Street art fascinates me. It is a perfectly unique intersection of a million thoughts, histories, and artistic movements. It is arguably where art most directly meets politics and the most likely place for the public to see art. It is at once a particularly free and a uniquely restricted space. Throughout history it has been a breeding ground for revolution both against the art world and society. Neither temporary nor permanent, it is an instillation in our life.
Street art can be remarkably ingenious, utilizing existing materials and physical environments. Yet often it is completely in your face, ignoring and overpowering its context instead of manipulating it. Perhaps in part because of this it is a meeting place of mediums as well. Everything is fair game, from extremely temporary works made of ice or chalk to large paintings and steel sculptures. It is both comedy and tragedy, threatening and familiar.
So often it goes unappreciated or unnoticed. Recently, The Washington Post asked world famous violinist, Joshua Bell to play in a crowded subway station during rush hour for 43 minutes. He did not go unnoticed, but almost. He was given about the same treatment as any other street performer. Most people passed quickly.
They didn’t look but they heard. There is something to be said for subtlety. Images that we see every day on our way to work can make an impression on us that we don’t even always understand. I believe that street art’s most precious gift is its ability to sneak into our lives. Viewers are confronted with interesting visual images and profound statements against their will. Outside of the museum or gallery setting it can touch people who don’t visit those spaces and alter their perception. It’s fascinating.
I want to wrangle my musings. I want them to come together and flow in one direction like a herd.
to force myself to develop my ideas past whim and shape my own conscious thought
Exactly. I think ideas, arguments, grow organically. In conversation and in writing, so I try both. Finally someone has convinced me to simply write and put it in the world like I am so willing to do with oral discussion.
Hell I can delete this if I want and no one pays enough attention to some rando to ever find the cache.
So I will try to rustle my disparate lines of argument into something relatively cohesive. I will try to write here about the philosophy I read and the baby arguments I write. And maybe as things are given some kind of permanence, even if still digital, they cohere into something special. If I am really great, I will make something special
I’ve been thinking for a long time about my return to this blog. I seemed to be on such a roll last year as I typed away. I’m not sure if it was the lack of deadlines that caused me to fell behind or the fact that I finally got a job in the arts, doing what I want to do. Suddenly I didn’t seem to need a blog to capture my artistic imagination, I was, and am, constantly enlightened and delighted by my work.
By no means has that come to a close, it is only that I itch to investigate more, to learn more, and to challenge myself in ways that I have allowed myself to become lazy. I never want to lose an opportunity to do something incredible because I spend my time doing unimportant, mindless things. While they are relaxing, they do not move me toward my goal of having the best life, which I think is fundamentally (if partally)reliant on intellectual stimulation and interaction.
I see things all the time that make me wonder, that captivate my imagination and I want to share those things with someone other than my incredible boyfriend. I want to force myself to develop my ideas past whim and shape my own conscious thought.
Which is all wonderful… until I started writing.
Somewhere between the decision to begin blogging again and the physical act of sitting down to write, all of these thoughts and whims have escaped me, flitting quietly into the recesses of my mind like startled birds.
So I forced myself to be still and quiet, and to consider process. Process is something that I seem to remember entire lectures about during my art history study. While I understand the concept, it seems that I have not, until now, considered process as a puzzle to be solved instead of a historical step to be studied. In my stillness this leads me to think about the artist On Kawara and his beautifully simple Today series. Beginning on January 4th 1966 the artist has created one work each day, a simple square canvas that depicts the date in white lettering on a black background. There is incredible depth here, a million connections to be discussed and discovered, all stemming from such a simple, accessible process.
Suddenly I am understanding that the search for complexity does not always begin with complexity.
So, I’m hoping to simplify my own process. I want to start somewhere genuine and simple and let the complexity come naturally.
I’ve always thought that a great project to work on (as well as a good resume builder for someone who’s trying to get into nonprofit development) would be to help art students get funding for small projects that they can’t personally afford to do. Things like $50 for a pubic photo project. Honestly, I had hoped at one point to make this a function of Public Canvas. The other day on BoingBoing I found a website that does this.
It’s a great way to democratize patronage and allow new givers to see a direct product of their gift.
