article 8: two links to other things

1) A young Cutty Ranks:

It’s unfortunate that a lot of people think of reggae as some kind of beach cocktail music made by grinning overweight guys with dreadlocks, or even worse, by white guys talking about Jah and bongs. The forms of Jamaican music in the ’60s and ’70s are as influential and important as the soul and funk coming out of the States at the same time, and like those musical forms, the bad exponents of it can mislead the casual listener into thinking it all sucks. If you feel the need to reappraise reggae, check out King Tubby’s early ’70s dub releases or the Scratch Perry produced Wailers tracks released in various forms on Trojan. To my knowledge, however, the modern Jamaican and Jamaican-influenced musical developments dancehall and reggaeton are even more misunderstood by many audiences than ska, rock steady, and reggae. If you’ve never thought much of the newer Jamaican musical genres, look at this Cutty Ranks link from an ’80s political rally for something with shades of Spaghetti Westerns and sci-fi movies.  Plus, his flow will blow your fucking face off at halfway thru:

Thanks to Robert Cathcart Smith for this link.

2) Stuff White People Like :

This is very crass, ironic, and comedy-sketch-like blog. Someone uptight might say that many of these posts are incorrect or generalized. They would be missing the point.

artist 8: Andrew Scott Ross

When I was visiting Atlanta a little over two years ago, I made the rounds of contemporary galleries and art venues, eventually going to MOCA GA. As I walked in, I noticed clumps of crumpled up white paper scattered around on the floor of the rooms. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the clumps of paper were actually the sets for little paleolithic dioramas made of paper, complete with hunting scenes, shamanic rituals, fireside lounging, and other enigmatic activities. There were hundreds of these people. This work, entitled Rocks and Caves, was impressive — with or without reflection on culture formation, museums, and installation strategies.

Rocks and Caves

The artist behind this and related works is named Andrew Scott Ross. Currently based in Brooklyn, he attended school in Atlanta and Chicago. His recent projects include contributions to a production of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” at the Guggenheim. According to the artist’s website, his work “explores the fragilities inherent to culture and our often-tenuous relationship with the natural world.”

One last thing: Ross doesn’t focus exclusively on miniature figures. An earlier piece from 2004, Sighting, consisted of lifesized silhouttes of a small buffalo herd arranged near an interstate. Passing drivers could glimpse the animals while speeding by or caught in the awful Atlanta traffic.

Note: The images in this post were grabbed from Ross’s splash page and the website of MOCA GA

article 7: most wanted paintings

America’s most desired painting.

I was reading another blog recently when I came across something of interest that I had encountered a few years ago, then forgotten: a project involving statistics and painting initiated back in the ’90s for the Dia Center’s website.  Here’s an excerpt from their description of the project:

Dia’s second artists’ project for the world wide web, begun in 1995, was created by the Russian emigrant artist team Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. The Most Wanted paintings, as well as the Least Wanted paintings, reflect the artists’ interpretation of a professional market research survey about aesthetic preferences and taste in painting. Intending to discover what a true “people’s art” would look like, the artists, with the support of the Nation Institute, hired Marttila & Kiley, Inc. to conduct the first poll. In 1994, they began the process which resulted in America’s Most Wanted and America’s Least Wanted paintings, which were exhibited in New York at the Alternative Museum under the title “People’s Choice.”

This process produced some terrible works. America’s most wanted painting is the artists’ interpretation of a specific survey given to average Americans - note the presence of George Washington, a pastoral scene, and wild animals. These paintings are funny and ironic, which isn’t surprising given Komar and Melamid’s presence in the Sots (Soviet pop and conceptual art) movement in Russia.

An older work from 1972.

The most wanted paintings also produced some lingering questions about statistics and art audiences. For example, after looking at the overall survey results and the questions asked in the survey for several countries, I wonder if answering questions about one’s own preferences is different that one’s actual preferences. Many people might think one thing when presented with a question about representational art versus abstract art, but actually contradict their opinions when faced with real paintings to consider or choose between. It seems as though the efficacy of the survey is not as important as the idea of commenting on it, especially with a tongue-in-cheek attitude. Would the people from the survey actually like the painting based on their opinions? Maybe not, but does that matter? In any case, it would be naive and superficial to think that Komar and Melamid thought that they were making accurate depictions of a country’s preferences in painting.

artist 7: Greg Pond

Greg Pond ends his artist statement with a quote from John Keats: “I feel the flowers growing over me.” This feeling of nature’s troubled relationship to human culture pervades many of Pond’s pieces: a bullrider at a rodeo loops in an endless and seamless video cycle, an audio speaker sealed in a glass container emits the sounds of birds, or birds continually fly from behind an anonymous skyscraper beneath a gray sky.

