The Rake Magazine

Bad design is all around us, but there's no bad design like bad election year design. Let's take a moment here to catalog some notable atrocities from recent election cycles, and then hang our heads in bipartisan shame. Offender number one is Bush/Cheney's militantly mindless logo from 2004; you can almost hear the designer making phlegmatic war movie sound effects to himself as he drafted it. There's Howard Dean's bumper sticker from the same year - the one that actually had goddamn yellow crayon writing on it. I sent the good doctor a whole bucketful of cash and I still couldn't bring myself to slap that thing on my car. The Kerry/Edwards ‘04 logo was so incompetently designed it looked like an advertisement for a personal injury attorney named "Kerry Edwards" (and not one of the better ones, either). As for this eyesore, which looks as if it belongs on a bottle of your dad's favorite aftershave circa 1982, the less said, the better. The sad fact is most campaign materials look, at best, like they were designed by an adjunct professor of design at an unaccredited two-year evangelical college (which may well be the case in some of these campaigns). At worst, they just drip willful contempt for the viewer's intelligence and taste.

But think now for a moment about the material Barack Obama has been putting out in the last year. Start with that typeface the campaign uses on all of its official signage, a sans-serif called Gotham. It's clean, assertive and streamlined. Regardless of your political or aesthetic inclinations, you can easily appreciate that it's the kind of elegant typeface that you don't really see in most political campaigns. Gotham was created only a few years ago by a prominent New York typographer, but it draws heavily on mid-century sources, and there's resultantly an authoritative, timeless sense to it. It looks great and it's highly functional. Gotham is a capital-M Modern typeface that carries all the cultural implications of Modernism with it - optimism, clarity, progress.

I know that seems like a lot to pin to something as simple as a typeface, but in the current electoral visual landscape, Obama's clean, simple design look downright radical, like it came from another world. It certainly calls to mind some of the more inspiring parts of our collective past, but not in a way that panders to baser reactionary tendencies.

A show of New Deal art called By the People, For the People will be closing this weekend at the University of Minnesota's Weisman Museum (you can read Julie Caniglia's outstanding review of the show for mnartists.org). Seeing it a few weeks ago, I was struck by how much the work on display reminded me not of fireside chats and Woody Guthrie ballads, but of the junior Senator from Illinois. I doubt that it was a conscious decision on the part of Obama's design squad to make explicit references to the aesthetics of the New Deal in his campaign material. But think of that Shepard Fairey poster that looks it like it came right out of an IWW print shop. Think of the explicit references to the American heartland in the campaign's it's-a-flag-but-it's-also-a-farm "O." Even that ridiculous Latin-enhanced faux-presidential seal that the campaign trotted out a few weeks ago (and then promptly retired) bore a strong resemblance to the logos of FDR's so-called "alphabet agencies" like the NRA, WPA and CCC.

Throughout the show, I detected a certain philosophical, functional and aesthetic kinship between our era and this one - it's all easily-deciphered, populist, progressive art-making practices in service of the civic good. I don't know if it is Obama's intention to suggest outright that he's the direct heir to FDR's high-minded hard-times liberalism (and his detractors would say he's hubristic enough to do just that). But there is something stirring about his campaign - yes we can! - that owes quite a bit to the outsized optimism of the 1930s, and a lot of that has to do with the aesthetic decisions Obama's campaign and his supporters have made.

Much of the work in the Weisman show was created by obscure regional artists working under the auspices of the WPA Federal Art Project, another one of those alphabet agencies that put American artists to work capturing the Great Depression on paper and canvas. I should say rather that many were obscure at the time, and then went on to have very successful careers later. But most did not; most were artists that were paid to do a job well, and went out and did it. As you might expect with work of this nature, it really ran the gamut in terms of quality. Some of it was very staid and workmanlike, some of it was quite distinguished. What was most remarkable about all of it, though, was the uniform clarity and toughness throughout with which the subject matter was depicted.

The Great Depression battered America in a way that makes our recent economic troubles seem piddling by comparison, but there is a sense to all of the artwork that America is perfectly capable of drawing on its strengths and pulling itself out of unimaginably difficult circumstances. It's a broad coalition of regular people, too, that will step up to carry out that task, the kinds depicted in the work - miners, laborers, scientists, factory workers, sharecroppers, truck drivers, builders.

The Weisman show reminds us that artists, too, were a part of that populist coalition. With the death of Jesse Helms this month and all the editorial hand-wringing that has followed regarding the late Senator's one-man crusade against contemporary art, we forget that artists could ever be a part of a broad-based populist coalition. And yet there they were, being paid to document the troubled times in which they lived and aligning themselves not with the elite and the influential, but with the dispossessed and the downtrodden. Granted, the work they made was not always popular with those Americans it depicted, and the kind of social realist art the WPA produced is often bogged down by the struggle between the high-minded principles it espouses and the difficulty and grittiness of the subjects it depicts. But thinking back to those pre-Culture War times and considering that talented artists would be permitted, and even encouraged, to engage in such a dialogue - well, that's what seems most surprising and satisfying.

