The Strycker

This is my life. Breathe.

2008-10-07T11:45:00.003-04:00

On September 30th, the contract for one of my three jobs ended. I know that doesn’t sound horrible, but I am a freelancer, and I need three jobs to survive. I can’t remember not having three jobs. I can’t remember not always searching for a new job, perhaps a slightly better job, or perhaps just something to pay the bills. I can’t remember not being broke.

Indeed, I am underemployed and living on my best friend’s couch. Two overflowing reusable grocery bags, filled with my belongings, sit on her easy chair. A pair of flip-flops, a pair of flats, and my running sneakers are tucked beneath. My friend has begun calling me Kato.

To be fair, I was living in Adrienne’s apartment for the entire month before I lost my job. At first, she wasn’t here; she was vacationing and I was performing valuable services: watering her plants, retrieving her mail, making the place look lived in. Then she returned, and I stayed because it was an opportunity to hang out—we hadn’t seen each other in over a month! Plus, I could cook and clean for her. I love cooking! I love organizing! And my friend really doesn’t, so again—valuable services. But, at this moment, as I sit at my computer in pajama pants and watch her get ready for her job at a big, corporate law firm, the fact that I have no work today makes the situation feel ever more pathetic.

In high school, I was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” Now, my ten-year reunion is approaching, and my goal is to have health insurance before I attend. Why this impending reunion has suddenly motivated me to acquire a healthcare plan beyond band-aids and my friends’ expired prescription drugs, I’m not sure. Perhaps I’m fearful that seeing my former classmates married, with children and homes and pets and full-time jobs, leading peppy suburban lives, will send me over the edge. I’ll drunkenly take off running and wind up smack into a metal traffic sign, ending the night with a concussion and in desperate need of stitches and a tetanus shot.

I try to remind myself that I have chosen this. I am an artist. I have chosen to live this hobo/ boho lifestyle, free from job security and most of what modern medicine has to offer, but also free from suits and meetings and moral/political compromise. I get to make art. And sometimes, I get to show the art that I make. I get to help other people make art, and teach people new ways of artmaking. I get to be an artist. And so, on the brink of an anxiety attack, I repeat this mantra: This is my life. This is my choice. Breathe.

Work in Progress

2008-09-21T14:28:00.002-04:00

I took a break from blogging for the summer to settle into a new job with Sarah Sze and a new studio space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

But now, school is in session, and I am back. In addition to working for Sarah, I am also teaching a printmaking course at Columbia University.

Pictured is an installation in progress from my studio. Built from recycled cardboard tubes, styrofoam packaging, copper wire, string, and pushpins, the work is meant to use household/ industrial items to recall ecological systems.

In the Hudson River Valley...

2008-06-26T00:07:00.002-04:00

I have three pieces presently on view at the Ann Street Gallery, in Newburgh, New York, located in the Hudson River Valley.

The exhibition, Printed Matter, includes work from nine contemporary artists working with printmaking, often combining traditional techniques and modern technologies.

Pictured are my pieces, Swarm, woodcut, digital, and collage on Japanese paper and Into the thicket, woodcut, monotype, and collage on Japanese paper.

At Gallery Satori

2008-06-25T23:20:00.002-04:00

An article in The New York Times this week talks about the "SoHoification" of the Lower East Side. It's referring to the glut of new galleries in the neighborhood. I visited one of these galleries last week. Gallery Satori's inaugural exhibition, Unreal City, features work from twelve emerging artists that explores the perpetually changing urban landscape.

Highlights include Stephanie Costello's pen and ink drawing of a deteriorating landscape filled with tattered flags and ribbons.

Cosme Herrera's drawing, New Forests II, uses minimal elements to create a complex space. A wood grain vinyl sits starkly on top of a white sheet of paper. The horizontal line of the grain contrasts with the organic, root-like structure in the foreground, while the vertical grain emphasizes the lines of one point perspective that the wall-like structures follow.

The show is open until July 27th. Gallery Satori is located at 164 Stanton Street in Manhattan.

Low tech works too

2008-06-04T00:16:00.003-04:00

At RARE PLUS, Italian artist Eugenio Percossi's installation, Black and White, made me smile. I was so enamored with Olafur Eliasson's Room for one colour, in which the Scandinavian artist used a weird yellow light to make viewers in the room appear to be black and white. Percossi's installation also evokes old cinema and black and white photography, but it does so in an even more low-tech way. Every thing in this empty bedroom is in shades of gray-- from the bed and bedding to the wallpaper, the paintings, the books and the bookcase that holds them, even the plant. The viewer then comes upon a mirror in which she sees herself, a startling splash of color, an intruder in this vintage world. Fun show.

