Noah K Everyday

Noah Kalina has been taking his photo daily since January 11, 2000. His project has caught popular imagination and often inspires imitators & homages (via Shoot! The Blog):

Homer Everyday



Microsoft Istanbul



Dunkin' Donuts Commercial



FSN Baseball Commercial



Melbourne Film Festival Trailer



Noah isn't the first to use this technique, as he readily admits. From his site's FAQ:

Does anybody else do this?
Of course. It was definitely an original idea in my head, and I was doing the project for over 3 years until I found out somebody else was up to it too… and for longer! Check out Jonathan Keller. He has a great website and a wonderful compilation of daily photo projects as well as other truly awesome obsessive photography projects.

Do you mind if I do this?
No of course not! It's an awesome project and you will impress all of your friends. Send me a link if you make it longer than a year.

Jonathan Keller has been doing it since 1998:




And I'm reminded of Sam Hsieh's even earlier (1980-81) Time Piece One Year Performance.

Chinese paintings

There has been a lot of attention paid to Chinese art lately. Contemporary Chinese art is certainly hot, hot, hot... Cai Guo-Qiang's show at the Guggenheim, for example. We Make Money Not Art has a recent big post about Chinese contemporary art.

But today, I'm writing about Chinese art-in-bulk that's being pumped out by assembly-line painters.

Back in December, The Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows wrote about his visit to the Dafen "art factory village" outside Shenzhen, in southern China. (The above photo is Fallow's).


YouTube has an (embeddable) tv news segment on the village.

A organization called Regional claims that 60% of the world's paintings come from Dafen. Boing Boing has a posting about an interesting project that Regional is doing in Dafen. (Unfortunately Regional's website is currently down, probably due to the traffic overload that often comes with a Boing Boing link).

Regional productively collaborated with the otherwise commoditized community in Dafen by asking selected individuals, some for the first time, to imagine themselves in their professional medium. The final works show the technical, creative, and professional facets of the artists identities subsumed by the styles and relationships they maintain with specific famous artists. The hybrid result of original subject with derivative style comments on originality, global cultural production and Regional's cooperation with emerging enterprise forms that are internationalizing the village

One of Edward Winkleman's recent postings (about when an artist and gallery goes separate ways) has a comment:

Anonymous said...

I love reading the comments on this blog.
I've never jumped in before but here goes…I show with several galleries. I sell maybe a dozen paintings a year. I was a little sick of the artist /gallery paradigm. So I rethought and reconstructed how I work. I still do the museum installations and participate in group and solo shows but I also manufacture a separate body of work in China. I have 10,000 paintings (one container) arriving in July and another in early Sept. They are all bought and I can relax for a bit.

4/18/2008 09:05:00 PM

The Way Things Go

My earlier mention of art being co-opted for commercials made me think about the Honda's Cog commercial that borrowed heavily from Peter Fischli & David Weiss's Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) (1987).

Here's an excerpt from Fischli & Weiss's 30 minute film:


And here's the car commercial which, according to Snopes, took 606 takes (and 6 million dollars) to make:

Appropriate appropriation

One is not like the other... can you spot which of the three artworks (above & to the right) is different?

Two of the images are conceptual art by Christine Bailey, who mimicked artist Cara Ober's style for a recent show in the T. Rowe Price lobby in Baltimore. The top image is Ober's and the two bottom images are Bailey's.

Ober, not surprisingly, was upset. She was quoted in a Baltimore Sun article:

The best analogy is this: How would you feel if someone stole something from you that you loved and cared for?" said Ober, 33, who lives in Charles Village and teaches art classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art. "It's a bitter pill to swallow."

Bailey explained the show's motivation in an (after-the-fact) email to Ober:

For me, this was very much a project about how or if I could steal someone's artistic identity and what that would look like. Could I be the Old Navy to Cara Ober's The Gap?

A Washington Post article connects the appropriation show (which was called "New Work by Christine Bailey") to Bailey's earlier work of "curating" shows of imaginary artists based on virtual online personalities (a Second Life character, the Ikea online assistant, etc.):

...She's adopted someone else's manner specifically as a way to move away from the standard issues of taste and the cliches of personal identity and expression that still tend to govern art, especially in more conservative scenes such as Baltimore's. "I'm really interested in the idea of anonymity, and not having a brand -- moving from style to style. . . . I really enjoyed making these paintings, because I didn't have to bring anything personal to it."

On a side note, the Post article (by Blake Gopnik, who discloses that his wife is a colleague of Bailey's) is markedly dismissive of Ober's work:

Bailey's paintings capture all of Ober's telltale tricks and tics. Nostalgic imagery is pulled from older sources. Bird books, old encyclopedias, decorative wallpapers? Check. Tender, pastel colors -- soft washes of pale yellows, blues and pinks -- with brooding splashes of black on top? Check. Scraps of dictionary definitions, presented in old-timey fonts? Check. An overriding sense of capital-P Poetry, without ever making clear quite what that poetry's about? Check.