One of the best surprises for me in the show was a photograph of farm laborers by Ben Shahn, the much-admired mid-century painter and printmaker. Shahn was the kind of old-school Brooklyn Jewish left-wing artist that the Obama campaign, for all its talk of inclusion and progress, would probably take great lengths to demographically disassociate itself with - too radical, too East Coast, too "elite"! I'd had no idea Shahn was out there in the field snapping photos for the Farm Security Administration, but there he was, right next to Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston. Would an Obama administration give a contemporary Ben Shahn, an artist with demonstrably leftist sympathies, the opportunity to get out there into the heartland and create art? Would a contemporary Ben Shahn even want to undertake such an endeavor? Hell, are there even any artists left in his adopted neighborhood of Williamsburg making political art?

Obama's campaign has been a fascinating one to watch. At times I have felt (a) like it seemed too good to be true, (b) like it was the true last hope for whatever might be salvageable of the American dream, (c) like the whole thing was hopelessly personality-driven and vaguely demagogical, (d) like Obama might be the only major political leader in my lifetime I could get genuinely excited about, and (e) like it was all noble sentiment and erudite speechifying with no real call to sacrifice and action - often all of these confusing sentiments within the space of a week. Many Americans on both ends of the political spectrum also felt the same sort of ambiguity about Roosevelt. FDR's harshest critics went so far as to decry him as a Fascist, a charge that has recently been unearthed again in two recent books from both the right (Jonah Goldberg's phenomenally stupid Liberal Fascism) and the left (Nicholson Baker's elliptical account of the lead-up to WWII, Human Smoke).

When we look at this moment in time from a purely aesthetic perspective, it seems to me that we're looking at a mainstream progressive movement that values good artistic practices and welcomes artists back into the fold, for perhaps the first time since the New Deal. In fact, one of the minor planks in Obama's long-term plans is the creation of an "Artist Corps." Would the Ben Shahns of 21^st century Williamsburg clamor to join such a movement for the good of the nation? Before you answer with a flip remark about the callous solipsism of the youth of America, it's worth visiting this gallery of Obama-specific street art, which runs the gamut between officially-sanctioned campaign iconography and totally wacky guerilla work. Compare it to these beautiful specimens of WPA poster art. Even if Obama's cult of personality is a bit overemphasized at the expense of the broader issues in much of the newer art, I would say the aesthetic, functional and ideological parallels are readily apparent, and the comparison on all counts is generally favorable. It looks, at very least, like the opening arguments in a long overdue national discussion over what role art is going to play in contemporary political engagement. That's something worth getting fired up and ready to go about.

Prelude: A friend--and faithful supporter of this blog--recently told me to consider taking more risks online. So, following this piece of advice, I offer you an essay about cars, hoping not to step on fellow blogger and serious car enthusiast Chris Birt's toes. A disclaimer: apart from driving them, I am not "into" cars. I think of them as gas-guzzling necessities that get me from point A to point B in case those two points are too far apart to bike. Still, I can't help feeling curious about cars, the ways they enthrall people's imaginations, their cultural significance, the changes their--for lack of a better word--mystique is currently undergoing as a result of the economy, oil prices, etc., and their relationship to art.

The other day--to use that aristocratically vague and suggestively intimate phrase the New Yorker Magazine's Talk of the Town is so excessively fond of--I attended a workshop on professional development for artists, sponsored by the Tremaine Foundation and capably organized by the College Art Association and Springboard for the Arts. The insights offered up for grabs were many, ranging from "New York is no longer number one in the art world" to "networking is out." Instead of networking, a rapt audience was told, we are supposed to build community, to share authentic relationships with one another--relationships whose authenticity ideally blossoms--for artists, that is--into inclusion in a show or, even better, a solo show. Community, from this rather jaded point of view, becomes a tool for allowing us all to do business together more pleasantly, to feign friendliness when truly we all understand whose eye we need to catch and whose verdict on whose work will make a difference in the long run.

Do I sound suspicious of this vision of community? I am. Community, any decent dictionary will reveal, is based on the notion of a shared vision or shared interest. Sharing this interest, or passion, or vision does not require us to act the same, speak the same, pretend to be the same--but it requires sharing, that is, a common goal rather than pure and unadulterated self-interest. For those involved in the arts, the greater, shared, common goal could translate into advocacy for the arts in general and ingratiating self-interested authenticity in particular. A devoutly capitalist compromise seems entirely possible. But what this vision of art as community still leaves out are those who may share the interest in art and yet feel excluded and alienated from this community.

Of course, some communities thrive on precisely their exclusivity. Consider, for instance, the commerce-driven kind of tribes who are drawn together by their shared attraction to a carefully designed brand and, equally important, their ability to afford said brand. Economic resources function as gatekeepers, and entry is allowed only to those who demonstrate they can afford to belong. Other communities rely not on economic but cultural capital to police their boundaries. Money won't fail to impress but the hushed tone of expertise, the authoritative whisper that requires you to lean forward and crane your neck in order to absorb the proverbial pearl of wisdom should not be underestimated.