On view through June 21st at RARE

Take your time

2008-05-17T11:37:00.010-04:00

Take your time, an exhibition of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s works is presently on view at MoMA and P.S.1.

The works reminded me of the Spencer Finch show at MASS MoCA that I saw earlier this year. Both artists are interested in space, light, nature, and research as a means to artmaking. But, unlike Finch, who's experiental studies are obsessive recreations of natural phenomena, Eliasson is interested not in replicating but in interfering with the way in which we experience space and light.

Some projects, such as Negative quasi brick wall, a wall filled with mirrors stacked for a kaleidoscopic effect, come across as simply special effects—superficially dazzling, but in the end, vapid, empty.

And, indeed, the artist does have an affection for special effects, for almost filmic illusions played out not on film, but right in front of the viewer. But, Eliasson’s most successful installations are magical. Your strange certainty kept still appears to have stopped time—a scrim of precipitation seems to be frozen in mid air. I walked into Room for one colour, a vacant room with an odd light, and then, I watched amazed as the person who walked by me looked as though he were in black and white. I looked down at my own arm and found that I too, had been transformed into a monochrome heroine, a character from Pleasantville.

And yet, the magic is not lost, even when we learn the trick. In each of his installations, Eliasson reveals the lights and motors and parts that make it function. Reversed Waterfall, on view at PS 1, is a mess of scaffolding and pipes and pumps that sends water streaming upward. Beauty is rainbow in a darkened room, created simply with mist and light. This exposure, like many of the effects themselves, is also reminiscent of early film. We can watch George Méliès, the "Cinemagician's" works now, and know how the simple, yet innovative effects were done, and still feel charmed, even awed. Charming too, are Eliasson's often low tech magic tricks. They are more mesmerizing than any summer blockbuster's CGI. Take your time and enjoy.

Pictured are Olafur Eliasson's Your strange certainty kept still and Beauty.

Columbia at Fisher Landau Center for Art

2008-05-06T12:43:00.017-04:00

This past Sunday I went to the Fisher Landau Center for Art to view Columbia University’s MFA Thesis exhibition.

Highlights included Oz Malul’s sculptures-- Rube Goldberg-like machines designed to advance a slide, or send a ball back and forth. They reminded me of Peter Fischli and David Weiss' 1987

art film Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go).

Diane Wah displayed a series of

large-scale, printed album covers that commented on race, gender, politics and art history, and included one with Gregory Amenoff posing as Don Imus.

Large drawings by Alyssa Phoebus are dense, labored works: a mix of seams that resemble both scars and pinking shear cuts, of letter fragments and lines that simultaneously recall barbed wire and embroidery. With phrases like “Harder Harder” or “Rough Sex With A Big Man,” the works comment on our relationship with gender, sexual violence and sexuality.

Pictured are: Shoot the Moon, by Oz Malul, Way Down Under by Diane Wah, and Rough Sex With a Big Man and Good Woman by Alyssa Phoebus.

More on Habacuc

2008-04-29T08:07:00.004-04:00

For several days I’ve been sifting through blogs and comment pages about the Habacuc installation in which the Nicaraguan artist tethered an emaciated stray dog in a gallery for three hours, with the words “Eres Lo Que Lees” (You are what you read) written on the wall in dog biscuits. The misplaced outrage over the piece by Habacuc, also known as Guillermo Vargas Jiminez, is remarkable. With crazed anger they suggest that he be tied to something and fed to dogs. Others demand that he produce the dog, and take his lack of denial as proof for a chain e-mail’s claim that he allowed the dog to starve to death. (All credible evidence suggests that the dog was emaciated when captured, and was fed before and after the exhibition period before escaping.) Still others acknowledge that perhaps it is true that he fed the dog before and after the three hour exhibition period, but that even three hours was cruel, and that allowing the dog to escape back to the streets is also cruel. The Humane Society's site laments the fact that he couldn’t be punished because there are no animal cruelty laws in Nicaragua. Most, if not all of these people live in privilege. They are from the United States or England or Europe. Indeed, they seem ignorant of the conditions in Nicaragua.

A country can only implement animal welfare laws when most of the humans in that country enjoy a certain standard of living. UNICEF reports that Nicaragua is the third poorest country in the Americas. The per capita gross national product is just $453. The disparity between the distribution of the nation’s wealth is significant: forty-five percent of all income goes to the richest ten percent of the population and just fourteen percent goes to the poorest. The CIA’s site confirms these facts and further states, “While the country has progressed toward macroeconomic stability in the past few years, annual GDP growth has been far too low to meet the country's needs, forcing the country to rely on international economic assistance to meet fiscal and debt financing obligations.” The CIA also states: “The US-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) has been in effect since April 2006 and has expanded export opportunities for many agricultural and manufactured goods.” However, the Nicaraguan economy is much more dependent on the service industry; agriculture represents only about seventeen percent of the gross national product. And, the rising costs of both energy and grain, including corn, a main staple in the Nicaraguan diet, are further hindrance to any economic growth.

