Tactical Art in a pretention sauce

            The term “Art Fuck Words” may have been created by anyone.  This article defines “Art Fuck Words.” Although mixed into the masturbatory sense of importance of this article there were some interesting ideas.

            The idea of interfacing with your audience in an interactive way is interesting.  While most art seems to be static, performance art that includes the audience is at least a good way to interest the public. 

            I personally get hung up on the artistic promiscuity of the movement.  Claiming any medium can be in your movement is fine and dandy, even a good idea some would say.  The co-opting of health-care providers who fought to change HIV care policy seems a bit much.  The vague nature of what they are trying to do as well seems super forced.  The way digital is defined as being “about copying, re-combining, and re-representing,” is aggravating at best.  The word they are looking for is derivative.

            The idea that they want to point out ideas taken for granted in a participatory way is lovely.  The way it is described by Stanley Aronowitz almost defeats the purpose because it sounds like it would be hard to reach an audience while congratulating yourself that much.

 I feel that the vernacular of art can sometimes get in the way of having an active audience.  When your primary idea is to have an active audience, how you talk about your work says everything.  If you describe it in a way that seems humble or at the very least thankful for the audience being there as opposed to trying to come off like some ideological superhero you can reach more people.

Having a problem with the lack of ephermerality from people recording your actions or leftover scripts comes off to me as either incredibly anal retentive or complete out of touch.  When you work with participatory experiential art that includes non-artists you should expect them to record it in an attempt to remember it later.  If you cannot let them do that does that mean you believe your idea is ephemeral and lacks the import to be remembered?

What I believe this art movement needs is a healthy does of reality.  Without the humility that comes from living in reality you tend to speak about your work as if it is saving the world; While that may sound grand in a grant, in an introduction to a book about you it kind of turns me off.

Overall I do believe there is a very specific need to educate people through interactive events and get people out into the world and dealing with things and questioning givens.  However by giving yourself a name and co-opting other peoples’ work you defeat your purpose because who is going to believe you?

I would probably go to their events, but I do not think I could make it through this book.

Style Wars: Redux

A hip-hop artist is someone who wants to be part of an expressive subculture.  While most subcultures express themselves in certain areas hip-hop artists seem to almost inject themselves into areas.  From sneaking into train yards to get people to see your tags to rapping on the street, expression oozes from hip-hop artists trying to infect their neighbors and neighborhoods like a brightly colored virus dropping a good beat.  They keep getting better and better because of the constant competition. The idea is to show off and be better than everyone else.  This is especially evident in the evolution of breakdancing.  Break dancing was impressive back in the ‘80s. Now it is to the point where it is almost impossible looking.  Because of this a hip-hop artist can find a source of pride that comes from solely them, and know that if they are good enough they can influence their local culture directly.

The idea of going “All City” is rooted in the idea that in New York City you are one of millions of essentially faceless people.  The city is covered in billboards of attractive people selling products which tourists stare at, while missing the people around them.  By having tags on every train line, you essentially reach out to other Taggers and say, “I’m here and I can do this.” Other New Yorkers also see your work, but the idea is to be good in your own subculture while showing the world your work.

Although city officials may say differently since the ‘80s graffiti artists have set the tone for the colors of the urban scene.  They take the grey walls and trains and cover them in a type of art that comes in a certain NYC style.  Like whale songs the specifics of the style change over time and evolve, speciating with individuals and creating something all New Yorkers know and see as part of their city.

Tagging is a way of saying you own something on something. It is about leaving your mark and it is so intimately human you can see the graffiti in Pompeii. While graffiti was fairly concretely in the hands of the common people for millennia, more recently it has become in vogue to have it adorn your walls.  Artists like Banksy have transcended the idea of just leaving your mark and have moved on to making a statement with that mark.  By leaving a window of a happier world on an Israeli built Palestinian wall Banksy is bringing to light the ideas of the neighborhood enclosed, in that in a time past having a wall the world is incredibly nicer. You can try but you cannot stop and idea a tagger wants to get across. People have started to collect Banksy’s work because they feel like it means something.  The rich always adopt the vernacular of the proletariat , visual, auditory or otherwise.  The vulgate bible went from Greek to Latin then one day to German; Baller spots in New York have gone from “modern art” to graffiti.