I went to Art City Austin a couple of weekends ago. It’s an incredible art fair put on by Art Alliance Austin (who I interned with back in the day, full disclosure). And it was really incredible. There were lots of booths, good music, and your choice of delicious, local Austin food. It made me think about something.
I’m not really sure if I want to go here, because I’m not really sure where I stand on this officially, but one thing I thought about was the artistic nature of food. Here we had local restaurants with booths, very similar to the artist’s booths around them. They created a product from scratch, in most instances an original product. You can think of each taco, which is a reproduction of the original as a print. However, not many people think about it this way. It’s really interesting to me to think about how different art forms stimulate different senses.
Lots of exhibits we visit utilize sight, obviously, and even sound. We consider music, like the band that was playing on the stage across the street from the food, art. There are always people, fine chefs especially who refer to what they do as an art, but this is true of many high quality tradespeople. In our society we often use the phrase “What they do is an art” as a compliment for lots of different skills without really meaning it or considering its repercussions.
We often clarify between “visual arts” and “performance arts”, but most performance arts, even music to a certain sense, rely heavily on sight. Maybe in our definition of art we should be considering different forms of stimulation of all of the senses a little more carefully. Because really, taco making in Austin, Texas is an art and if you’ve never had a really good fish taco, you need to change that.
I’m not really the jet setting type. I didn’t go many places till the past 5 years or so, but I’ve started to nurture quite a crush on Manhattan. Bright lights, big city, and art. Every time I’ve gone, art has been #1 on my priority list, but not always everyone else’s. So, I was really excited to go two weekends ago with my fabulous best friend who, not only loves art, also appreciates the fact that I like to wander alone through museums and refrains from the normal clingy, chatty thing.
Not only was she also excited about art, she had planned the trip around the Tim Burton exhibit taking place at the MoMA. As a scaredy-cat child, Burton films have not always been my favorite, but as I’ve gotten older, the flair in his art has really spoken to the whimsy in my soul (The boogie man from The Nightmare Before Christmas still freaks me out though) and I really have come to love him as an incredible artist.
I’m sure you really wanted all that personal information.
I might want to discuss other parts of my art filled trip later, but right now I would really love to discuss one simple aspect of the exhibit. Flow. The mechanics of people moving through the space. I’m not here to say that dealing with the throngs of people who visit an exhibit like this is easy but as a viewer, this was one of the most frustrating museum experiences of my life. And I went on a weekday!
I loved the large inflatable blue character on the landing in the main entrance. Everyone wants something to take a picture with, and when you can’t do it in the actual exhibit, this is a great problem solver. Big, representative of the artist’s work, and blue. Everyone likes blue. And the gaping mouth entrance was pretty darn cool too. But immediately upon entering the viewer is forced into a dark narrow (not much wider than normal) hallway. On the left side of the hallway, animated shorts are playing, and on the right, people are trying desperately to see them past the people who have given up and are walking right down the middle. It was one of the most physically awkward spaces in which I’ve looked at art. Did I mention it’s dark? I have just been handed a map/information by a docent, and I have no way to read it (or the information plaques) and find out what I’m looking at in the videos.
Maybe the videos are there to merely get you in the Tim Burton mood, but if they are, the next room does that a lot better. In fact, it was my very favorite room. All black lit, most of the pieces are drawn on black paper, with garishly bright colors, lending the drawings unexpected depth. Maybe it’s because I encountered the fewest amount of people in this room that I liked it so much because as soon as I walked into the main exhibit space I was confronted with a near wall of people.
There were just SO MANY people. It was really too many. I know giving as much access to as many people as possible is important, but so is regulating them so that everyone gets to experience the exhibit in all it’s glory. There are a lot of things that contributed.
The sheer number of pieces present was truly incredible and I particularly enjoyed the sculpture. But, most of the works hung on the wall were impossible to see through the crowd and working your way to the front is nearly impossible. With some artists, admiring from a few steps back is not a problem, but Burton’s delicate use of line and intricate detail made me want to be as close to each drawing as possible. Honestly, I wish this had been one of these exhibits where each visitor is given a magnifying glass, but I may just have a soft spot for museums who give into my desire to see every single detail and to look cool by carrying around a magnifying glass, Sherlock Holmes style.
