NEA Chairman Dana Gioia Lays It Down at Stanford U's Commencement

As someone who's pursued art funding at the studio level I've had almost no use for the NEA. I've seen it as a big supporter of big institutions whose motivations and methods have come into question.

But it's good to know that Dana Gioia is in charge of things, even if I base this only on the evidence of the commencement speech he recently delivered at Stanford University.

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.

Say it, Brother. Shame he isn't also in charge of MTV or, hell, even PBS. Think the boards at the Pixar-licking Armani-stroking museums are listening? Here's another snippet:

In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we experienced this colossal cultural and political decline? There are several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

Did I tell ya?

In point of fact, from my observations this sentiment, at least as regards artists, is becoming somewhat dated. Although I've read and heard quite a bit from artists whose ideas are unintelligible except to a handful of academics, I'm reading statements and artblogs nowadays that deliver at least a reasonable facsimile of street-level cultural relevance, even if they can be quite flighty at times.

But I see this as a process, and it needs to continue.

If you'll recall some of the art writing from the 1970's and 80's, you'll see what Gioia is referring to. The average person on the street could find very little connection with Minimalist and Conceptual art, and if you consider that collectors may very well have only an average understanding of art, that might at least partly explain the resurgence of figurative painting in the '80s.

Also, do you remember the antique-looking landscape paintings made during the 80's? Wasn't there an artist named Rebecca Horn who painted on massively thick slabs of marine plywood, and then coated the work with thick layers of wax? How hard would it be for any collector to connect with a landscape that is very reminiscent of the paintings on Grandmama's velvet-flocked walls?

Hopefully we can continue to develop connection and clarity for the wider public while the new art narrative develops in an other-than-retrograde direction. We'll succeed, I think, so long as we listen to ourselves as an outsider would hear us and maintain a willingness to translate now and again. Even when we strike off in highly esoteric directions we can plant a few obvious markers on the trail, can't we?

There's no point in making people feel stupid. Personally I think it's a lot more fun to bring them along and let them make the same discoveries we've made for themselves.

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Space Foamby Peter Hobbs

Peter Hobbs tells us that this thought-provoking piece

is meant to be a modest contribution to the study of psychedelic ritual. It is inspired by Jack Smith, Boris Karloff and Carlos Castaneda.

When Mr. Hobbs says psychedelic ritual I read hallucination, or maybe even hallucinization.

He obsessively covers and transforms his face with shaving cream. Even while vocalizing for the seemingly comic characters that emerge the application, smearing and re sculpturing of foam continues.

The suggestion emerges of identity lost through habitual disguise and disfigurement of body and/or of mind. After long minutes of this voices emerge with witless, demented greetings and mocking pleas that the transformation cease. We shape ourselves in spite of ourselves, Hobbs seems to say, and the results are never to our satisfaction.

In two long shots Hobbs wears a suit of many long, squid-like appendages, all useless and apparently connected to nothing.

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Riffing Versus Refiningand A Hierarchy of Essential Characteristics

Think this through with me.

I've ranked on Serra because, to my eyes, he's done the same thing for way too long.

But it's not that I don't enjoy his work. I've blogged it. It can be quite interesting.

My objection is that it's roughly the same thing for the past forty years. As I've noted in other places, he's done as much as anyone's ever going to do with gigantic slabs of iron.

In one place someone reacted to that statement with this disagreement: "He's not doing the same thing for decades. He's refining his work over the decades."

I'd disagree and say that he's riffing. And he's not even riffing on an external reality or concept of any sort, the way Coltrane riffed on "My Favorite Things." What Serra's riffing on is his own previous work.

Refinement is clear enough of an idea that I don't need to define it, right? If I'm seeing a progressive refinement of an idea, then over time I would expect to see the enhancement of strengths and the diminution of weaknesses.

Serra's all strength, in my mind. He purified the hell out of his work early on; in fact for me one positive aspect of keeping the surfaces raw and rusty is that it keeps the work grounded. Irregular surface color and texture add a level of particularlity that keeps the experience of a Serra in the here and now.

For an example of true refinement I see no need to go further than deKooning. His earlier work is rough as hell, frenetic stabs and smears. And if you look at the body of his work across the decades you can watch as he strains out gestures that perhaps had become trivial to him, and enhances other gestures. His final works have a very clean, almost slick feeling to them.

Something that occurs to me about Serra's work in particular, but also about other artworks, is this: how important is the specific material used to the experience of the work itself?