Indeed, many Nicaraguans are dependent upon La Chureca, a massive garbage dump, for food and income. Almost a third of the people who work in the dump are children between the ages of seven and eighteen. They scavenge for items to sell and for discarded food, over which they often fight with dogs and carrion-eating birds.

Americans should also recognize the United States government’s role in perpetuating poverty and violence in Nicaragua with the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980’s. The Contras refers to insurgent groups that opposed Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, a leftist political party supported by the people of Nicaragua in the 1970’s and 80’s. The Contras, short for contrarevolucionarios. operated out of camps in Honduras and Costa Rica and included remnants of the Somoza guard, which had a history of censorship, intimidation, torture and murder. Their actions, condemned by the World Court, included planting underwater mines in Nicaragua's Corinto harbor in order to disrupt shipping. The United States, unhappy with the idea of the Marxist Sandinistas, imposed a trade embargo on Nicaragua. Furthermore, the Reagan administration began to secretly and illegally support the Contras, funding them with money from arms sold to Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair.

Many individuals and organizations, including the Humane Society, argue that if Habacuc wanted to expose the plight of stray dogs in Nicaragua, there were better ways to do it; he should not have exploited this one stray. But, alerting the world to the fact that there are so many starving, emaciated, homeless dogs wandering the streets of Nicaragua was just one small component of Exposición #1. The installation is also about the starving people of Nicaragua. And even more so, it is about the fact that people with the power to act fail to do so when directly confronted with the opportunity. The artist did not stop anyone from feeding Natividad, the dog in his installation. No one tried. People are more content to feel outraged, to sign petitions, to ignorantly protest from the comfort of their heated homes, or air-conditioned offices, than they are to actually intervene. Think about this the next time you see a stray cat scamper through your neighborhood. Or the next time you pass by a homeless person begging for money or food. Or as you drive through a neighborhood with a women's shelter. Are you a hypocrite?

Habacuc Hoax

2008-04-24T21:32:00.009-04:00

I have now received two chain e-mails about artist Guillermo Vargas Jiminez' piece, Exposición #1 (Exhibit #1). The e-mail claims: "In 2007, the 'artist' Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, took a dog from the street, tied him to a rope in an art gallery, and starved him to death. For several days, the 'artist' and the visitors of the exhibition have watched emotionless the shameful 'masterpiece' based on the dog's agony, until eventually he died." It then goes on to ask the recipient to sign a petition to stop the installation from being exhibited again at the Bienal Centroamericana Honduras.

In fact, Exposición #1, originally installed at Códice Gallery in Managua, Nicaragua, included a captured emaciated stray dog, named Natividad, tethered with a short leash in the gallery, with the words "Eres Lo Que Lees" (You Are What You Read) spelled out above him on the wall in dog biscuits. The Sandinista anthem was played backwards as an incense burner burned with what Guillermo Vargas Jiminez, also known as Habacuc, claims were one hundred seventy five pieces of crack cocaine.

The artist claims that he wanted to test the public's reaction, insisting that not one of the exhibition's visitors attempted to intervene to end Natividad's suffering. In an interview published on Yahoo (in Spanish), Habacuc explains that the installation was inspired by an event that occurred in 2005, in which Natividad Canda, a Nicaraguan crack addict, was fatally attacked by two dogs as police, firefighters, and other looked on, unwilling to intervene. A video of the incident, which lasted almost two hours, was taken and appeared on Nicaraguan television. He won't comment on the ultimate fate of the animal because he wishes to retain a sense of doubt. "Las respuestas categóricas no aportan nada," he says. (Categorical responses do nothing.) He further observes, "El ojo humano es traicionero. A fin de cuentas, lo que uno ve es aparente y cabe la posibilidad de que luego venga un momento de reflexión." (The human eye is treacherous. After all, what one sees is apparent and it is possible that then comes a moment of reflection.)

However, articles in the Observer and La Prensa (in Spanish) quote Juanita Bermúdez, the director of the Códice Gallery as stating, "It was untied all the time except for the three hours the exhibition lasted and it was fed regularly with dog food Habacuc himself brought in." She also says that the dog actually escaped after one day.

And, indeed, the Humane Society has investigated the incident and although they condemn the use of live animals in "exhibits such as this," they also have not found cause to believe that the dog was actually harmed by the artist.

