity; living in Vancouver, where the rain can seem endless, the negative effects of the lack of sunlight on individual psyches and the large social milieu feel at times paramount. The use of light as a therapy or as a remedy for SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is commonly and effectively used by individuals, but for Light Bar, Instant Coffee puts it to the test in small or large group situations.

From the Panorama, “Junot Diaz in conversation with Dave Eggers”:

JD: I think more than anything, my basic lesson as an artist has been humility. So when I get a bunch of stuff, like “Do you want to come to this thing, do you want to come to that thing?” I say to myself “Do I want to go to this because I want applause? Do I want applause to make up for the fact that my mommy never held me enough? Or is this something where I feel I can be of service, is this an event where I can be of service?” That’s the way I choose.

He also talked about age and the relatively low amount of options open to those starting out when older. He’s talking about writers, but it pretty applies to photographers.

Young people are more isolated from adults than they’ve ever been. Unless you’re an adult who is getting paid to somehow be involved with young people, chances are most adults have no contact with young people that they’re not related to. And the isolation is kind of a structural and it’s very deep and it’s very visible. When I came to the US, they hadn’t gotten this whole thing that, you know, strange adults were gonna rape and kidnap you, they hadn’t convinced us of that yet. Strange adults were someone you could possibly talk to – we hadn’t yet been divided by fear. The reality is that most of the raping, abuse, and attacking of young people was happening inside their families, but hey no matter, it was easier to convince people to be scared of strangers.

DE: I wonder what you think about whether the MFA programs in general are doing enough. Because I’ve had some frustrating experiences where I’ve written recommendations for former students of mine and young writers of color I’ve met along the way, and the results haven’t always been so good. A lot of MFA programs, they’re not interested in a nontraditional learner, or someone from abroad, or someone not from a polished academic background. it makes me furious sometimes.

JD: What’s scary about MFA programs is that there’s a huge amount of privilege these universities hoard. And what’s fascinating is that if you actually look at the profile of writers doing an MFA program, they look nothing like the rest of our society. They’re almost always between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-seven, so it’s almost never people with families. I think for me the biggest problem is that, again, if it doesn’t look anything like the rest of our country, what the fuck is going on? I don’t only want to read writing from twenty-six-year-old hipsters. I include myself in that category, for real. It’s like, sixty-something percent of the adults in this country have got kids. I would love to see that kind of age range represented, because I feel like it would deepen our literary tradition. And it’s not like MFAs control the bulk of everything that gets written. But it’s a lot of money and a lot of privilege that they do control. So I’m like you, I think that at least a third to half of all MFA seats should be reserved for people with families. Our literature would change in ways that would challenge all of us.

It’s that I feel like if these kids are not in a classroom with a couple of forty and fifty- and sixty-year-old people who have children, I feel like everyone loses. And the literature itself loses that as well.

Do we assume certain things about talent and youth? Or is the system set up so that a young person who doesn’t have a livelihood is favored over an adult with a living-wage day job?

And the state of the arts in America?

Audience member: My son wants to apply to MIT next year; he told me that his goal in college is not to take a single English class. How do you approach students like that?

JD: I think that at this moment we belong to a country that marginalizes and trivializes the arts. For all the lip service this country gives to the arts, I feel like your child is in some ways voicing the real code of this country, which is, like, “Can I avoid this totally irrelevant, superfluous practice?” If you live in this country as long as I have, you become really prepared to deal with that. I guess my faith is always the same: exposure to the arts, especially that passionate, compassionate exposure to the arts, always seems to melt the pharaoh’s heart. And that doesn’t mean that you’ll win every person, but out of every ten, if you win one, you’re doing more than some of our highly funded arts organizations do. I don’t blame a young person who spends his entire life soaking in anti-arts culture for not liking the arts. I believe that so much is the way this gets distributed in people’s head, seen at an unconscious level.

Saw this Barry Mcgee/Twist photo installation in the SFMOMA 75th Anniversary show today: (that’s not me, don’t get your Asian girls confused…)

Jen Wong

SFMOMA has a set of photos of the installation of the work, and one of my favorite parts – the drawings of the strange heads:

There’s also an interview with the director of conservation about McGee’s installations in their blog.