When it comes to art and the community gathered in its name, where are the boundaries drawn? Who is allowed in, and who, in turn, is alienated and excluded? Who is art for? The self-proclaimed connoisseurs who come--if not with a background in art history or a degree in art school--with money or the amateur's literal love for oil paint and creative expression? Is it for those who make art, regardless of whether anyone will ever see it? And what is the role of community in these complicated cultural negotiations of who gets to count, who is allowed in, and who has to remain on the outside?

In creative circles, invoking and, in some way, shape, or form, involving community seems to serve a specific function: "Community"--it does not seem to matter much which one--has the power to give even the most reactionary body of work a dull cutting edge and, of course, that most sought after commodity--"street cred." But even the most well-meaning artists seem to stop short of actually bringing these communities whose experiences they mine in workshops, or visually, in photographs, to the galleries and museums. So yes to the quasi-anthropological appropriation of others' stories and images, a welcome spice to invigorate a possibly languishing artistic practice--but no, we won't go as far as inviting them--those eternal others--into our hallowed halls, become part of our community, our creative club. (I recognize and apologize for my over-simplification here for the sake of argument.)

The annual Art Car Parade in South Minneapolis offers a welcome reprieve from the air-conditioned, educated exclusivity of the conventional art space: cars, fashioned from the quirky to the outrageous, cruise through the streets--around Lake of the Isles this year--to finally assemble at Intermedia Arts on Lyndale Avenue, where the artists and the curious get to mix and mingle, chat and laugh, wonder and enjoy the general outrageousness of the objects on display. Here is individuality whose expression does not exhaust itself in pricy customization; here is community, too, because the people who make these cars share a passion, a vision, and they are all too happy to talk about it.

 

Polar Bear Car, July 19, 2008

Art cars, then, circumvent the typical self-selective audience of gallery goers and connoisseurs. They make art accessible in the most basic, democratic sense: on the street, to everyone who happens to pass by. They are fun, too, frivolous at times, and nonetheless cannot help being political: either overtly--this year's polar bear car drew attention to the threat of that species' extinction--with strategically placed bumper stickers--"I want an electric car"--or indirectly, by rejecting the conformist, conventional avenues for expressing individuality on wheels.

Intermedia's showing of Harrod Blank's 1992 documentary Wild Wheels added even more depth to the experience of appreciating the art cars, their makers, and the community that forms around the shared impulse to create this iconic American object anew. (A case in point: the 1960s Cadillac, chosen for its cultural significance, with ornaments that include a plastic Snow White figurine and pink flamingos on elongated fins, speaks to the opulence of American culture, as its creator proudly explains on screen.) The motivations of the artists interviewed in the film range widely, from the sentimental to the pathologically religious, from a keen understanding of audience--and wanting to appeal to a broader audience than your typical gallery crowd--to a tentative understanding of class politics in the art world and the viable alternative community these cars create.

 

Art Car Detail, July 19, 2008

Yet unlike most art objects, these cars are functional, which ironically hampers their status as art: in Wild Wheels, the driver of a Volkswagen Beetle, covered with small, oscillating light bulbs, recounts that no one, not even Lloyd's of London, is willing to insure this work of art. "If it is worth as much as you value it at, you should not be driving it," is--loosely paraphrased--the insurance company's stance. Do art cars belong in museums, then? Interestingly, visitors to both the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Art can encounter cars--or parts of them--in the galleries, safely housed in the white-walled spaces designated to hold what's precious and dear to the experts of the art community.

The MIA's car, a 1936 Czech Tatra T87, is housed in its 20th-century design area. In a 2006 article in the Star Tribune, William Griswold, the then director of MIA, described the car as "a great access point for the infrequent museum visitor." Visitors, said Griswold, will "see and understand this object, which will lead to understanding others." So apart from the artistic and historical value of the car's design itself, what makes this art object compelling is its familiarity and accessibility.

 

Hans Ledwinka's 1936 Tatra T87 at the MIA

Dave Hickey, who, somehow, despite his MacArthur genius grant, still manages to pull off the enfant terrible shtick of art criticism--quite convincingly, too--makes a similar point in his memorable essay, "The Birth of the Big Beautiful Art Market." Cars--customized and pin-striped and hopped up--served as the lingua franca of his American boondock education (Hickey's terms, not mine). Cars offered a universal language, accessible to anyone who cared to look and listen to the roar of the engine. Entering the art world with its putatively refined aesthetics and insider mentality felt "just like coming home," says Hickey. His conclusion? The two markets--or communities, or culture clubs--aren't that different, once you start peeling back and sanding off the layers of lacquer. Or are they?

While car culture not only offered cool rides, it also provided young Hickey with an education in aesthetics and meaning making--and I quote: "We knew these cars and knew what they meant; and what they meant, over and above everything, was freedom." These cars, then, were a means to voice dissent from the factory models, a way to let loose and re-imagine what a vehicle could look like, could signify, could be. This culture club was not limited to art galleries; instead, cars cruised the main drag, raced on the highways, and generally served as the embodiment of their owner's particular brand of cool. "Not limited to galleries" also meant no self-selecting audiences, no institutionalized spaces for display, and no exclusivity based on social class or education or any other of those markers we rely on to claim and bestow cultural capital. Finally, an obvious point: these cars worked.