Mate?

Whether one considers Ober's art interesting or not is parenthetical to the larger issue... and to take pot shots at it seems mean-spirited in this context.

Irene Hoffman, the director of Baltimore's Contemporary Museum, suggests that an audience's knowledge of the appropriation is key:

On the one hand, the success of any act of appropriation requires a knowledge of the source. Was the appropriation evident to the audience? If so, it's a very similar gesture to those of other, more famous artists, where the audience recognizes the source.

I think Hoffman speaks to the heart of the matter. Bailey's show certainly explores interesting issues... artists spend years building up a style & body of work. In comparison, mimicking an artistic style is quite easy. To take the mimicking short-cut questions what is the value of the pioneering effort (& sincerity) of the original artist... and whether the artist matters at all.

Circling back to Hoffman's comment about the audience recognizing the appropriation, it strikes me that Bailey's show could be more effective the original artist's involvement (which would also settle any ethical questions about plagiarism). Much more effective than a show that silently copies the work of some artist whose work I'm not familiar with, would be a show in which an example of the original artist's work is paired with Bailey's style appropriation. And why limit it to one artist, the show could consist a dozen such side-by-side comparisons.

Update: I was looking at Cara Ober's blog and noticed this post, where she gave Bailey's space to explain the thinking behind the appropriation exhibition.

Coffee, knitting, rice and data visualization

I hope I write a coherent post this morning... just now I almost spooned the cat's breakfast into my coffee pot. Oh well, I'm sure I'll wake up once I have a nice hot cup of Iams.

The photo above shows the News Knitter project by artists Ebru Kurbak and Mahir M. Yavuz (it comes via Turbulence's Networked Performance blog). Kurbak & Yavuz write:

News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: whereas one receives the content from live feeds the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period.

My sweetie is learning to knit, so I've been thinking about knitting based art recently (I missed it, but about a year ago the Museum of Art & Design had a Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting show). When I read about the News Knitter I wanted to find the work compelling, but honestly I don't. I think it runs into some common problems in technology-based art:

Data visualization. This is one of the more common approaches for making Internet art. The Internet gives access to tons of information and it makes sense that artworks using the medium want to investigate its particularities. However, since this well has been dipped into so many times, one needs to think twice before having data visualization be the center of an artwork. At the very least, the result should have some point beyond "jeez, isn't this a neat looking graphic?"

Novelty art. I'm still trying to come up with the most pithy description of this problem. Novelty art is the best one I've come up with, but I had been thinking about demo-art as well. Essentially this is art which is most compelling in how it shows off a cool new technology. The way I put this in my "Teaching Philosophy" essay is:

Working with technology, particularly new technology, has the danger of resulting in art that is more focused on demonstrating the potential of the medium than on transcending it.

I worry about this alot in my own art because I think it's an easy trap to fall into. But the result is empty calories... you get a confection which might taste sweet for a moment, but ultimately isn't satisfying. Plus, once that technology is more wide-spread, the novelty-artwork loses all appeal. It's great to explore new technology, but the resulting artwork needs to be able to stand on its own... the fact that computerized knitting machines are nifty isn't really good enough.

Another data visualization/manifestation project is the eRiceCooker. Here's what it does:

eRiceCooker tracks Internet news about genetically modified rice. Whenever there is a new report about GM rice, a quarter cup of rice is dispensed into the cooker. When the cooker has enough rice for a meal, water is added automatically to the rice and the cooker is switched on. When the rice is done, an email is sent out to inviting people to eat the rice.

The more news reports appear, the more rice is cooked, the more often invitations are sent out. The project is designed to create awareness to issues surrounding genetically modified organisms by producing excessive amounts of cooked rice and attempting to feed people with it.

Currently, eRiceCooker is doing the following google news searches: GMO Rice, Gen-reis, GMO.

The eRiceCooker was made by Annina Rüst at MIT, and as student work it is very nice. But there's some aspect of it which prevents me from fully enjoying it. Here's what I think it is:

Why? In the case of the News Knitter, why tie it to the news? Is there some resonance at work there? There doesn't appear to be... it seems a random connection. News about genetically modified rice and the rice cooker is better connected, but still not fully satisfying to me. Towards the end of this post, I'll more fully explain why.


I bet you thought the coffee in the title of this posting was about my problems making it this morning. Nope! The third artwork I'd like to discuss is Benjamin Brown's News Brews.

News Brews is Brown's 2007 thesis project at the Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University.

The News Brews device is an exploration of the possibility of creating a beverage which provides information about the daily news. News Brews connects to internet news feeds and parses them to determine the relative frequency at which different coffee growing regions are mentioned. It then brews a cup of coffee from freshly ground whole beans which contains relative proportions of beans grown in the regions in that day's news.

