contemporary monkey

As an artist - as a hungry, wanting, miserable-existing, low-rent-living, desperately seeking appreciation artist - wouldn’t you want to have maximum exposure so that any one of us buyers and lovers of art might catch on that you, well, exist?  More philosophically, if you have a showing of your work, and it lasts only one day, do you, or the art itself, really exist?

In the November issue of Art Forum (the leading industry publication, but really the advertising brochure for the art gallery world), we find ourselves an artist committed to producing multiple pieces, only to show them for one, single, here today, gone tomorrow, 24 hour period.  This mysterious exhibit, called Dia de Frutas y Nubes Negras (Day of Fruits and Black Clouds) showed (past tense) a series of empty wooden crates devised by Gabriel Sierra, hanging about the whole of the otherwise empty art space.  His inspiration for the empty crates are taken from a broader idea, the success of which is not worth debating, mostly because nobody saw them.  It is, however, worth pointing out, and reflecting upon, and possibly even to remedy the situation for, the myriad and colourful ways contemporary artists seem to find for lodging bullet firmly in foot.

Gabriel Sierra: Artist for a Day

What’s more, for our intrepid artist above, the one day opening wasn’t enough of a operational hurdle.  The show was held in an area between the centre of Bogata, Columbia and a nearby slum.  For all of us clairvoyant enough to be there on this day of magic, the signage on the outside of the artist-run studio was nearly non-existent (hmmm,  “artist run” you say, perhaps a hint for what went wrong).  Above the art space doorway was one of the artist’s pieces signaling to all passers-by for what lay inside; like a flag for the secret tribe of the world’s least ambitious carpenters.  This was art determined to be ignored.

But let us not cast stones in the house of glass.  Perhaps our artist friend could do with aid from my favourite subject,  “Mathematics for Artists”.  For this second chapter, I thought to help the poor lad out with a bit of logical instruction, in the hopes that other artists might learn from a brethren’s mistake.

KEY TO GRAPH

P = Population. Think of this number as people, animals, even plants that might want to see your show.  You want this number to be a large one.

T = Time. This is a number working against you.  Against all of us actually. This number will always increase, and rarely, if ever,  go backwards (even in the artist world).

The horizontal line has two important points: “o” for open, and “c” for close.  The distance between the two is the duration of your show.  If measured in days, you want this to be a big number; certainly bigger than one, as exemplified by our dauntless friend above.

The vertical axis has two points as well.  The lower one, “n” = nobody. This “n” happens to everyone, even a Jeff Koons or a Damien Hirst.  There has to be a nobody before the show opens; otherwise, it wouldn’t need opening.  The second point, “m” correlates with your new goal, and represents the multitude, or mob, if you like.  As time moves forward, your goal is to get more people to see your work.  That’s why you do, what you do.  This unpleasant, but indispensable “strategy” will greatly benefit your future, and help us out as well.

The third point on the horizontal axis, “r” represents the point in time that critical reviews are published in art magazines.  Reviews have nothing to do with adding more people to your visitor list.  In fact, nearly all reviews surface in the public pool of influence after shows have been closed.  Nobody knows why this is, but keep in mind that it doesn’t matter.  Critical reviews are to the artist, what a spatula is to an athlete: completely useless.

Commit this graphical image to memory and your success is nearly guaranteed.  All you have to do is produce original, thought-provoking art (a mathematical lesson for a later time).

In order to further assist artists with their efforts in gaining a following and thus increasing their importance to the brotherhood of man, I thought to create a mathematical model that explicitly describes a winning formula.  “Simian’s Theorem of Grasp” is a useful device for eliminating those individuals, who, in the end, don’t matter enough to the lonely artist, while optimizing the number of people in the world who do.  We can all do with a little closet cleaning, and to no-one is this activity more important than to the starving artist.