While both Griswold and Hickey see car culture as immediately accessible to the American collective consciousness, the meanings these cars transport for each of them are ultimately quite different: the cars of Hickey's reminiscences mean freedom, speed, the open road--that old American dream. Griswold would probably not object to such associations either but he wants the Tatra's audience to appreciate the lines, the design, the details, too--in order to move on to more complex and more sophisticated objects. The Tatra, while a gorgeous object in its own right, becomes a lure for the "NASCAR crowd," as the Star Tribune puts it, not shying away from cliché. Thus the Tatra comes to serve as a stepping stone to higher distinction and sophistication, an entry point into a different, perhaps more exclusive kind of community.

A few steps closer to downtown Minneapolis, Richard Prince's muscle-car hoods grace the walls of the Walker. As Nancy Spector astutely observes in her essay on Richard Prince, entitled "Nowhere Man," "the car offers testosterone-ridden dreams fueled by a desire for escape, pure velocity, and the romance of the road." All of Hickey's ingredients for attraction are here: the speed, the romantic dream, and, curiously, the desire for escape. From what? Prince himself explains his choice of painting substrate like this: "It was the perfect thing to paint. Great size. Great subtext. Great reality. Great thing that actually got painted out there, out there in real life. I mean I didn't have to make this shit up. It was there. Teenagers know it. It got ‘teen-aged.' Primed. Flaked, Stripped. Bondo-ed. Lacquered. Nine coats. Sprayed. Numbered. Advertised on. Raced. Fucking Steve McQueened."

As an appropriation artist (and I define "appropriation" as taking and using something as if it was yours--even when it's not), Prince likes the previous life of the object. It offers him a handy subtext to work with, fodder for presumably potent allusions. But isn't there a difference in appropriating from other artists--fine artists, such as De Kooning, in Prince's latest work, or commercial artists, who produce the ads and fashion shots Prince recycles in his earlier work--and from the shared obsession of a community of outsiders to the art world? And who gave the object "life" in the first place? Again, we encounter the discomfiting quasi-anthropological mining of others' experiences, passions, and visions for an ultimately self-interested artistic goal. When Spector describes Prince's Hoods as revealing "the poetry of process" in ever increasing levels of abstraction and applauds his mastery of Bondo as an aesthetic element--does anyone else wonder why we do not appreciate the original as much as the derivative, appropriated work? Could it be because there is no original to appreciate? Is it because the whole point of appropriation art is to topple the reign of originality? Or because those kids who played so shrewdly with the meanings of their cars do not fit into the art community easily--despite the affinities between car culture and the art world that Hickey diagnoses?

 

Art Car, Missile Launcher, July 19, 2008

Back to Intermedia, where the ingenious makers of their art cars spent Saturday evening hanging out with their rides. Ostensibly less concerned with the slick version of cool that Hickey's buddies bought into, these art cars are funky, quirky, expressive. Some of them are classics--the bone car, the astro-turf car, the car that's covered in CD's--and some of past years' favorites were sorely missed. (But does anyone remember the lobster car? I believe it came from Texas-schools of fish and lobsters lip-synching and shaking their stuff to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody"?) This year's favorite: a patriotic missile launcher with a fabulous crew, clad in red-white-and-blue, outfitted with missile-shaped dildos to match the giant "Number One" missile on the van... ready to roll down Nicollet Avenue this fall in the Liberty Parade.

What these speculations about cars, communities, and connoisseurs boil down to is one final question: What kind of community do we want art to inspire and to foster? An exclusive, snooty one, where only certain people are made to feel welcome and whoever does not fit the mold exactly is shamelessly condescended to? Or a space where we encounter not only the work on display with open eyes and minds--but each other as well? If we want art to be socially significant and accessible, is it not of paramount importance to build community across the divides of class differences? Kudos to Intermedia Arts for hosting this event, and giving this colorful, funky community a place to meet, celebrate, and cherish the wonderfully strange things people do to their cars.

Reclaimed Memory at Rogue Buddha through July 27^th and
Dots and Loops at Midway Contemporary Art through August 2^nd


Outsider art, a concept derived from Jean Dubuffet's 1948 coinage Art Brut, is the work of artists who live in extreme mental states. Dubuffet thought these states of consciousness placed the artists beyond the reach of official culture. The term emerged in the middle of the last century, (although some of the most famous outsider work comes from before that time). The Art Brut movement was a response to anxiety about the assimilation of Dada by the art establishment, a desperate search for an outside or margin. Today the term "outsider art" is often applied to the work of self-taught and naïve artists. Dots and Loops, at Midway Contemporary Art through August 2nd, is an outsider artist show in the sense of Art Brut's dedication to outsiders. At another show at northeast's Rogue Buddha Gallery, Yuri Arajs - who has done much to promote the cause of the other outsider art in Minneapolis - has an exhibition of new work, his farewell to the Minneapolis art world.

