contemporary monkey

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.

Zaha Hadid: one of the few soul-full

In the never-ending comparison between men and women, to me the variations are never as stark as they are dramatically overblown.  That philosophy proved to be true at the Pompidou Centre’s “Elle’s@centrepompidou” exhibition this past week.  Unfortunately, that’s a bad thing for women.  The works displayed were all 20th and 21st century pieces by women from The Centre’s collection.  I wonder if they’re all in a women’s locker room somewhere, separated from the male pieces?

When it comes to art after the 1950’s, women are equal to men in visual representing an idea. Never underestimate the power of disappointment to cross all boundaries.  Anything hanging on a wall at the Pompidou Centre seemed to fall into the Tracy Emin trap of making “objet weird”, made for shock purposes only.  From the vantage point of the 21st century, it all seems so quaint.  Women have successfully advanced since the 1960s, maybe not where they need to be, but certainly a giant leap for (wo)man-kind.  The social contract with men on display here is so outdated as to cause more confusion than create meaning.  One exception was Guerrilla Girls, who have rightly recognized women in the role of equal citizen, but convince us in their own humorous way.  Taking your audience forward is always more successful than reliving the past.

Typical of the installations was a Marina Abramovic video.  Whatever fascination Abramovic has with the concept of time, it’s not very interesting to the rest of us.  In a video that repeats itself, dulling its viewers with the phrase, “Art must be beautiful.  Artist must be beautiful.”  Abramovic brushes her hair in front of a camera.  For about 30 minutes.  The rumour is that the video continues with the same action, until she’s destroyed her hair and face.  I forced myself to watch 10 minutes of it, and it looked more like self-love than self-flagellation.  The point was made after 30 seconds, and it appeared that most people around me agreed by being swifter out of the room.

Louise Nevelson

A few areas of the exhibition that I thought succeeded though, were in the category of 3D.  Zaha Hadid is one of the most inventive designers of space, and the exhibition created a small place for photos and drawings of her buildings.  Louise Nevelson was also present through a monumental wooden piece called, “Reflexions of a Waterfall I”.  The form and space created transcended the smallness of the show’s purpose of female/male differences.  Along with Hadid, Nevelson made me think of the female sense of physical placement in space as something special and possibly unique.  I think.  I’m not sure why men couldn’t have that same sense, but maybe we don’t.  We’re better at parking cars, aren’t we guys?

In Art and Auction, June 2009 issue, Jack Kilgore gives good advice for appreciating art.  He says, “Art is a form of communication, and the pictures must have a soul.  They have to have something special.  You know it when you see it.”  I saw very little soul at the Pompidou, but I did witness confirmation of what I knew before going in.  While men and women might approach life from different perspectives, as contemporary artists they are alike: most of the time, self-indulgent with occasional traces of hope.

Something that Jeffrey Deitch said in the book, Collecting Contemporary (by Adam Lindemann) I thought was a very useful idea for understanding contemporary art.  Deitch is one of New York’s art dealers, with a background in finance as well as art.  Although he doesn’t come out and say it, his perspective is one where art is collectible for financial gain.  Still, what do you do with a Harvard degree, and Citibank Art Advisory on your CV?  I’m guessing the phrase “capital gain” comes up in his conversations with clients.

But everyone has their reasons for existing in the art world, and for a moment, let’s give Deitch credit for creative thinking.  He looks for an artist who “creates his or her own aesthetic world, as opposed to an artist who’s just making a nice object.  There are a lot of artists who make very nice objects, but you can’t really say that there is a whole vision of the world that you can grasp in their work.”

Creating worlds is a place where traditional story tellers excel, and artists should be held to the same level of expectation.  For example, in film, the Coen Brothers create their own worlds, and whatever the outcome to the protagonist, we’re always someplace we’ve never been.

Fargo: Joel and Ethan Coen

There was an online video once about a London artist by the name of Richard Galpin (Hales Gallery) where we followed along with him as he created his own invention using existing photographs.  Working with an enlarged C-Print of an existing city centre, he slowly peels away slices and sections of the original photograph, revealing his version of a futurist’s cityscape. The result shares very little with the original photo, but is useful as a “blank” screen for ground breaking results after a few hours.  It’s a revolutionary approach in that the world he’s given is not the world he’s taking.

Richard Galpin: Distructure 1

More outrageousness from “Collecting Contemporary” by Adam Lindemann: a little game that galleries enjoy playing that involves some heavy handedness.  In the game of collecting, there’s usually an unwritten rule (although sometimes it’s actually written into a contract): when it comes time to sell a piece, the collector is obliged to give the gallery from which it was bought the first right of re-purchase before throwing it to the dogs at auction.  Galleries don’t like to see their stable of well-stocked artists find more money from auctions than if they just sold the art to another collector.  The fear is that the artist could just eliminate the gallery as an unnecessary middle man, and go straight to the auction house for a higher price.  Seems that the relationship between artist and gallery is this tenuous.  In fact, the British artist Damien Hirst performed this very act in September 2008 by going directly to auction - Sotheby’s - and surpassed the £62 million high estimate.  He’s only one artist (and the first), but the initial crack in the foundation has been scored.

I'm on me own now

The threat to a collector for not working with the gallery is very real.  If the gallery feels slighted, the collector’s name gets passed along to other galleries as someone who doesn’t deserve further sales.  For a limited supply of art, that’s a big thumping for the fawning collector.  Effectively, they’re black-balled, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s also illegal.

The venom of the gallery is understandable, but this is nothing new.  Real businesses operate with “unfaithful” customers all the time.  That’s why brand image is so important…and unique products and services.  Apple Computers know they may be selling to customers that could easily buy a PC - for less money even, but they don’t, because the product and service is deemed valuable than anything Microsoft could create.  The customer never feels a need to be permissive.

Finally, if a collector is obliged to approach the gallery first, doesn’t the gallery then have the responsibility to purchase the piece back if the auction price is lower than the original purchase price?  Why doesn’t it swing both ways?

Having access to artists because you say they’re important is not really a service.  At one point, middlemen do one of two things: they either make themselves a more valuable element in the equation, or they go away.