I ask this because Serra goes to crazy lengths to create and then move his massive sculptures around. I wonder if all of this outside effort is somehow not a part of the art itself, an industrial performance thundercloud surrounding these often oppressively vulcan pieces.

Imagine the last Serra you stood in front of. What if instead of tons of iron, it was made out of a few hundred pounds of fiberglass, and was carefully painted to appear like rusty iron?

Keep in mind, the guards hate it when you touch or knock on the thing. You have no tactile or audible means of experiencing it. You are confined to your visual senses.

Would you know the difference? How would it affect your experience of the work, so long as you were left in the dark?

This makes me consider a hierarchy of artwork characteristics that can be applied to any artwork.

Some characteristics are absolutely essential. In a Serra work its dimensions, surface and environment fall under this category.

Other characteristics strike me as less essential. In order of diminishing essentiality I might list them this way:

• Date
• Title (changes in order depending on artist, possibly also on format)
• Relationship to other works by this artist
• Relationship to works by other artists
• Material
• Weight
• Curatorial positioning
• Critical positioning
• Cash Value

And others I'm not thinking of right now.

Thoughts? Comments? Reflections?

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James Blood UlmerBirthright

I play music for the kids while they're making art, but I never play anything they'd ask for. I'll tear my own head off and throw it at them before I'll let anyone in my studio hear even one bass-beat of the pimps 'n' hos gang-and-ghetto fakery they'd pipe continually into their ears if we'd let them.

So while Period 5 was wrapping up their final projects for this year I fired up I-Tunes Radio and ran smack into James Blood Ulmer singing "Geechee Joe" from his Birthright album.

That cracking-old tremolo voice rumbled through like a deep midnight thunderstorm, like six dead men calling their sorrows up through the bottomless well of his throat and trying to ascend again into the world they'd thought was lost forever until they heard the shimmering sweet wrongness of his acoustic guitar perfection.

And I kid you not, people, in a flash of time twenty small-town Connecticut high school students dropped all their distractions -- the thrills of the upcoming summer and graduation for some, the social dramas of the moment and all the little shinies that buzz about their brains -- and sat thunderstruck, their minds and spirits responding in silent awe to a magnificent power their young minds simply could not comprehend.

It's what rings true in Robert Johnson, comes out another way in Charlie Patton, lies somewhere in the vicinity of Elmore James, got maybe a bit too jokey-cute in Bukka White and a bit too grade-school-cute and bland in Leadbelly, and then became completely lost in two massive fusions, first with the beige folk stylings of the people who tried to follow Woody Guthrie and couldn't, and then with what we now think of as classic rock from Clapton to Joplin to Hendrix to Zepplin.

James Blood Ulmer channels the first power of blues, its purest, most authentic form as it was no doubt heard early in the last century in small places you could hardly even call venues in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, and I'd challenge any of you to prove otherwise.

Here he is at Carnegie Hall, can't tell when. This carries nothing like the power of his album Birthright, which, if you haven't made it your own yet, you should purchase without delay.

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Various Artists: Responding to Kahnat Yale University Art Gallery 2.0

First, I can't see that any of these sculptures selected for this show has anything to do with architect Louis Kahn. Yale was no doubt trying to celebrate Kahn, the designer of the original Yale University Art Gallery, and a group of curators got stuck with the job.

Anyone who works creatively will tell you that design by committee virtually guarantees mediocrity. The foundation idea behind this show is no exception. I'll quote the curators from the exhibition's big floppy handout:

Like the three points of a triangle, Kahn's building, the sculptures selected for the exhibition, and the viewer (each of us, and you) create a structure of relationships with endless permutations. What we see in a particular sculpture from a particular vantage point in the building, and what you see in the same arrangement, will inspire a particular conversation between us. The building shapes this conversation, how we view the sculptures and how the sculptures speak to each other. All, in turn, shape our interpretation of the space. Each arrangement of variable creates a new constellation of meaning.

I could paraphrase it thusly:

We put a bunch of sculptures in the new space. Waddayathink?

I know, a lot of people in the art world see gobbletygook such as the above big paragraph by the curators as deep and interesting, but, kids, it's just artspeak gobbletygook.

Seven curators, probably superb curators in fact, stars in their field no doubt, were tossed an assignment that I can't imagine anyone would enjoy: Make a show about the new space.

But they pulled off a pretty interesting little exhibit, even if the connections between these sculptures seem to be few and fairly inconsequential, more like clever quips than expressions of curatorial thesis.

The works pretty much appear to have been raided from the closet. Name a style of sculpture since 1960 and you're likely to find it here.