Arajs' Clever Show

There is a fundamental trick to Arajs' Reclaimed Memory. The works - comprised of found photographs that are cropped, treated, and re-framed into evocative scrapbook pages - lure us in with junk-shop mystery, then invite us to experience our own assumptions as discovery. In short, Arajs evokes nostalgia.

Lately, Arajs' work has circled around organized systems: numberings, language, and repetition. The old photographs at the center of these latest works have such a strong odor of nostalgia that they overpower the rest of Arajs' familiar motifs. The artist's modifications become mere clues to the lost worlds of the photographs. It makes for an interesting treasure hunt for the scrapbook sleuth, but as bricoleur, Arajs does little to challenge the viewers' longing for authority as detective/inventors of the past. To unseat us might contribute dissonance to the music at the center of this exhibition, and what sets Rogue Buddha Gallery apart this month is its ability to transport us into a lyrical mindset. You can almost smell the old books, snow, attic dust, teak and cedar.

Interact Center Artists at Midway Contemporary Art

Midway Contemporary Art is currently dedicating its galleries to disabled artists from Minnesota's Interact Center. The show, Dots and Loops, would attract curiosity even if it weren't so intellectually engaging and artistically evocative. Just as Arajs' current exhibition may coax the unwary into indulging mythologies of the past, these artists often point to our own uneasy relationship to the totems of the present - media saturated icons that have become so prevalent as to structure the unconscious idiomatically. Part of the wonder of such a show is that it invites expansive and open-ended interpretation of the work. With that in mind, I will highlight a few of the fifteen artists on display to suggest some of the works' capacity for meaning without closing off interpretation.

Take for instance the work of Matthew Zimdars. His drawings derive from the weather maps that have saturated our collective minds. The lurid colors in his Severe Weather series suggest the state of constant emergency that permeates the Bush decade. And yet, abstracted from their functionality, the maps radiate warmth, attaining the totemic quality of religious portraits. The maps are whisperings from an angel, or documents of divine wrath, but even wrath is consideration, and if nothing else, we rely on the interactive weather map to place the viewer reliably at its center.

Zimdars' work suggests the magical quality of the ordinary world - fantasy geographies of the ordinary that scroll by with menace and importance. Zimdars infuses the banal with magical significance. Meanwhile, in the same gallery, Peder Hagen's work describes a fantasy kingdom with the unflinching eyes of a census taker. His striking portraits and maps from the mythical land of Cressia thoroughly embroider a dream of a utopian culture. His fantasy is unerringly detailed, supported with maps and ledgers until the totality of his dream - its reality - is unmistakable.

When viewing outsider art, it's easy to indulge the idea that the art is more sincere, more real and less adulterated. The nihilism of a PBR-swilling art college grad seems like lifestyle art, more so when compared to the cockeyed satire in the work of a painter such as Paul Jagolino. Jagolino's minuet-in-the-round with the ladies of popular culture strikes a chord at once hopeful and insouciant, expressing an ambivalent relationship to the flickering images of supermodels and film stars. In each portrait, the celebrity sitter is painted coarsely, and each one confesses her love for the painter, a love that is, in its way, reciprocated by the portrait itself.

Among the most intriguing artists here is Donovan Durham. His work ranges widely - from unusually populated, flattened scenes such as Scenes of Spooks, painted in acrylic, to fascinating line drawings, including a series of portraits of a class of '64. The former, with their bright childish color schemes, flat perspective and fanciful subject matter, might lead the viewer to the dismiss Durham himself as a case of arrested development, a man with the ideas and concerns of a child.

But his pencil drawings invite a subversive reading. The portraits seem almost like transliterations from yearbook pages, but the headshots are distorted with a fisheye focus on the lips and nose. The sitters are transformed into half human African-Americans, their noses stretched until they are like armored carapaces across the front of their faces. They might appear like racist caricatures, (Durham himself is black), yet Durham's portraits are also infused with an unmistakable dignity and honor. Another portrait, with the words "Happy Birthday" written across the top, may refer to the sitter, a curly haired woman, or it may refer to an inscription above her head which reads "The War." The work has stayed in my mind as much as any other I've seen this month.

If it seems naïve to praise the work of an outsider artist show in the same terms as that of more conventionally abled artists, momentarily push aside your expectations of art and disability, and recall that disability refers to that narrow set of skills required for work and its related communications in modern society. It has little to do with the various acts of condensation and expression through which an individual's vision becomes visible through a work of art. The current show at Midway Contemporary Art is a gift of perceptual grace. Brave and lovely, its views through irregular lenses have that power so rare in modern art to transport the viewer to an alternate present. The show should not be missed.

I was recently quoted in print saying, "I don't particularly like complaining." This came as a huge surprise to many of my friends, who immediately contacted me about what they perceived as a glaring inaccuracy in the article. Of course, I protested that it all made sense in context: I was being interviewed about a music festival I co-curate and produce, and was trying to explain the genesis of the event. I was tired of hearing that there was "nothing going on" in town and decided to make something happen and give the lie to that particular complaint. I'll admit, though, that anyone who knows me well will have often heard me complain about a number of pet issues. (e.g., Unless you have some time on your hands, don't get me started on Daylight Saving Time. If you must, ask me about that in the fall, when you "gain" an hour.) However, I stand by my statement: I don't particularly like complaining.