The wall text referred to the “Mission School,” referring apparently to the gritty, graf-like, Hamburger Eyes and zine aesthetic of some punks and whonot in the city. I wonder who coined the term and how the artists feel about it.

Penelope Umbrico’s Suns From Flickr was in the next room, and I’m glad I got a chance to see it in person. A pretty good day at the MOMA… the contemporary floors were my favorite as usual – I felt like going a little nuts after staring at so many small dark black and white photos from the past. Not that all work should be large and in color, but it just feels so dead to live in the past so much.

UPDATE: According to Wikipedia, the “Mission School” was coined in 2002 in a Bay Guardian article.

More McGee here and here.

One of the Mission Art in Storefronts projects that was implemented was a fortune telling service called Mrs. Teriosa, where you write your question on a card and drop it into a slot. Mrs. Teriosa, who are really Kelly Ording and Jetro Martinez, then posts the original and a reply card in the window. Mission Loc@l, a “hyperlocal” web magazine, have a few photos of the questions people have been asking in What We Want to Know (I, II). What we want to know, it turns out, is mostly relationship-related, for better, or in this case, for worse. I should go check it out soon, maybe ask her what photographs I should take next, what I should have for dinner tomorrow…

A little bit about Mission Loc@l:

Mission Loc@l believes that by covering a neighborhood fairly and thoroughly, we can build community and a sustainable model for quality journalism. As part of that effort, we seek collaboration and experimentation that will serve the community we cover and journalism. In the Mission District that means being a bilingual site and using print, multimedia and video to deliver information that offers diverse residents a way to connect and stay informed.

The site launched in October 2008, opened an office in the Mission District in January and many of us are Mission residents.

They have a feature call Sunday Morning Walk that’s pretty fun. Looks like the Mission alright.

Art veterans among you are probably over-familiar with this, but I have to work it out for myself.

Abstract works are more purely visual – having a preference means having a preference for the colors and negative space, lines and curves in one particular piece, not a preference of subject matter. If you like to look at things, really look at things, they’re wonderful, but if you need to focus on something human, something more object-oriented, then they’re horribly tedious and boring. Personally I like to approach abstract works on a more purely visual basis than try to find figurative objects. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine when people say something like “it’s like a beach!” Not that that’s not a legit reaction; I just prefer the more purely visual.

Prof. Morten Hansen was lecturing about space and depth in abstract modern paintings, about Malevich and Barnett Newman, and I thought, hmmm, I’d never considered abstract paintings to be particularly spatial. But then I remembered the Marden retrospective as well as a couple of other works at SFMOMA in 2006. Unfortunately, all the pieces I mention are essentially in-person pieces, but I’ll try to talk about them anyway.

Tom Wesselmann, Picasso

Some works that actually have three-dimensional objects protruding out of the canvas, like Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life 30, looks relatively flat, even in person, whereas something like Picasso’s Seated Woman (1927), if you stare at it long enough, has a strange multi-dimensional feel to it despite being simply lines and shapes. I think Wesselmann was going for a more subtle effect of “hey, something’s off here” rather than a real sense of depth, but before seeing those two things, I’d never thought particularly hard about it.

There was also a great if thinly populated Marden retrospective. Guess single-color canvases draw very few people, but I thought that gathered together, there was an odd peace about them. I don’t know how they play on their own, in the midst of other works, but together there was a coherence to each series as well as the line of his career – together, you could notice things like the fact that his colored lines tend to be neat whereas the grey lines tend to be smeary in many works. You could see the progression from single lines on single colored canvases to his more recent gargantuan Propitious Garden of Plane Image. The six panels covered almost an entire wall and each panel alternately using five of six total colors, the sixth serving as background. I loved staring at how different each color looked on a different colored background, seeing the different colors pop out. I’d like to imagine there is also a line of the background color wriggling invisibly about in the background.

Brice Marden

Something about abstract art is weirdly escapist and hedonist.

I can’t believe I just spent a night writing this instead of scanning while watching Big Love (awesome show), but I’ll take some solace in the fact that I got Joerg to put the word “chipmunk” in a subject title.