I can't imagine what need there was for one curator, let alone seven, to arrive at this rambling collection. But, given a curatorial committee and a dull assignment, I can imagine why rambling might have been the only option.

Wish I had pics to show you, but my camera's been on blocks in the front yard for a few months now. I do, however, offer some notes:

Matthew Barney's Unit Bolus from 1991 appears to your right as you enter the exhibition. It's essentially a small refrigerated steel table with a Vaseline dumbbell sitting in the middle. You can hear the compressor for the refrigerator humming, and the dumbbell has a light glaze of condensation on it. Apparently if the refrigeration unit ever shuts off the dumbbell turns to a pile of goo.

I've seen Barney as more bombast than anything else. But I get a kick out of the idea of this object's life precariously reliant upon a constant flow of electricity.

According to the hand-out the work "combines imagery of the body ("bolus," meaning a soft mass of chewed food), athleticism and gender." But for me it's about small things being reliant upon big ungainly, almost unimaginably complex things. The dumbbell is "a mouthpiece that could also be inserted anally" to Barney (gag me with a bolus!).

To me it's my workout, and by extension the regimen of life itself -- civilization, really. And if the power goes out or even flickers long enough, it begins to deform and finally to collapse completely. It suggests a sickening delicacy of contemporary life that relies on utterly ungainly structures.

More interesting still for me is the thought that this might be entirely fake. The dumbbell could very well be made of white plastic. The table is one flat surface with nothing to contain the cold it supposedly generates, and there was no draft coming off of it. Can such a concept be communicated through deception? I think so. In fact it bears noting that on the same side of the gallery just a few yards away is a deceptively realistic sculpture of a working-class male asleep in an easy chair, Duane Hanson's Man in Chair with Beer from 1973.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about Joseph Beuys lately. This show included Sulfur-Covered Zinc Box (Plugged Corner), 1970. I remember Rudolf Baranik saying once, "You go to a show of Beuys, and you come out thinking that you can't even be an artist anymore." In other words Beuys blew the man away.

I've read about Beuys since the '70s and find a lot about him to be fascinating. But I'm not sure I'm with him for much of what he does.

Some of it seems to be pure comedy. How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. I Like America and America Likes Me.

Other pieces, such as these two tall open boxes made of zinc, one of which is covered in a sulfur kind of paint and has a gauze plug in the corner, leave me wondering if there's anything going on. The sense that there might be an interesting interpretation to the piece keeps me chewing on it.

More interesting for my money was another Beuys piece in the permanent collection: a violin painted green, next to two metal cans linked together by a short piece of string. It took me a while to realize that both the sending and receiving ends of the "can phone" are together with the violin, and it occurred to me that making music is a way of talking to yourself. The green of the violin could connote concepts such as go, sickness, envy, environmentalism, or a meaning idiosyncratic to the artist; haven't figured that part out yet. Also, if I recall correctly, there was no bow. Even more to think about.

Note to self: read up on Fluxus.

David Nash's Crack and Warp Stack from 1988 reminded me of Ursula Von Rydingsvard's tall sculptures in wood. It's a long rectanguloid of wood standing a bit taller than man-size, with horizontal cuts deep into it, cracks throughout, and a pronounced wobble along its height. You sense its precariousness, the way it could crack open or collapse at any moment. It tries to keep a straight face and is funnier for managing to succeed. I like the note from the hand-out: "In this work, Nash discovered the unpredictability of movement in wood and watched the material resist the form he had imposed on it."

Alison Saar's Bat Boyz from 2001 is an arrangement of seven or eight old dark baseball bats leaning in a corner, knob to the floor, each with a different face carved into the top end. The morose faces, the barely civilized sense of tribal totems and the threat a baseball bat can pose off the field gave this group an ominous feeling.

There's a lot more to this show, and the Yale University Art Gallery is always worth a visit, even if it's not as homey as it used to be. Yale is open and filled with enough to keep curious people occupied for days and days. New Haven is a great town to play around in, probably the most fun in all of Connecticut: great museums, bookstores, restaurants of every kind, and terrific places just to hobnob. Get out of the studio for a day! You need a break.

Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT 06510
Tuesday–Saturday 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Thursday until 8:00 pm (Sept–June)
Sunday 1:00–6:00 pm
Closed Mondays and major holidays

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D5: All Things DigitalDon't Hold Your Breath

On an interesting NPR article this morning some of the people behind the D5: All Things Digital Executive Conference were discussing the future.

Ah, the future. Remember the future, according to the past?