When it comes to graffiti people just want to express themselves and have everyone see it.  Look at deviant art, or the Internet in general; people who are terrible at art want to show off their work.  Tagging a train or every train in the city is the ultimate way to put your artwork up on the fridge at home.  This transcends social cliques; it is universal to want to express yourself.  I would argue the only thing people want more is to have sex, get money and eat food.

Cap seems like an Internet troll. He bothers people in a way that he knows will hit them at the root.  Not because Cap dislikes them, but just because he wants to cover everything with his name.  Like the early graffiti artists they talked about he tries to put himself everywhere and spread his name not through quality but by brute force.  If you are a writer you know Cap because he’s scrawled over your work and if you don’t write you know him because his name is everywhere. There are always people out there who want to piss people off and pervert their work.  With social media nowadays it is more important to have more exposure than to have produced something amazing. Covering someone else’s art exerts power over them and in a way tells them that you are more important, because of this there will always be someone there to cross you out and write their name.

The Gallery scene is ridiculous.  You have what seem like graffiti knockoff art covering the walls with these pretentious folks talking about how these pieces are investments.  The work itself is still visually interesting but without the scale of a whole train car I feel it looks trite.  Without the context of it being hard to get a tag up it does not have the same power that a giant tag on the side of a train does.  You can take the graffiti out of the streets but it seems almost ironic to hang it up in a gallery and sell it to rich people for thousands of dollars.  A big part of the point of putting it up on a train is so that people will see it.  By selling art to a collector it will be put into a museum with an entry fee or it will be put into their personal collection for only their baller rich friends to see.

Taking back control of your city through graffiti can be a good thing.  However when you cover every wall in meaningless art, you defeat the purpose.  Berlin is a city that has the idea of graffiti right.  They have free tag walls where people practice their chops.  The tags change almost daily and you can really see some good work.  Then you have five-story pieces commissioned for a hostel, which makes you wonder how someone could have planned that to begin with.  Since people are going to tag the areas they live in it makes sense that you would want to at least give them an outlet.  With no outlet taggers will run around the city and put their own flair on things created by those in power and keep the struggle ongoing.  Whether they have the right to tag things is almost a moot point.  People have been scrawling on public walls forever, they are always going to and it’s something that should be harnessed, because attempting to stop it outright has not worked and seems pointless.

My western cocoon

For cocooned/engaged I walked around downtown with my ipod.  The beginning of the walk I listen to Ennio Moricone, which effectively made me walk much more upright and effectively able to make eye contact with people who would have rather not made eye contact.  I found that I was fairly unable to recognize when people were around me and almost got hit by a couple bicyclists.  Overall I felt as if I was in my own world and my acknowledgement of other people was giving them a pass into my world.  As I walked around I realized how isolated I really was from other people as even when someone would say something to me, I couldn’t understand what they said.  Overall this walk made me aware that I am not very observant to begin with and certainly not when I’m distracted by music.

My second walk occurred after night had fallen.  As I started walking around downtown I realized how much car noise there was even though in many parts you couldn’t even see them.  Despite all the construction, vehicles were everywhere.  There were more people than when I was last out and now that I could hear their conversations I felt more engaged with them even from a voyeuristic standpoint.  I successfully avoided any of the bicyclists forced up on the sidewalk by the construction; for that alone I liked this walk better.  I attempted again to make eye contact with people.  Except for a few women smiling back I was unable to engage anyone.  Most people will notice the eye contact and avert their gaze and now that I had to headphones on I felt a bit offended, but not really because I am guilty of the same sin of pseudo-xenophobia.

I would say the biggest thing that occurred was in my view of other people on the street.  With headphones in, they were people who were going about their own business and were not super excited to have some giant looking at them and smiling.  Especially when that giant had no idea what they were saying as they passed by.  In contrast, when I was not wearing headphones I almost felt compelled to speak to people now that I was cognizant of their avoidance.  Although not wearing headphones was slightly more successful at garnering human contact, I feel like people may have developed an evasive default downtown, where many people ask you for money or just walk up and talk crazy talk.

Project 1 Ephemeral

On a hike up Mount Lemmon I crested a ridge and saw four mini peaks on the next ridge.  The tallest of them was begging for a flag, and climbing mountains to me has always been something of an act of domination.  So we erected a flag to show that we were there.  I do not expect the flag to stay forever, but it will hopefully last long enough for someone else to see it.  Their seeing it will tell them they are not the first there and hopefully remind them they won't be the last.