First off, let’s clarify a bit. Don’t read too much into the chipmunks! I was looking for an excuse to show the Star Wars chipmunk. I admit the images and text in my posts aren’t always closely wedded. It’s fair to say that if I don’t mention the photographer by name in the body of the post, the image(s) aren’t very tightly connected to the ideas in the text. Sometimes I do it to break up the monotony of the text and give readers a few easily identifiable landmarks. I’m going to do this right now. Since this discussion includes La Pura Vida, let’s take a look at Bryan Formhals’ work as we proceed, shall we?

Bryan Formhals

KILLING THE CHIPMUNK

So. Our chipmunk is not an example of public art or vernacular art. Art is not the point, which is precisely my point. It is just an example of someone putting together a group of other people’s images for public view, an example of how photography is used for different purposes that don’t necessarily need to be art-related to be ultimately beneficial to the art photo community. Having a public that is excited about photography in all its forms is a good thing for art photography in general in my mind. The issue for me is not whether Flickr is full of snapshots or if artists use it. I agree with Bryan over at lapuravida that it’s very difficult to define what Flickr is since, like the net, it is just an empty template into which individuals can pour anything. I have no doubt that this is mostly true:

flickr it’s just a massive thing. Nobody can just diss it like that. Probably a quarter or half of the photographers we’ll talk about in the future are now or have been there at some point. I think that the whole thing is just starting. Now it has been brewing for a while, and the first photographers and curators are getting out of it into the world. Those exhibitions, books, etc. will have nothing to do with flickr, but flickr has just been the yeast in the process. You’re not looking at it to find the best of the photographers that you already know. You’re looking at it to try to figure out who out of those millions of users you’ll know in a decade.
- Joni Karanka

However, I’m making a broader statement that we should look at Flickr neither as the breeding grounds for new artists or a pool of vernacular photos for artists to draw on, but as a forum for generally getting the public excited about photography in a way that museums can’t. This is done by the interaction, the large number of searchable photos and also the presence of working fine artists, amateur fashion photogs, sports fanatics and what have you. You can be inspired by photos in the MOMA, but you can’t do anything about it, not really, in the MOMA. Flickr on the other hand, is an open DIY invitation. You see something you like, well, sign up and join in. That’s not to say that the point of museums or galleries isn’t to get people excited about and doing photography, but Flickr is built so that interaction and passive gazing occur in the same space.

There really is something for everyone on Flickr. I think we actually all agree on this point. You can find your own level – if you want to post family snapshots and limit your interaction to your own family and friends, you can. If you want to grow up to be just like Dave the Strobist, you can. And so on with fashion, wildlife, landscapes, sports, street, fine art, etc. The percentage of photos that fall into these different “genres” on Flickr probably mirrors the percentage of photos in these genres in the larger world in general. So in that view, fine art is in fact still a small slice of the pie. That’s no surprise.

I threw a monkey wrench into my own argument by tacking on that last paragraph, which was really a lead-in for another issue, and the unfortunate choice of the word “curate.” Edit and group are more accurate terms. I am talking broadly about the skill of parsing sequences or series of images, which is related to the skill of parsing images much as parsing sentences is a step up from parsing words.

Bryan Formhals

KILLING THE TROLLS

I do agree with Joerg that the bulk of the discussions on Flickr tend to be about gear, how to be a pro and technique, and are laced with trollish remarks. But those remarks are really just a part of everyday life. Let’s not pretend that every discussion we have in person with a sizable group of people is rational and orderly and even-tempered. It’s just that all the snitty little remarks get recorded permanently which makes them that much more intrusive, but at least on the web you can just skip over comments made by trolls. In real life you actually have to listen to them, or deal with their blather.

Though you get the inevitable pointless ones, I like the comments function. It’s the easiest thing we have these days, and it’s getting better. I can’t think of a site off the top of my head, but now there are ways for a community to render trollish comments invisible by collective vote. This way, you end up with only the comments that most people find worthwhile and you don’t really need one moderator to do this intensively – only everyone to click a helpful/unhelpful button as they’re reading. Of course, this only works with sizeable communities, but actually, I bet it’d work okay if you even had ten loyal readers who regularly voted, depending on how sensitive your visibility threshold is.