Furthermore, the claim that Habacuc intends to replicate the installation in the Bienal Centroamericana Honduras is also false. Although he has been asked to participate in the biennial, he never planned to recreate Exposición #1; he is working on a new piece for the show.

That said, Exposición #1 was a successful piece. The artist very knowingly used the media. He intended to expose the initial apathy of a public that had the opportunity to intervene, and then almost hypocritical outrage of the public after the fact, and he did this. In many ways this is not just what happened with Natividad Canda, but also with Rodney King, and even with Abu Ghraib. It is why we are told to yell "Fire!" rather than "Help!" if being attacked. It is how we walk past the homeless each day. It's how we watched the Taliban abuse women in Afghanistan for years before September 11th. It is even how we greedily and wastefully consume our natural resources as we frantically search for a cure for global warming and climate change. We like to sign petitions and get outraged after the fact, but when faced with the opportunity to interpose, to mediate, to actually do something, would we? Do we? Are we?

Please don't call him "da Vinci!"

2008-04-23T15:09:00.004-04:00

On my recent trip to Milan, I had the pleasure of seeing Leonardo’s masterpiece, L'Ultima Cena (The Last Supper), which is housed in Santa Maria delle Grazie. But, I cringed each time I heard someone refer to the artist as “da Vinci.” “Da Vinci” means, “from Vinci.” It is the town from which the artist hailed; it’s not his last name!

Leonardo, an illegitimate child, was simply given the name “Leonardo” at birth. He had no last name, although his father, Ser Piero did allow him to be called Leonardo di Ser Piero. The Ser Piero family was fairly established in Vinci, a town in Tuscany. Thus, they were the Ser Piero’s da Vinci. When Leonardo became an apprentice to Verrocchio, with his father’s permission, he referred to himself as Leonardo da Vinci in order to distinguish himself from other Leonardos. Indeed, he later referred to himself as Leonardo il Fiorentino, or the Florentine. (Leonardo eventually had his own workshop in Florence.)

So call him Leonardo da Vinci if you must. Or just call him Leonardo. He needs no other name. But please don’t call him “da Vinci.”

Pictured is Leonardo’s The Last Supper

Tomas Vu at Amste Arte

2008-04-23T11:26:00.002-04:00

Just outside of Milan, in Lissone, AMSTE arte contemporanea gallery presents Flat Land, an exhibition of paintings by Vietnamese-born American artist Tomas Vu. The exhibition includes eight paintings from Vu’s Flat Land series. The works, made from layered silk screens, collaged wood veneer, and ink wash, portray a catastrophic battle between man, nature and machine. Like the Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib video projection at the Icebox in Philadelphia, this work also evokes Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, ultimately depicting a beautiful, yet damning post-apocalyptic vision of a dystopic world.

Pictured are paintings from the exhibition.

Ciao da Milano!

2008-04-23T10:45:00.004-04:00

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I’ve just returned from a five-day work trip to Milan, Italy. It was a fantastic time to be in the city because this past week was Milan’s annual turn at being the “Intenational Design Capital.” Interni sponsored a GreenEnergyDesign event, in which designers were encouraged to create sustainable, eco-friendly products that used and reused materials in innovative ways.

The Dream City asks the viewers to generate energy via bicycle in order to light up and see portions of the exhibits.

Tejo Remy’s Chest of Drawers XS is a smaller version of her first chest of drawers, entitled, You Can't Lay Down Your Memory, created in 1991 as a critique of consumerism.

Till death do us part is a table whose concept was developed by Martino d’Esposito. Disturbed by the amount of usable objects that people throw away after buying newer replacements, that they will then eventually throw away and replace, the designer asked Frank Bragigand to paint a second-hand table, onto which he then burned a contract that binds its owner to keep, use and care for the table for the rest of his life.

Tobias Rockenfeld’s Creatures repurposes old, broken toys by dissecting them and combining them with household items, trash and each other to create a series of creatures that swim, fly, hover, or crawl.

In Defense of Aliza Shvarts-- Sort of

2008-04-20T03:00:00.003-04:00

Much press has recently been devoted to Yale Senior Aliza Shvarts’ senior thesis project after it was first written about in the Yale Daily News. Shvarts, an art major, claims that the project is a documentation of a nine-month period in which she artificially inseminated herself from the ninth to the fifteenth day of her cycle, “as often as possible” and then used herbal, abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibit includes a large cube, suspended from the ceiling, and wrapped with plastic sheeting that holds the blood from the self-induced miscarriages, mixed with Vaseline.

After bloggers, and then major news sources picked up the story, most of them outraged that the project trivialized abortion or that Shvarts abused her right to choose, Yale University issued a statement that the project was a fiction: Shvarts never impregnated herself nor induced miscarriages. “The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.”