Based in rural Tennessee, Pond describes how he makes art within “the rising tide of suburbia.”* He writes:

I am interested in cultural attitudes towards landscape and the pursuit of utopia (no place). It is the landscape that largely influences our collective mythology and culture. I compress histories and cultures, alter the pace of time, and distort physical scale to portray a psychological rather than a social or material realism.

Pond is represented by Nashville’s Zeitgeist Gallery. He regularly works on projects across the U.S. and in Europe, and has most recently been involved in filming a documentary in Trenchtown, Jamaica. The artist is also a founding member of the now defunct Fugitive Art Center, a nonprofit project space and artist studio complex, as well as the enduring Fugitive Projects, a more nomadic curatorial organization based in Nashville. The word “fugitive” refers in part to the fugitive status of alternative art projects in most cities, but also to the specific group of poets active in the mid-south in the early 1900s, including Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren.

*perhaps a related issue would be about the relevance of artists living in the country versus artists in the city. Ideas are traditionally spread in cities and between cities, but is that still true now? Are the best artistic ideas being conceived in cities or in the country? There is a lot of wankery out there about the periphery being the new center, but that hypothesis remains to be proven to me, even if I’m open to it.

article 6: strong art market = a lot of art, even for artists against capitalism?

Many artists struggle with the notion of buying and selling art. The most misanthropic and romantic artists often reject the art market entirely, as if any contact with it is degrading.  Sometimes they have real grievances from being exploited, but other times it seems like these artists have a deep suspicion of the art market whether they have any real experience of it or not.  The art market can seem very abstract and intimidating. On the other extreme, one finds artists who want to get rich or are already rich, including the market superstars playing the game unabashedly.  Other artists feel more ambivalent despite the increasing popularity of professionalization and self-conscious marketing and branding tactics.  (In many schools there are classes that specifically address issues of self-promotion and professionalism.  Other schools also branch into quasi-research models to encourage students to be practitioners of a method or direction of inquiry).

Ambivalence is understandable; artists want to make a living and participate meaningfully in exhibitions and other projects, but the overall structure of the art market can seem like one of the negative parts of capitalism, even if the art being sold has anti-capitalist goals. (Check out the collection of essays, Commodify Your Dissent, for more on the topic of dissent as a commodity. Here is a review of it.) On the other hand, would there be as much art being made today, even noncommercial art, if there were not a strong art market? Maybe someone with more knowledge of economics can help me here. Do we owe the popularity of contemporary art on all levels to the money being invested in the art market? Another issue involves the parameters of the art market. How does it relate to the so-called art world? Is the health of the art world* as a whole dependent upon the health of the market? Is contemporary art, regardless of whether it’s for sale or not, just a feature of a culture created by capitalism and market economies?

* or art worlds. There are many aspects of the art world, not all of which interact.

artist 6: Niamh O’Malley

Video has become a very popular medium even though some people think that it still gets marginalized. In any case, there are a lot of videos out there and many of them aren’t very good. “[In] the field of contemporary art, audiences are often fantastically forgiving, standing for hours in front of dismal videos in case they miss a sign of life, studiously reading the wall-texts when the art can’t speak for itself,” writes Laura Cumming in a recent Observer. One example of an artist successfully working with video (but not to the exclusion of other media) is Niamh O’Malley. According to a statement about her work posted on the Green On Red Gallery website, the artist

is interested in the fabricated nature of the viewing experience. Her artistic practice, which often takes the form of video projections onto painted canvases, is concerned with the distance from source to spectacle, the deliberate manufacture of illusion, and ultimately, loss. Her works hope to generate the potential for an incursion of unreality into a real world alongside a sense of distance and disappointment in the nature of the image as chimera.*

When confronted with an O’Malley piece, one can experience an intriguing perceptual confusion. Seeing a video projected onto a painted canvas in such a way that the two media link together can challenge our normal ability to dismiss or understand illusion, and it might take a minute or two to figure out what is going on. Like the works of Olafur Eliasson, O’Malley’s pieces often attract and dazzle viewers, making her installations interesting to a potentially wide audience. Also like Eliasson, she simultaneously presents a rich perceptual experience and its artifice; after awhile the viewer understands, at least superficially, how it was made. What this says about the nature of representation and perception is an issue worth pursuing in another article at some stage.

O’Malley currently has her studio at Firestation Studios in Dublin. She has exhibited internationally and is represented by the Green On Red Gallery.

* As a corollary to these artist postings, I need to say that I recognize that three sentence quotations from artist statements aren’t always enough info to get a deep picture of the artist. I also know that the institution of artist statements is suspect. Check out Jennifer Higgie’s view on this subject in her article “Please Release Me”. Even so, I hope these brief descriptions are enough to get started in considering an artist.

article 5: vaguely disquieting forest scenes

In the current issue of Frieze, Tom Morton offers a new year quiz worth checking out. The first question, entitled the “I-spy round”, gives you points if you saw any exhibitions in 2007 that featured the following:

a) Imagery of former Eastern Bloc leisure facilities.
b) Pencil drawings of attractive ‘70s terrorists / political activists / post-punks.
c) An archive of stern-looking independent publications, presented in an artist-designed book shelf-cum-conversation pit.
d) Vaguely disquieting paintings of forests. (Score one extra point for every background figure dressed like a saltimbanque, Ruritanian naval officer or minor theosophist).
e) Sculpture that’s kinda Minimalist but kinda Emo too so it’s, like, a fucked-up, tearstained altar to NOW!
f) Newsprint and a silken arc of semen.
g) A horse. A beautiful, terrified horse.