I have two explanations for this seeming contradiction. One is somewhat legalistic: I don't like complaining; it's just that the world too often conspires to force me to do it. The other is closer to the truth: I think that once you find yourself complaining about something repeatedly, you have two options--either do something to create the change you want to see or shut up, OR get used to it and leave the rest of us in peace. Ideally (though this is often not the case) a complaint has a function, like the pain that makes you pull your hand out of the fire. It ought to help you organize your thinking about the world you wish to see and spur you to some kind of action.

One of my favorite recurring complaints regards the visual arts coverage in the Twin Cities. Or, rather, the near complete lack of it. Our local media seem quite happy to repeat, ad nauseam, that we have a strong arts scene, or that the Twin Cities are somehow supportive of the arts. Well, this may or may not be true, but there is a difference between supporting "The Arts" and having any sort of meaningful or engaging discussion of any specific art. This is especially troubling as visual art thrives on discourse and withers in its absence. In some ways the difference between a piece of art and any other object is that the art object is a locus for discourse, an attempt to embody, however tenuously, some kind of idea or meaning, and to engage in some way with the history of those ideas. This means, in turn, that works of art are always contingent objects, and require community and context for their very existence.

Oddly, though the local dailies and weeklies have "Art" sections, this tends to mean CD, film, theatre and dance coverage. Of course, there is nothing wrong with any of these forms, but when I tell people I went to art school, they rarely assume I must therefore be an actor. It's been somewhat galling to me, as an artist, that the "Art" sections have precluded it's very namesake: art. It seems odd to me that any day of the week I can find a review of a play, a dance piece, a film, a new album, or even of live music events that have already passed, yet seldom find any coverage at all of visual arts exhibitions, despite the fact that they are on display for a month or more. I was especially troubled this past year (troubled enough to cancel my subscription) when the Star Tribune "Fall Arts Preview" listed exactly four upcoming visual arts events. Of those, three were at the major arts institutions in town, and only one had any local content. The only other visual art related article in the entire section was reprinted from the New York Times.

So, what will follow in my upcoming posts is my attempt to do what little I can to contribute to a change, to be part of a larger conversation, and to put my money where my mouth is. Offered the opportunity to be part of a group attempting to start some discourse about local art, I really couldn't say no, despite several reasons to be reticent. As a practicing artist, I fear any implication of conflict of interest. Having many friends in the local arts scene, I worry about being either perceived as too partisan or having honest criticisms received as unduly harsh. As a non-writer, I may not be the man for the job. I guess we will see. I am happy to say that my fellow writers here have already given me less to complain about. All the same, I am sure more complaints will follow.

Part the first -- History Is the Past

 

History is something that happens to other people. -Anonymous

 

WELCOME STUDENTS. I'd like to begin today's seminar with a pop quiz. (No groaning, people!) Please take out your Bluebooks and answer the following two-part question:

1. Identify the following historical era: In the early years of a century, at the end of a long era of prosperity, there occurred a contentious generational baton-pass between an older, tradition-minded generation (often called the "Civic Generation," but also sometimes the "Greatest Generation"), to a younger generation noted for being insecure, disillusioned, and "lost." That new century's dreams for continued prosperity and peace had been ended by a brutal war that, while at first very popular, was later deemed the deceitful, wool-pulling act of a reactionary leadership bent on preserving a dying world order. The resulting atmosphere of destruction, death, disappointment, and demoralization defined the history of an entire generation.

2. Identify the movement that was birthed of this era, and describe its location and surrounding circumstances: Out of the era's despair and dismay, a group of young artists and writers gathered in a place of refuge and began venting their anger at the times in the best way they knew how: through art. Making use of new communications technologies (which often became a subject of the work), the loosely linked group took to questioning the meaning, and subverting the value, of what had been held sacred by the generations previous. The resulting art was often obtuse and insensible, but it also captured the underground anger of an age and shocked an otherwise apathetic public.

Everyone got your answers? Good, let's check em.

Question 1: This era occurred circa 1916-1923, and is sometimes dubbed the years of the "Lost Generation." The war was World War I -- a.k.a., the Great War -- and the reactionary leaders were the last, blind rulers of the old Empires of the 19th century.

Question 2: The place of artistic refuge was Zurich, Switzerland; the recent communications breakthrough was the rapid expansion of cheap printing methods on newsprint, and the art movement came to be called dada.

 

(A little bit of dada from back in the doo-dah...)

 

Dada, the 20th century's greatest and perhaps earliest art movement primarily intended to shock the established order, was birthed of war and its aftermath. Dadaist artists and poets, who comprised a wide range of styles and approaches -- such that it's difficult to identify any single dada style -- were connected via a sense of protest and discontent and by their use of mild obscenities, scatological humor, obscure visual puns, nonsensical language experiments and imagery, and blasé gestures. (Think Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa moustache, called properly "L.H.O.O.Q." (1919), or his flat-footedly presented urinal called "Fountain"). (Note: The title "L.H.O.O.Q." is a wry and baudy pun in French, because read aloud it makes a sentence, "Elle a chaud au cul," which, translated, means, "She has heat in the arse." )

                

The group's primary goal, then, embraced by young artists around the world and across the ages, was to outrage and repel the public (read: the established elders of the time). Today, history suggests the dada movement is key to understanding the sense of meaninglessness of the post-War era.