However, Shvarts denies Yale’s account, claiming she does not know if she ever was impregnated and whether she actually miscarried. In a guest column for the Yale Daily News, she writes, “To protect myself and others, only I know the number of fabricators who participated, the frequency and accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of privacy, the piece exists only in its telling.” She goes on to say, “No one can say with one hundred percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen. The nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Shvarts insists that the purpose of the project was not “shock value” but instead to inspire discourse about the body and its relationship to art. And, indeed, the project has provoked conversation. In this respect, Shvarts was successful. However, from Shvarts’ comments about the work, it seems that the specific conversation generated was not the desired outcome.

The focus of the debate has been specifically about abortion— is abortion immoral and if not, is it wrong to attempt to get pregnant for the sole purpose of having an abortion? In many ways, the work reads like an anti-choice piece: If abortion is simply another operation, then why is it wrong/ outrageous/ upsetting/ offensive to attempt this operation as many times as possible in a short period? Are those who claim to be pro-choice but are upset by the act hypocrites? Are they revealing that they know that abortion is actually immoral? It does not inspire further conversation about the designation of certain body parts as sex organs or not. There has been no discussion about the ambiguity of whether the blood in the piece is actually the result of a miscarriage as opposed to simply being menstrual blood, as Aliza Shvarts had hoped there’d be. These points have inevitably been swallowed up by the more emotional, more controversial issue of abortion.

Ultimately, the work reads as naïve work of an undergraduate artist who has studied the work of performance artists like Marina Abramovic and Karen Finley and also wants to make something of importance, something that matters, but is unclear as to the specific statement she’s trying to make, or the most effective way to go about it. The piece is both heavy-handed, and unclear. The concept and materials seemed to have been chosen because they feel important; they are chosen for their controversy and yet the controversy provoked muddies any meaningful debate.

Much has been made about the fact that this student is a Yale undergraduate, a senior about to get a degree from one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. Regardless of the college she is graduating from, she is an undergraduate: a twenty-one or twenty-two year old who has spent the last four years studying philosophy and theory and weird sciences and whatever else is a part of her bachelor of arts degree as an art major. She is now trying to put all this knowledge into practice as an artist, and, just as a political science major's senior thesis is likely thoughtful, but ultimately flawed, so too is this work. I certainly would not want to be judged upon the art I was making as a twenty-one year old.

What is amazing about this project is that it has generated so many comments of outrage, shock and horror. It's the naive, not particularly good work of a twenty-one year old getting her BA in art. Why talk about it at all?

The Soft Epic at the Icebox

2008-04-12T21:55:00.003-04:00

On Thursday evening, I went to the Crane Arts Center in Philadelphia, for their regular Second Thursday opening. I especially enjoyed the Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib video installation in the Icebox, entitled The Soft Epic or: Savages of the Pacific West.

Multiple projections create the 120 foot-long panorama. Pictures of historical disasters such as the 1960 Park Slope plane crash are collaged with representations of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights along with various effects and images from sci-fi and disaster films. The amalgamation of these dense layers of documentation, mythology and cinema is an epic narrative that recalls Matthew Barney, Hollywood, popular culture, and the political anxiety that periodically and presently permeates American society.

Pictured is The Soft Epic or: Savages of the Pacific West.

Freedom of expression: the SFAI controversy

2008-03-31T17:31:00.004-04:00

Last week, the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) suspended, and then ultimately cancelled a controversial exhibition by artist Adel Abdessemed. The show, entitled, “Don’t Trust Me” included video of animals being slaughtered with a sledgehammer. The artist claims that the images are a social critique about food production and the contrast between the industrial. In a statement about the exhibition, SFAI President Chris Bratton explained, “Abdessemed participated in an already existing circuit of food production in a rural community in Mexico. The animals were raised for food, purchased and professionally slaughtered. In fact, the central point of the controversy is that Abdessemed, an artist, entered this exchange, filmed it, and exhibited it. “

Animal rights groups, including PETA and the SPCA, argue that the images are shock art and snuff film. One of the groups’ central arguments for the closing of the exhibition is that it is partially funded by taxpayers. Indeed, SFAI receives about $80,000 in hotel taxes each year that helps fund its public exhibitions and visiting artist lecture series. In a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle, Jan McHugh-Smith, director of the San Francisco SPCA said, “The San Francisco Art Institute used poor judgment in supporting ‘shock art’ in San Francisco. To take this type of brutality against animals, call it art and use tax money to support it is deplorable.”

