Michael Kimmelman on Art

I just watched My Kid Could Paint That. It would make a great double-feature with Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? The two documentaries are flip-sides of the same coin--they both explore issues of authenticity, authorship, and art-world insiders/outsiders.

I suspect Amir Bar-Lev, who made My Kid Could Paint That, originally intended to use the story of the 4-year old painter (whose paintings were selling for upwards of $10-15k) as a narrative thread to explore "what is art" and the inconsistencies in the art world's psyche. However, that path becomes derailed when a 60 Minutes expose throws doubt on the the child as an artist. The documentary shift gears and becomes a self-referencing reflection on the documentarian's relationship with his subjects and the ethical dilemmas it poses.

In the documentary, Michael Kimmelman gave very straightforward, but enlightening overviews of the art-related issues raised. The DVD's special features also included "Michael Kimmelman on Art":

15 Criteria that Define New Media Art

After much research, the Near Future Laboratory has come out with a list of the top 15 criteria that define interactive & new media art.

Here are a selected few:

15. It doesn't work

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13. Your audience looks under/behind your table/pedestal/false wall/drop ceiling or follows wires to find out "where the camera is"

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11. Your audience "interacts" by clapping/hooting/making bird calls/flapping their arms like a duck or waving their arms wildly while standing in front of a wall onto which is projected squiggly lines

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0. There are instructions on how to experience the damn thing

See the full list (plus 3 bonus criteria) at Near Future Laboratory's blog.

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

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.

The Power of Sculpture

WARNING: This post may have too much pretentious artspeak. I've been mulling over a few ideas this last week... as I began to write them down, I realized that the thoughts have a semiotic slant to them. It goes downhill from there :)

I was recently looking at a show and trying to figure out why one of the artist's works seemed much more powerful than the others. Eventually I realized most of the pieces were representing a thing rather than simply being a thing. The work that struck me most was different. It was the most object-like; it wasn't trying to present anything other than itself.

I'm not really talking about representation versus abstraction... rather, something like the semiotic distinction between a signifier (the word that represents a thing) and the signified (the actual object or mental concept). Most artistic mediums inherently have a signifier/signified relationship to the world. Almost every painting, even the most abstract, are trying to present something, not just be something. There are exceptions to that (Robert Irwin's work comes to mind).

But setting aside exceptions, most mediums don't lend themselves to an existential solidness. Sculpture, however, is a medium that can simply be (as opposed to signifying something outside of its own existence). Sculpture is the only visual medium that has an natural affinity for this. This doesn't (necessarily) mean that sculpture is the better medium. But I do think sculpture that steps outside of this signifier/signified duality has the power of directness--nothing is loss in translation. What is more, the object gains a measure of emancipation from the artist's intention; it's no longer just a symbol.

I was looking for an artist whose work might show the range of what I'm describing and decided on Rebecca Horn. The first sculpture (located on a Barcelona beach) is Homentage a la Barceloneta. It is definitely has a sense of representing/signifying a warehouse or apartment building. It's made out of COR-TEN steel, which is a fairly common sculpture material and adds to the sense of "artwork" as opposed to it simply being an object on its own terms. This is an unusually conventional (and signifying) artwork for Horn.

This second work from 2000, Schmetterling-Skulpture (Butterfly Sculpture), takes a step away from signfying. The viewer is left to decide whether it is meant to be viewed as a butterfly or whether it is something of its own.

The third sculpture, from her Bodylandscapes series seems to exist in its own right. The ink sprayer, as the series title suggests, may reference the body and perhaps IV drip bags, but it also seems to have its own integrity and power.

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A little off topic, but these thoughts of reminded me of Sherrie Levine's 1979 work where she re-photographed Walker Evans's famous depression era photos. I think the connection is that her photographs can be seen as signifying the photographs (as opposed to the images originally taken). Michael Mandiberg has a pair of websites (AfterWalkerEvans.com and AfterSherrieLevine.com) where he presents scans of those images.