By this time a variety of visionaries -- writers, corporate leaders, so-called futurists, and even good old Walt Disney -- had predicted that we'd be living in robotic houses. Push a button in the kitchen and a hot meal would appear. Little robotic gizmos would pop out of the walls, sweep the floors and wash the windows.

And let's not forget the flying cars; the same wing-nuts who think they can balance a bowl of Froot Loops between their knees while reading the paper, talking on the cell phone and driving in rush hour traffic were supposed to also be able to pilot airborne vehicles of various sorts.

That's one dream I'm glad never came true.

Well, the D5: All Things Digital Executive Conference posits that one day everything in your life will be digital, from your refrigerator to your coffee table to your shoes to your lawnmower. Everything will be networked.

Screens will display the status of your milk, for example: MILK -- 3.8 ounces remaining. Freshness Factor 2
Imagine your Nikes with this readout: Foot Pungency Level -- 4: WARNING

Imagine eggs with a digital readout on their shells: Double Yolk: YOU'RE A WINNER!

D5 sounds like the same hoakum visionaries have been trying to sell us for decades now. A fully digital life would be a bloody nightmare. It's all fun and games until the damned thing breaks down.

This conference, put on by the Wall Street Journal, is just one more publicity event by a corporate world that's entirely reliant upon creating and filling desire in you, the American public. The powers that be have learned that with technology you have to throw a lot of noodles at the wall before one of them sticks.

Think about the last two great technological successes: the personal computer and the cell phone. Think about the length of time between both successes, and the things that came and went during that time -- the billions of corporate dollars that went nowhere. Think of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people like you and me whose careers were greatly affected, both positively and negatively, by the rise and fall of companies devoted to crazy technological gimcrackery.

And if you have both a personal computer and a cell phone, think about their effects on your life, both positive and negative.

Some people need to turn both of them off.

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Davide Cantoni -- Burn Drawingsat Daneyal Mahmood Gallery

Some intriguing images just in from Mahmood. I'll need to see these in person.

Maybe I'll make the Thursday, June 7 opening. If you're there, don't be a stranger.

DANEYAL MAHMOOD GALLERY
511 WEST 25 ST, 3FL
NEW YORK CITY 10001
phone: 212 675 2966
Tues.-Sat. 11am to 6pm

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Richard Serra, Legacy Talents and What The Heck We're Doing Here

I got into a discussion commenting at the superb Edward Winkleman's blogsite with an artist and writer named Franklin regarding Richard Serra's MoMA show and Kimmelman's piece essentially enshrining Serra and excoriating contemporary art.

Needless to say, my take was anti-Serra and pro-Contemporary. Serra is legacy, there are no new revelations from him to be seen at MoMA, and it would surprise me not one iota if the impetus for the show began with members of the MoMA board or their close acquaintances who have a stake in Serra's work.

As you'll see from the comments, I outlined my usual "we're all separate island art worlds now," along with "Serra had the narrative, which both helped and hindered him." Let's not forget my usual harangue, "Anyone who's done the same thing for decades needs to make a change."

Franklin's position stemmed obviously from his powerful and enduring reverence for Serra, which I'm sure he shares with many art lovers the world over. He seemed to think that my anti-Serra comments were more about self-pity, but I can't see what there is to feel self-pity about.

I think we're all in a more advantageous place than Serra was at the start of his career. For one thing, I love island living.

Franklin also resorted to the usual "Serious artists work the same forever" tune, which is only half-true: many notable artists changed during their lifetimes, or employed multiple styles throughout their careers.

One notable name I couldn't recall at the time was Louise Bourgeois.

But here's the thing:

It's kind of funny, when you go back and forth with people in comments. At some point the tone becomes more serious than your initial emotion in replying to the post. You can feel the sweat on their brow, their insecurities rising, the roil in their guts.

What is it we're doing here, really? I used to think, at times, that we're carrying on the discourse that used to take place in Paris cafes and Greenwich Village bars.

But I'm not so sure now.

For one thing, even the best writing here in Blog World tends to dissipate quickly. It's got a short shelf-life, and is consumed and forgotten in an instant, with a few notable exceptions.

Let's say your argument sails like a dream out here. Anyplace else on Earth it amounts essentially to nothing. And here, what does it get you? A shot at writing for Art in America? Not bloody likely. A few blog writers have gone on to better things, but only a very few and only the very best.

On political blogs you ultimately stand a chance of affecting someone's vote. Here maybe you sway someone's opinion a bit on something that on the big scale doesn't amount to much. And that's the best you're likely to do.

The real work, the real accomplishment, is in the artwork itself, and in its effective dissemination and propagation.