I did not see the exhibition at SFAI, so I can’t comment on whether it’s ‘shock art’ or has artistic merit or glorifies animal abuse. (I am inclined to think, however, particularly after the recent Westland/ Hallmark slaughterhouse scandal that spawned a massive beef recall, a slaughterhouse film could only further animal rights and would in all likelihood not, as Eliot Katz of In Defense of Animals contended, “send a terrible message to Art Institute students that it's OK to go out and do similar things.”) That said, it’s dangerous to argue that a controversial exhibition should be shut down because it’s partially, or even entirely, funded by taxpayers. Remember that Giuliani tried to do this from the other side of the political spectrum in 1999, threatening to shut down “Sensation”, a show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that included work critical of the Catholic Church.

Throughout history, from the early depictions of the crucifix in the twelfth century to Goya’s Los Capricios to Degas’ Ballerinas to Picasso’s Guernica, art has challenged authority, societal norms, and accepted standards of decency. This is part of the role of art and the artist; art should engage the viewer; it should provoke thought. Sometimes the artist asks us to think about perspective or color or the nature of painting, and sometimes he asks us to contemplate more difficult subjects: death, the inconsistencies of certain organizations or religions, the cost of war. When we ask that public funds be rescinded for artistic statements that are offensive to some group or critical of some aspect of contemporary society, we are asking the government to fringe upon the artists’ First Amendment rights.

There are those that argue that rescinding funding for these offensive/ critical/ challenging works is not the same as saying that they can’t be made or shown; they simply shouldn’t be made with government funding, or shown in institutions that receive taxpayers’ dollars. This isn’t censorship, they say. Yet, if we do this, we cause self-censorship. Artists and arts organizations and institutions will forgo riskier, controversial endeavors in favor of safer, less critical projects that will more readily receive funding. When this happens, we risk cultural atrophy. Indeed, this was/is the fate for many of the communist nations that practiced such censorship, including East Germany, Romania, Poland and Russia.

Furthermore, where would such censorship stop? Public libraries are funded with taxpayers’ money. Should controversial books be removed from them? Several cities are working to provide free and low-cost internet connections to their entire municipality. Should they be allowed, or even obligated, to block connections to offensive imagery, artwork, critical thought, etc, in the way that China blocks YouTube videos and filters the results of search engines like Google and Yahoo. It is, after all, taxpayers who are paying for this dissemination of information. They are not paying to be encountered with offensive material!

Indeed, such a notion sounds ridiculous in the United States, a democratic nation founded, in part, upon principles of free speech. Yet, over the last thirty years, there have been several battles regarding the restriction of arts funding based upon content, beginning with the 1989 amendment to the National Endowment of the Arts funding that NEA required all grant recipients to certify in advance that none of the funds would be used “to promote, disseminate, or produce materials which in the judgment of the NEA … may be considered obscene.” After several court battles, this amendment was struck down as unconstitutional and in 1998 with The NEA v Finley, the law was most recently redefined to state that the government is not required to subsidize controversial or offensive work. It may (but is not obligated to) consider public decency standards when funding work. However, once funds are provided, it may not withdraw them because it disagrees with the message of the work. To do this would be to censorship.

Be wary of encroaching upon another's civil rights, no matter what your cause is.

The "Aspiring" Artist

2008-03-26T12:46:00.002-04:00

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed the phrase “aspiring artist” being used to describe the young MFA’s who populate Philadelphia, Jersey City, and some of New York’s seedier neighborhoods. For example, on NPR’s Fresh Air, author Richard Price spoke about the aspiring artists living in New York’s lower east side. He goes on to further describe them as “Would-be artists working in restaurants…a wave of MFA’s.”

I take exception to the use of the word “aspiring” before any young person who strives to make his or her living through art. Aspiring: hopeful, would-be, wannabe. The word either conjures images of optimistic naiveté-- a cherubic, Heidi-like girl-woman who paints watercolors from her easel in the woods, and dreams of moving to the big city so that she can sell her paintings and “make it,” or it feels like a sarcastic snort aimed at slacker hipsters living off an allowance from their parents as they claim to make art, but actually spend most of their time shopping for albums and vintage t-shirts, and drinking PBR at Williamsburg bars.

Yet, to describe someone who has invested time and money in a fine arts education as aspiring is insulting. It’s particularly derogatory when it refers to someone who has received an MFA, a terminal degree in the visual arts. Is a PhD of Early Christian Art an aspiring scholar? Is an MBA an aspiring businessperson? Is a JD an aspiring lawyer? We are not aspiring artists; we are artists! We may aspire to be well known, even famous, but we need not aspire to be artists. For that, we need to continue to engage in creative pursuits, to make art.