Misunderstandings of tone and intent happen a lot online, but part of this comes out of a limitation of technology. For example, there’s gotta be a way to pull these related blog posts together into a more easily readable and respondable (?) form so that I don’t have to open 10 tabs to keep up, without removing them completely. But we’re not quite there yet. I’m hoping the more modular, data-oriented semantic web will make some of this easier. I think you guys are arguing on different planes, about different points. When it comes to the subject of Flickr and the vernacular we all have some easily pushed buttons that when the subject pops up, we tend to harp on. I do it. This is not just a feature of web discussions either.

In my experience, the majority of conversational exchanges over course of a typical day are likely pretty inconsequential, unless you are the lucky bastard that lives among people who have idea diarrhea. I’m missing the smalltalk gene, so I wish the day consisted of one intense debate after another, but realistically, I’ve learned that there’s no way to expect that from other people. It’s just not feasible anywhere, so I’ve developed a tolerance for offhanded remarks, smart alek comments and the inevitable snarky intrusions.

Bryan Formhals

CIVILIZED DISCOURSE: AN EXAMPLE

Actually, I use Flickr now more for the forums than for the pictures. There are groups where more civilized heads prevail. I favor Utata. The pool is pretty typical Flickr. The group’s strength is how well it’s run. Many people have been there for years, so they’ve gotten to know each other, which always helps keep the trolling down. Aside from basic civility, rules are few – there are no genre, gear, or theme restrictions. There are weekly participatory exercises/assignments. Greg writes up a new fine art photographer twice a month – look at this formidible list! It is not comprehensive, but it is nothing to scoff at, considering he used to do it every week in addition to picking some of the assignments, publishing said assignments, culling feature photos for the Utata website proper, writing the occasional text for the front page and being active in everyday discussions, sometimes stepping in when things take on a nasty tone. He shares these tasks with other mods. Behold, a collective with 16 moderators, 17,000 members and nearly 9,000 discussion topics that hasn’t fallen into complete chaos.

Right now there’s a discussion on vegetarianism and slow food, and not long before, there was heated debate over the new development in the Shepard Fairey case (started by yours truly, no less). All sorts of bizarre things pop up. (Cloaca Machines or blink reminder glasses?) I think the amateur/hobbyist nature of the group makes it more laid back and pleasant. I look into more hardcore groups and there are just too many ideological debates for me. Utata is just a nice place to ask a question without being jumped on and picked apart. All this civility might make it too nice for some, but I think it’s a nice place for a beginner to explore without feeling the need to jump on either side of any given argument. The natives are friendly and funny. The group doesn’t have everything but of course, you can supplement with other groups, even start your own.

I think of it has most successful long term relationships – not every moment is fire or peace or happiness, but you know what, it works. 1/6th of the time is really awesome, 3/6ths is good, 1/6th is annoying little things that as much your problem as his, and 1/6th is some serious problems to work through. But what have you got to complain about? 5/6ths of the time you’ve got no problems, you’re not going to break up. (Loosely spun off a study that showed that couples who were negative to each other for more than 1/6th of their interaction time tended to break up.)

But I digress. It takes time to find a community that you’re comfortable with. The thing about the web is that even though it’s a different medium, all the same rules pretty much still apply. You need to reach out to others for others to become interested in you. It takes a while before people respond to and get to know you. Disagreements will arise and there will be drama. It takes time and effort before you really get anything truly rewarding out of it, and at some point, especially if you’re interested in fine art, it’s more efficient to leave Flickr for the world of the blogs and online magazines to see the work you’re most interested in.

I can imagine that if I had been as savvy about what was available online in the blogosphere then as I am now, it might’ve been harder to dig through Flickr, but at the time I was feeling my way around, I had a lot to learn from a wider range of photographs, and I didn’t mind looking at everything I could get my eyes on. I managed to find my way to some contacts whose work I admire (Li Wei, Mu Ge, Lung S. Liu, among others) and it’s a lot easier to hop into a crowd familiar with the history of photography from this point.