On a side note, the project does have a design flaw: the coffee simply pours out as the news arrives. If there isn't a cup there, or if it is filled, you get a mess. This is a nice--though unintended--metaphor for being overwhelmed with news saturation.

News Brews is basically the same concept as the eRiceCooker, perhaps to a fault... Brown looked a bit chagrined when I gently mentioned the similarity. Setting aside the issue of originality, there is something about News Brews that works better for me than the eRiceCooker. I've been mulling over why I prefer News Brews. Here's what I have come up with:

News and coffee seem to go together... I read the news while drinking coffee in the morning. While "news about rice" is, of course, tied to rice... news in general doesn't seem to relate. So why GM rice? Why the news? My suspicion is that eRiceCooker began with the idea of automating cooking rice and that the genetically modified issue was grafted on later. Adding to this is the problem is that the eRiceCooker is political art, and (in my opinion) political art really needs to be perfect--there's not the room for looseness that might be acceptable in other works of art.

The eRiceCooker is ostensibly about GM foods... so what exactly is the connection between news reports about GM rice and eating (presumably) non-GM rice? The artist's description above seems to tie an abundance of news articles/cooked-rice to GM crops producing larger yields. She refers to "excessive" amounts of rice, which seems a bit off-message. Larger crop yields is a good thing, but presumably the artist feels GM crops are not. Perhaps a tighter conceptualization would be to borrow News Brews's idea of a news blend. The cooker could mix rice (representing articles about rice in-general) with some bittering agent such as quinine (representing the GM news articles)... so that the people eating the rice are eating a representation of how GM foods are corrupting our food supply.

Thoughts (i.e., comments) on the matter are certainly welcomed!

Golan Levin & Andrea Boykowycz's "unfunny" finger puppets

Golan Levin has some very funny Dutch masterwork recreations on his site. Even funnier is what he has to say about trying to show them at a Dutch art show:

My partner Andrea made all of the costumes and spent a long time crouched underneath a cardboard box while I carefully positioned her fingers. It was a new experience for me when the show's curator refused to exhibit the work he had commissioned, even though it was already listed in the catalogue. The explanation he provided was that the photos "weren't funny". About a week later I received an even more puzzling request to exhibit the project in a Taiwanese digital art festival.

Derivations redux

Here's another interesting artistic originality situation (I wrote an earlier posting on the subject). BoingBoing posted Lei Xue's porcelain beer cans. I commented on how similar the art looks to Charles Krafft's work and ended up taking part in the following discussion with J. Black:

#1 posted by Ethan , January 2, 2008 9:36 AM

Looks like Charles Krafft's work... or, if not, someone being very derivative of his art.

#3 posted by j.black , January 2, 2008 10:20 AM
Meh. I don't think it's right in saying Lie Xue's work is derivative of Krafft's. The medium might be similar, but the message I'm reading from them is totally different.

Krafft's use of Dutch Delft style porcelain paired with modern weaponry oozes suggestions of warfare in Europe as a timeless-yet-current situation which is both fragile and something that we keep with us as a cultural heirloom.

Lie Xue on the other hand, produces ultra iconic Ming (maybe a Kangxi hybrid!) presentation style porcelain. Traditionally used for, well, being presented to diplomats or other 'official' uses, Xue's assimilation of the techniques to produce crushed soda/beer cans is much more subversive than Krafft's in-your-face statement of fragile war. It's much more about what 'officials' do with gifts given to them in good will, or how we treat disposable/precious objects.

#4 posted by Ethan , January 2, 2008 10:42 AM Appropriation/influence/originality/etc. is certainly an issue that have to continually grapple with... we all run into situations where one of our works is evocative (perhaps overly evocative) of something someone else has done.

Generally I put myself into the position of the artist doing the more recent work (Lie Xue, in this case) and ask myself would I be comfortable with the similarity... in this case I wouldn't. Perhaps the contextual avenues these two artists are exploring are different, but the roads have ended up in the same place: works that are most striking in their ostranenie niftiness. Look at it this way, there's many, many different ways Lie Xue could explore the issues you mention--why choose one which is formally so similar to someone else's work (especially given that the work ends up being a visual pun)?

Here's a recent blog post I did on a similar situation (i.e., one work of art being, perhaps, overly similar to another).

#6 posted by j.black , January 2, 2008 1:21 PM
Ethan, I still think it is important to look at the styles of pottery which each artist is using to de-familiarise the respected physical objects themselves - because each style has it's own unique subtext. They're both blue glazes, certainly, but mock-Delft does not equal mock-Ming (Kangxi?) and vice versa. The significance of each glazes historical weight makes these two pieces extremely different - as does the violent object (weapondry) vs the pleasurable-sustinance object (refreshing drink vessel). Because of that I think it's wrong to say that Lie Xue's work is formally similar to Krafft's and thus derivative. They are simply artists using ceramics with traditional style glazes. If all works who use traditional ceramic techniques but with a ostranenie twist, does that mean Shary Boyle is derivative too?