Indeed, today, that is all one needs to do in order to be an artist— make art. Historically, one had to apprentice to be an artist. Now, that craft is not viewed as integral to art (in fact, it’s often looked down upon), there is no real requirement for calling oneself an artist. This is further complicated by the fact that “What is art?” remains one of the great philosophical questions. Hence, although we can get undergraduate and graduate degrees in painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, new media, and other fine art genres, these degrees are not technically requisites for the artist; artmaking is the sole qualifier for an artist, and we’re not even sure what that is.

So, perhaps artists are to blame for allowing anyone with a pair of scissors, a glue stick, some glitter, a found object, and some free time one Saturday afternoon to stake claim to our profession. But the artist who lives her life in pursuit of creativity, as a researcher, a thinker and a maker is not aspiring; she is.

The Artist's Workweek

2008-03-21T12:52:00.003-04:00

Last week, on WHYY’s Radio Times, Marty Moss-Coane spoke with Jerry Jacobs and Laurie Granieri about the workweek in America. Granieri, a journalist at Central Jersey’s Home News Tribune newspaper, has recently garnered attention for her decision to stop working at 5:00pm each day so that she “can see the sunset.” Jacobs, a professor of sociology at Penn talked about the pressure for professionals to work long hours, often well beyond a forty-hour workweek. The discussion focused on the work expectations for white-collar, salaried workers such as lawyers, investment bankers, and business people, but it got me thinking about the typical artist’s work week, and the time commitment that an artist feels obliged to give to his or work.

Most artists are unable to support themselves solely with their artwork. Unfortunately, there are few landlords who are willing to barter paintings for rent, and even fewer electricity, gas, and cell phone service providers willing to do so. What’s more, the present weak economy does not inspire many people to purchase art. And, even if an artist does regularly sell his or her work, the income from such sales is still usually not enough to sustain oneself.

Thus, part of the artist’s workweek is often spent working some other job or jobs. Artists clamor for low paying employment that is in some way related to a creative field, if only peripherally. Lifting art, or cataloguing it into a database still allows us to maintain some closeness to the art world. “I moved a Louise Bourgoise today,” someone will brag. Or, “I catalogued a new Takashi Murakami.” I still talk with pride about the day I got to gather twigs in Riverside Park for William Kentridge to use as drawing tools.

Indeed, artists are art movers and handlers; we are adjunct professors; we are framers; we are museum ticket takers; we are gallery admins; we are assistants for other, more prominent artists. Most of these jobs are not fulltime and do not offer benefits, so we often work two, or sometimes three of them. Or we’ll search for odd jobs and the occasional opportunity to be the subject of a medical research experiment for some extra cash.

And then, in the evenings or mornings or weekends or Wednesdays or whatever time we have to ourselves, we must cook and clean and do our laundry, just like most Americans, but we must make our art too, for that is what makes us artists. We feel guilty about any free moment that is not used to make work. Still, we also have to make time to remain knowledgeable about our field-- to visit museums and galleries, to read art publications, to go to conferences, to watch Art:21 on PBS.

Even then, our jobs as artists are not done. We also spend hours each week on NYFA, Transartists, CAA and even craigslist searching for grants, residencies and exhibition opportunities. Still more time is spent putting together packets and applications, most of which will ultimately be rejected.

Indeed, artists work well beyond the traditional forty-hour workweek, even beyond the sixty, seventy or eighty hour workweek that many professionals bemoan. We do so not for any great financial compensation, but simply in the spirit of creativity, of making, of some belief that the world needs art.

Artists' Obligations

2008-03-19T14:35:00.002-04:00

I've recently made a decision to attempt to make work that is more overtly political. For some time I've been very aware of the materials I use to make my work-- where they are made, where they are purchased from, or whether they are purchased at all or instead recycled from old work or found materials. Yet this is not immediately, or perhaps ever, obvious to the viewer who looks at my work. And, as someone who obsessively reads the editorial pages of the NY Times and Washington Post, who listens to NPR podcasts rather than music on my long runs, who subjects her friends to rants about corporate socialism, environmentalism, and the myriad present social injustices, I've begun to feel that not making a more explicit statement with my artwork is irresponsible.

In fact, do artists have a responsibility to make work that critiques, protests, or even simply comments on actions that have led to a world that is being suffocated by carbon dioxide, people fighting in a war that began with false pretenses, major health crises, government sanctioned oppression of groups of people, government sanctioned torture, the list goes on. Should art have a social message? I’ve often postulated that the personal is in the end the universal, which is in some way political. Thus, it is only necessary to create works that have meaning for the artist; the rest flows naturally.

Yet, certainly there is precedent for great political art—Goya’s Los Capricios, Picasso’s Guernica, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, and more recently, the work of William Kentridge about apartheid in South Africa, and Daniel Heyman’s prints and installations about the Iraqi detainees and the torture at Abu Ghraib.