 

Part the second -- History Is the Present

 

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth. -E.L. Doctorow

 

OF COURSE, AS WITH ALL GOOD HISTORY LESSONS, I suggest there's also a second, alternate, partial-credit answer possible to today's pop-quiz.

That is, the advanced students among you might have noticed that another era also fits the historical description above. Just substitute, for instance, in your answer to question 1: the Iraq War for World War I; the Bushies for the great old oligarchs; the malaise of now and the current generation for that of the early 20th century's "lost generation" -- et viola, what's old is new again! (The only question that remains is with the impending death of older, newsprint-based information systems where can one find a movement of artists seeking a place of refuge from all the turmoil today and a method to express their discontent?)

But you don't have to take my word alone on this connection between then and now. Other commenters have suggested that the current conditions are similar to what created dada. Tyler Green, for example, reviewed a retrospective of dada at the National Gallery in 2006, and wrote: "[Dada] is a celebration of the power artists have to portray horrors, as well as a celebration of the voice they have in condemning the circumstances that produced those horrors. On view in Washington at a time when our nation is questioning the Bush administration's conduct before and during war in Iraq, it is a rare -- very rare -- instance of an exhibition at our National Gallery of Art bumping up against the news of the day."

Certainly, there has been lively activity among political-minded artists in recent years. The 2006 Whitney Biennial was filled with young artists venting a variety of grievances through artistic gesture. (It's a personal hypothesis of mine that this show's curators -- Philippe Vergne and Chrissy Iles -- had hoped to evoke the energy and subversive qualities of dada in their curatorial choices; as to whether they succeeded in any way, well, I'll discuss that in a moment...) Even well-established artists -- such as Mel Chin (in recent sculptural objects suggest makeshift humvee armor, for instance), Jenny Holzer (in recent paintings based on declassified government documents related to the Iraq War), and Siah Armajani (in a recent public monument that conflated Fallujah with Guernica) -- have gotten the political bug of late.

As Enrique Chagoya said in a recent issue of Art in America dedicated to political art, "I have noticed many more artists dealing with political content since 9/11. The world changed after that ominous day, and the topics are more urgent and global than ever. Just look at how many issues are making us anxious in our country and in the world: political and economic corruption, global warming and our dependency on fossil fuels, the rise of xenophobia, ethic cleansing wars, discrimination toward women and minorities, etc. -- the list could be really long."

 

(Recent image of the Bush administration by Enique Chagoya)

 

Still, the current generation's political art up till now has been greatly lacking in something, some je ne sais quoi, or magic if you will, to capture a wider audience. Mostly it's been dull and dry and deadpan and rote, lacking spark and inspiration -- or the power to spark imagination in others (and thus win them to a cause). In my view, it's a great disappointment that in this day and age of so much to protest and rail against, there appears to be no movement among artists that has any of the depth and quality to upset, confuse, question, and subvert like the dada movement of old.

So where, I ask you students of history, is the New Dada?

 

Part the third -- Nothing Is More Delightful Than to Confuse and Upset People

 

Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income, their dog. -Tristan Tzara

SO, THUS BEMUSED AND DISTRACTED by my own ideas and preoccupations about the current times and its art, a few weeks ago I received a cryptic, and unsolicited, email from a sender I did not know -- a guy named Alex, who apparently is a regular a reader of some of my more obscure web-based arts writing. The email included only a weblink, and no other explanation; no text, no greeting, nothing at all of an explicatory nature. Of course, being an incurably curious sort -- especially when it comes to online offers and links of uncertain provenance -- despite my better judgment I clicked through the message to the other side. And what I found was an inscrutably low-tech-looking, clunkily typographed webpage with, again, no explanation beyond another link, this time to a pdf file of a document written by one Alexander Lane -- thus solving one mystery (who this "Alex" was), but leading to another (what did this guy want?).

The essay, which, frankly, could have been written by a failing high school sophomore English student (who had never learned how not to use passive voice), was a rundown of a recent panel discussion at the New Museum in New York, "Net Aesthetics 2.0," which examined the phenomenon of something called "Internet art."

Now, I consider myself a fairly open-minded guy, and somewhat youthful and accepting despite my advancing years. But like any busy contributor to the national economy, between you and me, I was getting peeved by all of Alex's obfuscation and crypticism. Still, against my better nature, I dug in and tried to make sense of this essay, painfully as it was written (and painfully as it was presented), and as a result I learned the following nugget of gold: Apparently, a lot of artists are using the Internet to make art these days.