#7 posted by Ethan , January 2, 2008 2:08 PM
Well, I think it's clear that Boyle visual style is distinct from Krafft, whereas Lie Xue's isn't.

You seem to be suggesting that the visual similarity doesn't matter much because the presumed conceptual intention is so very different. Again, if Lie Xue is working from such a different set of concepts, why not use a more original formal way of expressing it? If the formal manifestation is so unimportant, then why use a visual gimmick that is so closely associated with another artist? What you suggest as the conceptual underpinnings of Lie Xue's work seem much more profound than the resulting image (which, again, is a bit of a visual pun).

If I decided to create laptops, iPhones, & other bits of computer technology in ceramic with English willow patterns, would I be comfortable? I'm using a different ceramic pattern and it isn't weapons or drinking vessels and I'm sure I could explain why my concept is different. Again, perhaps you or others would feel differently, but I would think that it is a case of being too derivative and would scrap the idea (even if I made the artwork before being aware of Krafft).

It may seem like I'm advocating unbridled originality, but I generally think originality is over-rated... anything worth doing is worth doing more than once. If an idea is so fragile it loses its specialness upon being explored more than once, then it really is just a shallow novelty. I think Krafft's Delft work falls in this category--that's not to say it isn't worthwhile, just that it's limited in how often it can be repeated and still be interesting.

onKawaraUpdate(V2)

onKawaraUpdate (V2) is a new internet-based artwork by the MTAA guys (M. River & T. Whid). Here's what they say about the piece

This art work updates and automates (via software) the process-oriented nature of On Kawara's date paintings. The artist's labor is essential to process-oriented art. What happens when that labor is removed?

If this web site is visited by anyone on a particular day, a date page is created. If no one visits on a particular day, no date page is created. Click the large date for news clips from that day. Click the 'more' link for archives.

Derivations

Last summer Artbash, a New Zealand art blog, had a posting about the similarity between Rama Port's "Pull" (2007) and Mona Hatoum's "Pull" (1995). Hatoum version is on top and Port's second.
















My comment on the posting was this:

The reactions of the various parties (artist, director, academic) has a "circle the wagons" defensive feel. I don't think it's reasonable to expect even an art-educated person to catch the reference and it is pretty standard for artists to include "after X" when referencing even much more well-known and seminal works (e.g., Sherrie Levine's "Fountain after Marcel Duchamp"). Since Port has already renamed the work once (from "Hair Pull" to "Pull"), it seems reasonable for her to rename it again, acknowledging the borrowing.

This next thought comes with the caveat that I haven't seen either work in person, so I may be off base.

One thing that strikes me is that Hatoum's piece is richer in terms of content [what appears to be a monitor is Hatoum herself, so unbeknownst to the gallery-goer, pulling the braid actually pulls Hatoum's hair]. If Hatoum was the artist doing the appropriating, I would think, "Hmm... well she has really taken it to another level with the performative aspect and the exploration of simulation vs. reality." Port's version doesn't seem to add anything, but rather lessen it and not take it anywhere new.

So imagine my surprise when I was flipping through the Tinguely Museum's catalog for "Bewegliche Teile: Formen des Kinetischen" ("Moving Parts: Forms of the Kinetic") and I came across Günther Uecker's "Sandspirale" (1970). It has a very striking similarity to Hatoum's "+ and -" (1994). Uecker sculpture is on top and Hatoum's second (you can click on the images to see a larger version).

Hatoum's "+ and -" is a gallery-sized version of her tabletop "Self-Erasing Drawing" (1979). Hatoum and Uecker are both well enough known artists that I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this, so there's probably nothing amiss. I am curious, though, what is the relationship between the two artworks. Does Hatoum acknowledge Uecker's influence on her sculpture? Have they ever discussed it? Does she recall seeing "Sandspirale" before creating "+ and -"?

The sculptures have their differences... Uecker's chains cause more organic and meandering lines, whereas Hatoum's sculpture includes the concept of endless erasing. Still, the similarities are more striking than the differences.

My position on originality is that it's over-rated... anything worth doing is worth doing more than once. If an idea is so fragile it loses its specialness upon being explored more than once, then it really is just a shallow novelty. That being said, I'd be pretty uncomfortable if I were the maker of "+ and -." At the very least, I'd want to acknowledge Uecker in the title (unless there's some understanding with him to the contrary) and would seriously consider scrapping my version altogether simply to avoid the appearance of plagiarism.