Simian’s Theorem of Grasp states that

x = y - (a + b + c + d);

where the constants and variables are explained to the forlorn artist as follows:

a = you, and, with the possible exception of Grayson Perry, is always constant at 1.  Realistically, if you hope to have a chance with your art, your influence should attempt to reach beyond this lonely number.

b = your friends (variable in number, decreasing with time, and usually insignificant in this filthy business of art.). This group will never tell you that your art is rubbish, and will therefore most likely lie to you when asked by you, “This art, do you get it?”  Your friends are one thing, your friends in art are quite another.  In fact, your true friends will probably thank you for literally leaving them out of the equation.

c = art patrons.  These individuals are usually quite wealthy in cash, but poor in judgement in matters of art.  People in this group can include British bankers, Russian oligarchs, American hedge fund managers, Mexican drug runners, and Charles Saatchi.  When we speak of those with “more money than sense”, it’s this group of whom we speak.

d = sycophantic art culture hangers-on (similar to “b” above, but even less significant in the art scheme of things).  Those in this group act differently than variable “b” in that the number may actually increase with time if you’re represented by powerful, yet delusional, agents.  Please remember however that knowing more of the wrong people doesn’t help you with your goal of making a real difference in the world.

y = everybody on planet earth; including those hard to count tribes in Indonesian jungles.

x = this is perhaps the most important of the variables: this the magical number of willing individuals who seek to derive meaning, or feel emotion, or exhibit love toward your art.  This group can include those that, unprompted, unpaid, and unrehearsed, say they like your work.  The higher this number, the more influential you will be to mankind.  This variable is the antithesis of a,b,c and d combined.  Think of x as the Jedi knights, while a,b,c and d are, well, you know who…

Success in art is really this simple.  It’s been proven to be true by those that have high “x” factors, such as Anish Kapoor, and perversely proven true by those, such as Damien Hirst,  with high “c” and “d” factors.  Please be advised that, because of its greater potential, “x” can be an extremely large number.  The wise artist will use this to his or her advantage, and will soon find that the c’s and d’s of the formula soon become useless and trivial.

Imagine you’re floating in a narrow hole in the ground, a mile deep in the earth’s crust.  It’s useless to scream because nobody would hear you.  And there you are, for the rest of your very quiet and still life, getting to know your new neighbor, mother earth.  It wouldn’t be a comfortable way to complete your up to now agitated and anxiety filled life, but if you were promised a hoist back up to civilization after an hour or so, it might be worth the day-long effort it would take to get you down and back up.  Your day would be filled with the earth belching, squealing, screaming, farting, rumbling, whatever earths do when they’re not being paid attention to.  If you’re an environmentalist, it’s your version of swimming with dolphins.  If you’re a monk, it would make your wooden, mountain-top shanty seem like Las Vegas in comparison.  In fact, if you’re a monk, you’d buy a one way ticket.

Doug Aitlen

Los Angeles artist, Doug Aitken has made such a hole.  While you can’t go down it, he makes the trip more convenient by bringing the sonic chat show up to the surface.  Aitken has just completed a five-year project that demands you to make a visit to a sculpture park in the middle of Brazil.  In the same vein as James Turrell, Aitken’s project requires remoteness, a sense of place, and a nice spot to move some dirt.  He’s in luck because a collector by the name of Bernardo Paz has provided him space to do it in Brazil’s Instituto Inhotim.  We mere dreamers, however, are out of luck because the space is a six hour drive from Rio de Janeiro.  Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion is billed as a quiet space on a hill, lined with frosted glass on all sides, presumably to take you out of one world, and into another.  Inside the room is the hole, with a microphone - a really good and brave microphone - dropped one mile down into a concrete-reinforced earth barrel.  The sounds are retrieved, amplified and filtered through room speakers, where, we’re told, the noise never repeats itself.  We’re going on the theory that Aitken isn’t taking us for a ride, and the microphone really is down there.  And it’s really making the sound coming out of the speakers.

The project is such a great idea that it’s unthinkable no one has thought to use the internet as a delivery network.  Earth racket to everyone, anytime, anywhere.  Science museums, to mention the obvious patron, would love this, but it’s equally interesting as art.  Keep the hubbub going 24 hours a day by sealing it inside a quiet room in a gallery or museum.  I’m sure there isn’t money to be had by Aitken’s gallerists to do this, but the outrageous publicity wouldn’t hurt sales for any of Aitken’s other projects either.