Sounding Out The City

A personal stereo is control.  In all situations that were described people used it to alter their environment.  Whether to block out unwanted stimuli or to make a situation more "in tune" to their mood users attempt to hold some kind of control. Control is a basic need in a persons life. By controlling stimuli you can control your environment. This control leads to a fantasy world.
The ability to escape into this world is universally understood. So when someone is in their own world it pushes other people away. Not because other people are offended but because it is seen as rude to break someone out of their world for no reason.  This reinforces the idea that one is in their own world.
Without the imagined potential for human interaction the brain is able to process other things.  If the person focuses on their music they can pass time faster than usual because they will not focus on other things making time harder to judge.  When one is on public transportation most of the time they are trying to avoid interpersonal contact so the desire to focus on one's dream world becomes greater thereby also increasing the rate at which time is dilated.
The more a person uses a personal stereo the more addicted they become to the control. This is evident in the interviews about how people feel when they do not use it.  They feel bored or have an "empty feeling."  The empty space is not just about having some music fill the void, it is about having an interaction on your own terms.
Today the ability to control interactions through intermediation has become widespread. Text messages have replaced phone calls because a phone call has become too much of an interjection in someone else's life.  This stems from the same need for control exhibited by the widespread use of personal stereos.  With control over stimuli achieved people feel more at home wherever they are.  After all a home is only a way to control environmental stimuli, i.e. temperature, wind, rain.

Rivers and Tides Response

Goldsworthy seems to look for a peculiarity in the area he is working in and replicate it.  The sticks which are only partly black become a sheet with a burnt circle, a stone outcrop receives a driftwood whirlpool, a grey rock face gains a splash of color by putting yellow wildflowers.  His river inspired curvilinear lines reflect a nearby river and the curves in the form

1.  The way Goldsworthy seems to be obsessed with the Platonic idea of ideas and forms.  He constantly creates and sees the forms of the archetypical idea of rivers and streams.  Goldsworthy creates artificial forms to represent the idea he sees in his head, the form however is merely a representation of this archetype he knows.  Because of this every new river, every new tide, and every new installation he makes are equal and new despite having seen something almost exactly like it before the form is important because it shows a different interpretation of the same root archetype.  As Goldsworth sees more and more forms the unfamiliar parts fill in gaps about the pure non-tangible river idea.

2. Goldsworthy is excited because the ice structure he built that appears to be moving through a rock is perfectly illuminated against a cliff behind it.  Having started building the ice sculpture at night he could not have known how the Sun would affect it.  He is also excited about it because the very thing that brought the sculpture to life, the Sun, is also the thing that will destroy it.

3. The Sun comes up behind the ice, bringing it into brilliant contrast with the hillside behind it, however because of the heat from the Sun the ice will begin to melt and ultimately the sculpture will disappear. The context in which art is made usually contributes greatly to the form and concept.  Someone from rural Illinois may make sculptures in a similar way to other rural areas but it will inform the viewer in a different way than if it were to be placed in a museum.  If you were to take the Kaaba and place it near mountains of black rock, the Kaaba would not seem as mysterious or mystical as being in the middle of the desert.  The same with Stonehenge, with Stonehenge being in the middle of a field it brings different things to mind for those experiencing it than it would in the middle of a quarry.

4. All work is theoretically ephemeral; Paintings will fade, songs may be forgotten, even the Sphinx lost its nose.  Works that are ephemeral in a more immediate sense force a person to experience it in person for full effect.  Seeing Goldsworthy's wooden whirlpool gives you a facsimile of the experience that the actual installation would have given.  It is a full life story of a project.  From birth to finalization of form to eventual destruction Goldsworthy knows that once the tide rolls in the project will disappear.  Everyone knows they will die, they just hope they achieve an acceptable form by the time the tides come to wash them away.  It is like watching children build things out of sticks and rocks during recess; they know it will probably be destroyed by the next day, but the thing is actually in the creation of it.

5. When Goldsworthy was working in a cubical at art school he could control every variable, there was no driving force.  Once he began working on the beach he could focus on the fact that eventually the work he did would disappear allowing him to start anew.  When combined with the uncertainty of working somewhere new and with found objects makes the work unique, it makes Goldsworthy work from a new point every time, despite going for a similar thing  from what he has done before.  When his rock pile falls apart he has to adapt and rebuild, if he were in an art school he could have selected each stone and made sure they would all work.  There would be question as to its fate, it would have been built and stayed like that till someone decided it should be taken apart.  Even if you know when the tide is coming in and that the tide will tear your piece apart, you don't know how and you don't really know when.  In that Goldsworthy allows a sculpture to actually work in a time base format; the piece is not done until it is truly gone.