Still, art remains a useless commodity. That is, after all, what makes it art; it has no function other than to be admired, and perhaps to engage the viewer, to make one think. Great art will please the viewer multiple levels: it is interesting superficially, and, for some, it will also inspire closer inspection—research, study, reflection, action that will ultimately lead to a more enriching experience.

Indeed, as makers of a useless commodity in a world of rapidly depleting resources, artists need to make work that engages the viewer, even arouses him or her to learn more, to take action. We have enough vapid escapes from reality in the form of television, video games, ridiculous YouTube videos, and our other passive forms of entertainment. Art does not need to offer an escape.

I take some solace in the belief that simply choosing to be an artist is a political statement. In a culture that places a high value on corporations, superficial scandal and anti-intellectual beliefs, the artist’s actions say that there is worth in creative pursuits. There is value in studying art, in studying how to make art, in examining the philosophy that drives art; there is value in learning and in making.

I continue to accept that the personal becomes the universal, that the individual is key to ultimately accessing the collective unconscious. Yet, particularly now, shouldn't the political be what we are personally interested in? In order for art to remain relevant, valuable, and not simply a beautiful yet vapid commodity, art needs to be about something that matters.

Spencer Finch at Mass MOCA

2008-03-17T14:57:00.002-04:00

I recently saw Brooklyn based artist, Spencer Finch’s show, What Time Is It on the Sun? at Mass MOCA, in North Adams, Massachusetts. The show is an investigation of nature—of light, color, wind, and gravity-- that is both conceptually and visually interesting.

The exhibits included are Finch’s sometimes obsessive and often poetic attempt to capture ephemera, the results of exercise in experiential study. For example, in order to create Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004), Finch worked with a flashlight in a parking lot in the Painted Desert, mixing colors to match the color of the sky. He then weighed the physical mass of each pigment in the mixture and calculated the molecular ratio of each color in the combination. Each of the 401 incandescent bulbs of varying sizes is then used to create electrified models of each pigment’s molecular structure.

CIE 529/418 (Candlelight) uses stained glass filters to transform the day light into the color of candlelight, as determined by a colorimeter.

Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA August 28, 2004) uses a specific mixture of florescent lights to replicate the Massachusetts sunlight in Emily Dickinson’s yard on a late August afternoon. A cloud is then depicted with a mass of translucent blue, gray and violet filters that are held together with clothespins. As they walk around Finch’s cellophane cloud, viewers can then experience the precise light conditions made by the passing cloud in Dickinson’s yard.

Particularly interesting and unexpected is Finch’s choice of materials; they include cellophane, florescent light bulbs, incandescent lights, fans and artificial turf—synthetic materials that Finch manipulates to describe the organic or natural phenomena.

Pictured are: Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004), CIE 529/418 (Candlelight) and Sunlight in an Empty room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA August 28, 2004)

Residency

2008-03-16T19:13:00.003-04:00

I'm presently halfway through a six week residency at the Women's Studio Workshop, in Rosendale, NY, which is just past New Paltz, in the Hudson River Valley.

I just installed my show, entitled Pollinators: Bees and Bats in their gallery. Pictured are images from the show.

Summer of Love and Papaya King

2007-08-11T16:44:00.001-04:00

My mom and my aunt met up with Adrienne and me in the city to see the Summer of Love Exhibition at the Whitney. We had fun listening to classic rock while we looked at psychedelic posters and Yayoi Kusama works and tried to guess who had eaten some magic mushrooms before viewing the show. Afterward, we all enjoyed smoothies and hotdogs (no hotdog for me though) from Papayaking.

Artwork pictured: Verner Panton's Phantasy Landscape Visiona II, 1970/2000

Student Work

2007-07-03T13:16:00.000-04:00

The first summer session has officially ended. Grades are in, and I'm generally pleased with my class' work. Pictured are some of my favorite pieces.

Summer Session 2007

2007-07-03T13:05:00.000-04:00

My first adjunct professor position is teaching the printmaking courses during Tyler's first summer session. Pictured are the college kids working in the Penrose shop and on our field trip to the Abington Arts Center.

Official MFA

2007-05-18T16:32:00.000-04:00

On Thursday I graduated from Tyler School of Art. I am now officially a Master of Fine Art! Woo hoo!

Hola de Mexico

2007-05-18T16:24:00.000-04:00

My Mom and I partied like college kids on Spring Break on our vacation in Mexico... Actually, we lathered on the SPF 60, and broke up our time drinking coronas on the beach with relaxing by pool or on the hammock. ¡Me encanta Mexico!