Spock, the better days

I’d even settle for a peaceful room in a gallery with limited visitation rights.  The gallery could sort out a queue system where visitors spend 15 minutes in a darkened, sound-baffled room, and we could all imagine ourselves trapped in the great void of nothingness.  Like Spock when his body was shot off into space.  Except Spock was dead, sort of.  You could even send in a hopelessly stubborn child to correct misbehaviour.  Let him scream his complaining little lungs out.  You couldn’t send in Paris Hilton though, because the earth would probably run away.  And then where would we be?  Floating in Spock-like nothingness watching the earth flee the solar system.

like Amiga, but with paint

In October of 2009, the internet turned 40 years old.  Not the web, or as some would call it, the Google machine; I mean the internet, developed by ARPANET for the US military to withstand a Soviet nuclear missile attack.  Images on the internet arrived later, around 1990, when the CERN Institute developed the world wide web. I bring these dates up because they seem so long ago; the wow factor hasn’t been palpable since the late 20th century.  Or so I thought.

Digital art, while not widely accepted by the art buying public (i.e., merchant bankers), is widely followed by a global audience.  Its gallery, however, is mostly online so you’d have to know where to look to find it.  Even with limited appeal, however, there it is; raging wildly and completely toward the Next Big Thing.  Digital styles vary from futuristic, technology-pushing 3D imagery coded to audio, fireworks, and probably even orgasm, to something completely not that - sentimental remembrances of 8 bit digital: the old space invader imaging.  If you missed the digital art revolution, you were probably buried under a rock, or possibly banished to whatever the equivalent of the art gulag would be.  Crawford, Texas maybe.

Semyon Faibisovich isn’t from anywhere near Texas, at least not topographically.  He’s from Moscow.  But the digital distance between he and Crawford’s most popular citizen isn’t that far.  Faibisovich at one time painted in the realism style, but traded canvas for film in the past two decades.  During this time, the former Soviet Union was crumbling beneath the merciless weight of its arch enemy: Conceptual Art.  While Faibisovich was off conceptualizing, digital photography was busy happening.

Faibisovich is being shown at the IKON Gallery in Birmingham, where he’s uploaded (OK, hung) large format images on the IKON’s walls (or as I call them, old-style screens).  He’s back painting large formats using very small source material, and he’s done most of it within the past few years.  Walking around the Moscow district of Razgulyai, he’s captured what passes for life by way of a mobile phone camera.  As most of us know, camera phones today are terrible at reproduction, but handy when you need it.  Like when your friends are throwing shots of high octane alcohol down their necks at a Spanish bar and the moment Must Be Recorded.  Nobody pretends the quality is going to be any good, with the results eventually getting sucked down the drain of the digital dark underworld of forgotten photos.  Or maybe that’s just me hopin’ and wishin’.

Faibisovich seems to have just now discovered the technological fault of the ubiquitous comrade of the proletariat.  Starting with highly-pixellated mobile photographs, he then distorts the image further through either Photoshop filters, or his own paintbrush.  The result is the digital equivalent of Monet or Renoir.

just prior to the introduction of digital photography

Pixellation isn’t new to art. Digital artists have used old fashioned computer images to achieve a kind of distressed or atavistic effect.  Faibisovich is simply doing what the impressionists and post impressionists did, but with some help from a mobile camera phone.  It’s like he’s just discovered the 20th century world of pixels through photography and manipulation.  This doesn’t seem contemporary to me.  Faibisovich is just someone who’s playing catch-up with the rest of the world, and thinks he’s on to something. He’s like the Brendan Fraser Neanderthal character in Encino Man (California Man to British People).  The content is only interesting from one point of view, and it isn’t ours.

What I found more curious was the amount of manipulation that varied among the works.  Some sections of the pieces Faibisovich has left alone, where the final enlargement is magnified relentlessly from the original source.  Other bits were recorded over with oil, which to me would suggest that he must have had a reason for supplementing some bits and not others.  What were those reasons?  As I’ve said before, knowing why an artist does something can be more interesting than the way he does it.

In fact, let’s make a rule: art can only be called contemporary if it feeds the creative spirit of our time…events within the last 10 years.  If it’s just catch-up art, then maybe the work is best suited for the museums.  Or the nostalgia bin.