6. Learning photography through editing your own photos is much like learning from failure to discover how you can succeed.  Pouring over contact sheets and through CF cards looking to see which shot was successful results thousands of shots that did not work.  But then there are the photos that do work, they inform on the ones that did not work by contrasting.  Once you compare the successes to the failures you can come away with more knowledge as to what your style really is.  Doing this over and over and over again speciates your work and develops you.  If every photo taken were successful it would be hard to see the direction you should go.

7. Goldsworthy's projects in a museum have a sense of immutability and permanence derived from their creation from stone.  They seem as if they will always be there, as if they were a greek statue.  In a museum it also seems as if the work is out of place, put on display for all to see.  His work in the field feels natural, as if the stone were part of the landscape created to serve some purpose, to mark a spot or provide guidance.  It also makes you feel like it will eventually degrade and go back to the loam and be reabsorbed into the landscape.

8. The idea of sheep as benign silly creatures was destroyed for my by a Scotswoman who taught me Scots-Gaelic.  Before that class I saw sheep as a fluffy cute animal that wander around just eating food.  What I learned then was that sheep had destroyed the wildflowers of Scotland, turning the hillsides and valleys green with only grass.  The English removed the Scottish peoples to Canada in order to graze more sheep.  Sheep destroyed what was Scotland and have turned it into the idea of Scotland most people have today.  Goldsworthy put a layer of wool atop the foundations of an old house, almost as if the sheep had conquered the place and their wool had settled leaving the house empty and slowly disappearing.

9. To mark the lack of something in a landscape requires an almost completeness.  The pictures in Joel Sternfeld's "On This Site" show images that seem normal and mundane, but beg the question "Why this picture?" By leaving a negative space or making a space seem so mundane, yet on display, you can evoke a feeling of something missing.

This American Life: Mapping response

I think the strength of Dennis Wood's work lies in the idea of showing what it is like to live in an area.  The development of a series of maps for each sense allows for a body of work that seen as a whole develops one's idea of a neighborhood so they can almost feel like they have been there.  The uniqueness of each map also lends itself to wanting to see the next; as each map is something you have probably never seen.  This project would make an awesome coffee table atlas.

Jack Hitt's work is interesting because it is about being conscious of the unconscious.  The body tunes things out and Hitt exemplifies those things in a way that venerates them.  I like the idea of songs made to compliment monotonous noises.  I would never do this sort of thing though, as listening to all the little noises would drive me insane.  The idea of being the compliment to the appliance’s noise is also an interesting idea; it implies that the noise is the lead of the musical piece with everything formed around it.

The electronic nose is incredibly cool.  The idea of an electronic nasal map of the world is an interesting concept.  Although I feel like this was the weakest part of the series, it serves the purpose to question the idea of a computer map of the world.  People have historically done cartography and since people are not machines we cannot be as precise.  This works when things are physical objects, like when you have a laser measuring an area and creating a visualization of whatever.  Smell on the other hand can’t be super easily replicated thus the readout of “smells like pancakes” does not evoke the same things that the smell of pancakes would. 

The touch part was the weakest link in this series. This part was more a mapping of a person’s psyche, and even then a weak one at that. This was a story about a person’s hypochondria, which can be interesting but came off as a bit of a self-obsessed rant.  Another method for exploring the idea of a world through touch would have been better.  As an exploration of Deb Monroe’s psyche this felt a bit disorganized, the narrative lost my attention quite a few times simply because it felt as if she were just venting about her problem.  It came off as a cliché hypochondriac story.

Jonathan Gold’s story worked the most successfully for the idea of mapping.  While the other parts of this series explored the ideas of mapping an area through different sense, this piece actually succeeded in bringing you to areas.  The descriptions of the food, along with the audio from the locations allow the listener to actually transport himself or herself to a restaurant in L.A.

Overall the ideas brought up in this series successfully captured my attention as a feature piece.  While I wish there was a bit more attention applied to the actual mapping techniques and processes the majority of the pieces worked for me.