All of these could be illustrated with examples, but I want to focus on d) vaguely disquieting paintings of forests. A good example of this trend can be found in Sarah Emerson’s work.  Note: the Frieze article gives no specific examples.

I like her work and would buy a piece, given the right opportunity.

artist 5: Nina Canell

In her 2006 review of a Nina Canell show, Sally O’Reilly describes how the artist “liberates man-made objects from the drudgery of service, ascribing them a new status as vacuous, absurd or oblique.” Canell combines everyday objects and technology (often of the analogue or obsolete variety) to make a range of pieces, some as simple as a few tubes of neon light wrapped around a branch, others as complex as a whole system of tape recorders, plants, bottles and other detritus, all connected by magnetic tape that is actually moving and producing sound. The artist also produces video works and sound recordings, often in tandem with Robin Watkins. According to their statement on the website for Firestation Studios in Dublin, the two aim to

explore the possibilities of open-ended sculptural and sonic systems. The inherent properties of material and immaterial forms function as a sort of testing ground in works which combine found and custom-built objects/sounds into a non-fixed state of durational activity. Elements are balanced and positioned in order to sustain a flexible state in which formations move and shift within carefully choreographed sonic and sculptural happenings.

Canell is represented by the Dublin-based Mother’s Tankstation.  She resides at Firestation Studios, also in Dublin.

article 4: gallery collapse during art opening leaves sixteen artists and three “viewers” dead.

In 2002, the satirical newspaper The Onion reported, “37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead in Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster.” For those who don’t know, Yo La Tengo is a revered band in the indie rock circuit. The article suggests that the main fanbase of Yo La Tengo consists of music store geeks/clerks, but “also believed to be among the missing are seven freelance rock critics, five vinyl junkies, two ‘zine publishers, an art-school dropout, and a college-radio DJ.”

Is this so different from the contemporary art scene, once you step outside of the big museums like the Tate Modern or MOMA, each of which boasts millions of visitors each year? By most estimates, there are more artists, collectors, galleries, art centers, art initiatives, etc. than ever before, but is the contemporary art scene (or scenes) really any less insular or rarified than the indie rock scene? Is it safe to say that most people who are into contemporary art beyond the occasional visit to a big museum are artists, ex-artists, or working in some sort of artistic field?

At some point or another, most people involved with art have to come to grips with the experts, self-appointed or not, that inhabit contemporary art circles. For example, when someone unfamiliar with art asks dumb questions at an artist talk, is it an opportunity to cringe or an opportunity for outreach? Or, when visiting a show with big wall texts about the works, it it an opportunity to wish they were more cerebral (or absent completely), or an opportunity to appreciate how they seem to help visitors who need them?

artist 4: Fahamu Pecou

Fahamu Pecou is an artist who explores the “identity design strategy of hip-hop artists and the conceptual framework of mass media” as they relate to contemporary fine art practice. According to his website, any unauthorized use of his images or statements will “result in a serious beatdown. For real tho!” Not surprisingly, a quick read of his artist statement reveals that Pecou is aware of the implications of this type of language. Hip hop marketing relies on the same poses and stereotypes of black inner city culture taken up by Pecou, but it is perhaps most interesting that Pecou doesn’t appear to be making a straightforward endorsement or critique of blunts, ho’s and saggy pants. It’s not clear what Pecou’s stance on the social origins or accuracy of gangsta rap would be, or whether he thinks the music business paints harmful pictures of black culture (to sell to legions of white kids from the middle class). Pecou isn’t a moralizer.

Working in video, painting, and performance, the artist relentlessly pursues his own image as subject while remaining aware of the notions of “fame, image, and black masculinity [as they combine with] fine art insider politics.” When Pecou attends an art opening, he arrives with an entourage in the manner of a hip hop mogul. Unlike Warhol or Koons, however, Pecou openly discusses his self-reflexive relationship with his image and subject matter - at least when he’s not “performing”. Koons, for example, is famous for making maddeningly naive statements about his sculptures of balloon bunnies or photographs of his ex-wife/porn star, Cicciolina. Pecou cites Basquiat as an influence, but it might be more accurate to say that Pecou is influenced by the media buzz around the earlier artist.

Most recently, Pecou exhibited work with Lions Wier Ortt at Pulse Miami, where rumor has it that Takashi Murakami bought a lot of his stuff.