Also, I learned, many of these artists often participate in something called "surfing clubs." I had never heard of such, but, according to another essay I dug up (via a couple of testy email exchanges with Cryptic Alex), a surfing club, as defined by Marcin Ramocki, is, apparently, a communal blog, usually run by artists, that may have several characteristics. These characteristics include: an internal dialectical and syntactical logic and narrative flow; a disregard for audience expectations in favor of its own infrastructure; a tendency toward semiotic and conceptual "games"; a connection to the act of "surfing" the Internet to find random materials and referents; a self-awareness of certain cultural codes inherent to the internet (among the most common being "Minimalism," "slacker art," "rock music," "youth culture," "programming language," "cute, extremely ugly eighties colors," "beauty for beauty's sake," "porn,"and "video games"); and a tendency to evolve and change quickly (as per the culture of the Internet).

The art done on these blogs is, I learned, at first glance rather off-putting and inaccessible, perhaps much in the same way Dadaist art and poetry must have been for the older generation of the time. It is raw, blatantly youthful, full of noisy, and seemingly random, disjointed imagery and gestures. The work denies any clear interpretation, and it is often repulsive and off-putting, confusing, upsetting, and resistant to clear explanation -- just as Tristan Tzara may have preferred.

In fact, it seems, the extra-credit answer to question 2 could be that the Internet is both the place of artistic refuge and the recent communications breakthrough for artists seeking to vent their frustrated modern spleen. And, it seems possible, that in this Internet Art movement we may well have the perfect analogue to the greatest protest art movement of the last century. That is, this cadre of young, disparate, unaffiliated, and angry online artists, who have found on the Internet a place to voice their underground discontent, may be the earliest wave of the New Dada.

(Sample of art from a "surfing club" weblog based in Minnesota)

 

 

The part in which I AM conclusory (or, at best, partially conclusive) -- CHoosing Instead to Provide Links (with explanation) to Samples of This Internet Art Phenomenon (both local and national), So You Can Judge for Yourself

WITHOUT FURTHER FUSS, below I present some practitioners of the obscure art of the Internet -- from "surfing clubs" both national and local -- for you to make your own call (as to whether these measure up to dada, or else seem something altogether different).

 

National Surfing Clubs/Internet Art Groups

(Art by Tom Moody, from Nasty Nets)

Nasty Nets -- Apparently this group began posting in 2006, and is credited with being first to coalesce a growing movement of artists interested in online blog art. The community is relatively small, comprised of artists, curators, and activists/bloggers pushing boundaries (in the manner of Dadaists of old), and in fact questioning whether what they're doing is art at all.

Loshadka -- has existed since May 2007. The first post on the site, extant during that first month, says everything about the site's aesthetic and m. o.:

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PWN

everything

billy you're gay right?
admin;

2 Comments »

1.
yesyesyesyesyes
Comment by billy -- June 22, 2007 @ 7:41 am

2.
gives me a pwnr thinkin about it
Comment by prawnstar -- June 28, 2007 @ 5:08 am

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Spirit Surfers -- A much more clean, graphic-designy, and less frenetic site than some of its competitors, Spirit Surfers is no less obscure and obtuse - nor biting and incisive -- for all the cleanliness. One of my favorite posts on this site is Tim Skirvin's documentation of the building and destruction of a scale lego model of a Star Destroyer (from Star Wars). It's particularly poignant that the Star Destroyer was destroyed by a cat named Tulip.

Double Happiness -- Click on this site, and you get a frenetic soundtrack mixture of sounds from 1980s uber-soundtrack of Top Gun, hip hop music, and a 1-800 infomercial. Plus, chocolate chip cookies with bacon, Google maps to pizza places in Poughkeepsie, and an image of the Hulk having standing sex with Wonder Woman.

 

(Another sample of Internet Art)

Heck, with Internet Art, you just never know what sort of visions you'll see -- nor how obscure and obtuse they will be.

 

Minnesota-based Surfing Clubs/Internet Art Groups

Here are some locally-based attempts at Internet Art, though (*please note) it is often difficult to know precisely where such "surfing clubs" are located. This is because the artists often eschew their very identity, including their names, locus, origins, and so on, when they get involved with such sites.

The Shitizens -- A mishmash of local artists hip to national Internet Art trends, this site also seems to be one of several efforts by a local artist/blogger named Hollingsworth J. McTubbins. Check out the silly whip fetishism in this fun post.

Hardland/Heartland -- A group of artists who seem to do a bit of everything (including old analogue art exhibitions, online stuff, zines, happenings, poetry, manifesta -- and everything in between); you probably shouldn't miss whatever they've got hidden up their proverbials.

Hooliganship -- These guys really seem to love, for whatever reason, the whole "cute, extremely ugly eighties colors" thing. The organization of the site is a bit tighter, and less fluid, than some of the others of their ilk, but still the artists involved seem just as dedicated to the eccentrically obtuse aesthetic as any of them.

Lords of Apathy -- These guys seem particularly sex-deprived, but then what do I know about modern art anyway?

And, well, you get the picture. I'd love to hear if you come across any more of these artistic endeavors -- both national and local -- or if you have any opinions about this art. Submit any thoughts, comments, suggestions (as long as they're not cryptic) to the comment section at the end of this post.