I didn't even read Franklin's last comment, only noted its length and the spittle flying out of the monitor.

Chill out, people. It's OK if you still find deep meaning in the work of artists who have been doing the same thing for decades.

Hell, people still go to Rolling Stones concerts, don't they? People ignore the ancient folds of skin hanging off of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and their gravelly vocal tones, just like they ignored Frank Sinatra's deepening atonal voice as the years tracked onward. New York New York was on permanent rotation over many AM stations throughout some portion of the 1980s.

So here's Richard Serra doing something else with slabs of iron. And there's Chuck Close making yet another giant head painting. And there's Joan Mitchell hashing out yet another Ab-Ex painting. And there's Bowser from Sha-Na-Na one more time laying the bass-line to "Blue Moon."

There's room enough in the pool for all of us, folks. If you're in love with the giants of the past, please, by all means, exercise your love with tender diligence.

I respect their achievements, too, but I keep them in their historical context, which is where I believe they belong.

But regardless of whether you agree with my contextual issue or not, don't disparage the people today who are trying to figure out what it's all about. Sure, some art today looks cheap and shoddy. But some of it's damned strong. If you don't risk making some real crap, you're very unlikely to score any real achievements.

Think of the biggest, most bombastic artists now: Barney -- Hirst -- who else? Are they really heroes on the scale that Serra was in his time? Or Pollock? Or Judd? Not even close.

Remember the previous crop of heroes? The big marquee names of the '80s: Salle -- Basquiat -- Schnabel -- Kiefer -- who else? And where are they now? Among those who are still alive and painting, Kiefer is the only one I see still making the same kind of work. Salle's work has changed substantially. Much of the work of other artists from the same era has changed substantially since.

Is it that artists are total schmucks now, or is it that the times are different -- that with no narrative, there can be no heroes?

To me it's obvious: with no art narrative it's disingenuous to berate contemporary artists for being something less than art heroes. It's going to take much longer to redeem artists in the same historical terms when the historical narrative itself is very unclear -- when nothing essentially proceeds from anything else.

Concept is ascendant. Style, media, format -- all those material aspects that made Serra, Pollock, Warhol et al the big names they were -- they're in the back seat. It only makes sense, then, that as concepts develop, style, media and format change to best incarnate each new stage of the developing concept.

In a sense we're relearning art from the bottom up. A new narrative is going to emerge, in fact I think it's emerging now. Give it time to develop. Already there are some who are gaining in stature.

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Philip Straub

I enjoyed the privilege of working with illustrator Philip Straub in the children's software field. He was then and remains still at the top of his field.

Since the goo-goo work crashed and burned -- what, Mom, you don't want your little four-year-old staring at a UV-hot monitor for hours and drooling on your keyboard? Who'da thunk it? -- Phil's been a video game illustration bigwig director mucky-muck kinda guy, but he still has a heart for us little people.

Check out his amazing work at his website and watch for more. He's one of the best I know at self-publicity, and new developments are constantly coming in.

Rock on, Phil!

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Where I've Been

Sheer schedule insanity hell, with a few bright spots.

1. Oldest daughter's graduation -- one more to go. Here she is with my lovely parents, who never miss an event even though they live in a dark corner of Uzbekistan and must sell all their goats and the artifacts the plow kicks up in order to bribe the local officials into allowing them to escape in the dead of night.

2. New Hampshire, where the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College is exhibiting a 1942 Jackson Pollock study for a mural that, if you ask me, marks a clear transition between his earlier Thomas Hart Benton-like pieces and his later "Circumcision," "Moon Woman Cuts the Circle," etc pieces. Wish I could have nabbed a photo for it but my camera's down -- (same reason my own website is painfully out-of-date)

3. Teaching insanity. Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most.
4. Website and logo work to help subsidize the aforementioned collegians. Incidentally, if you need a quality upright bass, or if you need one repaired by a master, ask Mike Asetta at Asetta Strings. He's all over it. He's also a terrific jazz musician; check out his play dates and make one if you can.

5. Catch-up on all the household idiocy that accumulates when everything else is going nuts.

• Changed the oil in the Honda (required a chisel -- don't ask).
• Saw the neighbors gathering torches and realized I'd either have to cut the grass or hide out in it for a few weeks.
• Landed on the crawling laundry pile like Steve Irwin on a croc, wrestled it into the car and drove to the laundromat in the dead of night to avoid police curiosity.

More later. Ignore the Serra show at MoMA and focus on Chelsea and your local contemporary art venues.

Contemporary Art is Here to Stay TM
Get It?

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