A lot of corners in the room and a lot of works on the wall in the corners also did not help. It naturally stops people, which prevents people from moving.
An oddly shaped exhibit space, which prevented a true logical path also kind of set off my ADD. Let’s be honest, everyone wants that kind of path, it helps them know they’re not missing anything. Sometimes I feel like exhibitions that draw crowds of this size should have arrows on the floor like Ikea. You never miss seeing anything at Ikea unless you want to and people aren’t stepping in others ways as much.
Finally, at the end, visitors exited into a fairly random photography room. I was totally enthralled by this and happily looked around as I waited for my companion, but most people need a sitting/waiting/resting your feet type of place, especially after being sardined the whole time. The one bench was packed and people sat on the floor and milled around as they also waited. I understand that spaces like this are often determined by a predesigned space, but why not add more benches, temporarily? Maybe place a docent there to direct people to the best way to view the rest of the museum? Half of the people who left that space did not appreciate incredible photographs that they normally would have lingered over because they were simply trying to decompress.
So, in the end, I hate to complain. There were so many individual objects that I really fell in love with. My favorite, a Jack the Pumpkin King sculpture surrounded by his many heads with their varying expression, all suspended at his elbow height, was not only visually stunning, and an excellent example of Burton’s ability to visually develop characters. It also helped me to understand the challenges of animation, claymation and digital production, as did the whole exhibit.
Overall, the content was incredible, but given more space, more direction, and more crowd control, I would have been able to enjoy it much more thoroughly.
This is an incredible idea and opportunity. The WNYC and the Whitney Museum of American Art are putting together an exclusive twitter tour of the 2010 Whitney Biennial. It is this kind of openness that allows people to experience art in their own way and to see these images that would not normally be photographed. I’m interested to see who the 8 handpicked participants are.
I was watching Rick Sanchez on CNN today because I wanted to catch Nancy Pelosi’s press conference. I’ve always had a lot of forgiveness in my heart for Sanchez because filling three hours of TV every day is not a job I could do without saying stupid things. Let’s be honest, very few people could. But today he did something that really put a bee in my bonnet.
No, I don’t wear bonnets, but I really wish I did.
Anyway, One of his segments featured Danish-Norwegian artist Nina Maria Kleivan who is receiving notoriety for a series of photographs called “Potency”. The pictures depict her infant daughter dressed as tiny dictators like Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Very simple concept, and I honestly believe that the higher thought there isn’t a stretch.
Without even hearing the artist’s perspective it’s very clear to me that the images call into question the nature of evil. Each one of those dictators were innocent infants once, where did their horrific notions come from? Just as the artist puts the helpless child into the clothes of a dictator, society forces otherwise good individuals into the roles of evil bigoted dictator. Or maybe they are born with it, another obvious question presented by the works.
These are excellent thinking pieces that I feel like should be easily interpreted by our community at large and used to start conversations about what makes these evil men (they are all men, I believe). Instead, people are outraged.
I find it funny that every one is freaking out about the Hitler image specifically, because, what? All those other men weren’t just as bad? Sorry, I digress. They’re flipping out. Holocaust survivors are “disgusted”, and Rick Sanchez thinks it’s “just weird”.
I understand that there are concepts, especially within the artistic realm, that not everyone is going to like or understand. I understand that this is an age old problem. Society does not like mirrors. But, I really think this is something we should be able to handle. The baby is not being harmed in any way. It won’t even remember this.
Children are born and raised by neo nazis every day in America, taught to hate brown people and Jewish people and Catholics and communists, and people of mixed ethnicity, and well, everyone but them. All the while, the artist who questions the nature of evil and it’s source is the one we call crazy.
Street art fascinates me. It is a perfectly unique intersection of a million thoughts, histories, and artistic movements. It is arguably where art most directly meets politics and the most likely place for the public to see art. It is at once a particularly free and a uniquely restricted space. Throughout history it has been a breeding ground for revolution both against the art world and society. Neither temporary nor permanent, it is an instillation in our life.
So I forced myself to be still and quiet, and to consider process. Process is something that I seem to remember entire lectures about during my art history study. While I understand the concept, it seems that I have not, until now, considered process as a puzzle to be solved instead of a historical step to be studied. In my stillness this leads me to think about the artist 