Bryan Formhals

NEW WORK, UNFINISHED WORK

One great and unique thing about Flickr – the work keeps pouring in. When I’m learning, I personally feel the need to look at a lot of photos, and sometimes the work featured on portfolio sites and blogs is too periodic. Once or twice a year, if that, photographers release new work. I simply need to look at far more than that to speed up the learning process, and Flickr is perfect for this. All photographers are connected to a web of other photographers, so if I ever feel that I’ve exhausted my pool of contacts, I can trawl my contacts’ contacts or favorites to find new stuff. Also, as someone trying to figure out my own optimal process, it’s better to engage with a group of people who are constantly showing new work rather than a finished, edited portfolio. It helps me feel motivated to shoot new stuff and I get to see the editing process to some extent, of other photographers. This is something that is entirely missing from the museum and artist website models of seeing work.

I suspect that one of the main reasons Flickr isn’t always taken seriously is a practical one – do you want to show potential colleagues and employers outtakes or work that you might ultimately decide isn’t good enough? For art directors or buyers I can see how this is the main problem – streams are just a mash of personal snapshots and serious work (if there is a distinction to be made). Do the snapshots make employers nervous about ability? Or perhaps mostly it’s just a matter of not having the time to look through hundreds of photos. One complaint I do have about Flickr is that for a photo sharing site, it sure doesn’t give you versatile options for display.

Bryan Formhals

A little later in the week I want to address the issue of elitism vs populism and more importantly, our tendency to make these classifications in the first place, but I felt we had to shoo that chipmunk out of the room. It’s gone now, poor thing!

Simmons and Belonax

Remember that Art in Storefronts initiative? The chosen artists have been announced, and the most interesting to me is Simmons and Belonax’s “Everything is Okay” neon sign installation proposed for Central Market St, not the least because there is a mock-up photo.

There is also Market St poster plan for next year that includes some work by Bihn Danh. One can only hope daguerreotypes are involved, but maybe that’s asking too much for street posters. The project is described as:

The final series, by artist Bihn Danh, called The Wonderful Life of Gardening, will be installed from April 5 to July 1, 2010. This series incorporates photographic collaborations with San Francisco gardeners, including some of those who tend garden plots under the San Francisco Recreation and Park’s Community Garden Program.

There’s also a bit of strangeness brewing. As, I assume, a part of the SF Planning Dept’s plan to prettify the Mission (I heard about this in the Mission Dispatch, and it certainly explains the construction on Valencia St), the SF Arts Commission announced the winning proposal for a Valencia St installation as Michael Arcega‘s, but it was a close one between Arcega and Brian Goggin. Apparently one of the jurors on the deciding panel voted with a fraction, and when he was told he couldn’t, threw the deciding vote to Mike. I’m not really sure what was going on behind the scenes, but Goggin saw an opening, and with some mobilization he has won a revote. Not sure when it is happening since I only heard about this today, but if you’re a local, you might want to take a look at the two proposals and let Mary Chou (Mary.Chou [at] sfgov.org) know if you, as a community member, have any views.

Personally, I think Mike’s proposal is a lot more functional and meaningful as a part of the daily activity of the community, though it looks like Goggin has more experience in street installation. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that he was the TA to one of my art classes a while ago and I am swayed by the fact that the work he showed us in class was very interesting. Not to mention he is a nice guy! So if you have thoughts, shoot off an email. Who knows if community messages will make a real difference, but it can’t hurt, especially since one of the main goals of all these projects is to build a few spots where it’s pleasant for people to hang out and to make the area more pedestrian friendly.

UPDATE: From Kate Patternson of SFAC:

There is a lot of misinformation flying around about the recent Valencia Streetscape Public Art Project artist selection process. Here are the facts:

Essentially, when the panel met and originally voted it appeared that Michael Arcega had the highest score and was declared the winner. However, afterward the staff reviewed the votes and realized that there was an error in the scoring, which invalidated all of the votes. In order to rectify the situation, we are going to redo the last selection panel meeting and all original project finalists will be included. This has nothing to do with any particular artist, it is simply a mistake, which we are going to correct.

The final selection panel meeting is currently scheduled for October 14. More information will be posted soon.