contemporary monkey

Felix Gonzales Torres, "Untitled", aka flaccid light bulb thingy

“In 1992, he commenced a series of strands of low-watt white lightbulbs, which he strung along walls or vertically, from ceilings.  Alluding to purity, spirituality, and enlightenment, these delicate and flaccid garlands, which willfully surrender to the forces of gravity, are also a campy commentary on the phallic underpinnings of numerous Minimalist creations, particularly Dan Flavins’ rigid light sculptures.”

Um, OK…get much sleep last night?

If you want to get to know the inner workings of someone, the part that allows you to walk in their shoes,  take them to a museum and make them stare at the most inexplicable art piece on the property.

Dan Flavin's electric rods of...sensual-ness-ity-ish?

It’s a difficult job, art analysis.  It’s what binds the middle-men of writers, critics, PR hacks, gallery marketing assistants, museum curators, and most confused art insiders charged with the Herculean effort of decanting contemporary art.  In the end, nearly all share the same results: irrelevance, confusion, disorientation, muddiness, bewilderment  If nothing else, they’re a consistent lot.

I think the quote above was written by someone aching to forget last night’s experience of one-too-many rigid phallic “sculptures”?  Placing the comment back in context - if that’s still possible, because, well, we’re all now thinking about rigid light sculptures - it originates from the Guggenheim Museums’ web site identifying an installation from the works of Felix Gonzales-Torres called Untitled (Arena), 1993.  Gonzales-Torres was considered a pioneer for what was “the next ism” in the 1990s: Relational Aesthetics.  Relational, in that you and a community of people like you as viewers, are creators of the artwork, along with the artist.  In Untitled (Arena), 1993, it works like this: there you are, with a friend that you dragged along to the museum, and who probably didn’t really want to be there in the first place.  Instructions are given for you and your new partner to dance within the confines of the “flaccid garland” of low-wattage light bulbs.  At the time the Guggenheim show took place, in 1993, a walkman was available with dual headphones so the two of you could keep time without looking like goofy white people.

Anyway, that’s Relational Aesthetics, and the point made by Gonzales-Torres was to participate.  His art has absolutely nothing to do with comparing it to a previous, minimalist artist whose chosen medium was fluorescent light tubing.  I know, I know, contemporary art is personal, so maybe someone does see a relation to another artist, and can visualise the comparison of rigid v. flaccid.  But doesn’t that make the Guggenheim complicit in adding more smoke into the fog bank of contemporary art?

On the other hand, it’s OK for you and I to take a guess at meaning, because we’re not art professionals.  According to the Relational Aesthetics people, we’re artists, and we add meaning to objects.  Any creation found in a MOMA, SFMOMA, COMA or even OKLAHOMA was set forth by the artists’ hand, but now it’s our turn.  We don’t need a referee from the Guggenheim to witness the man hug of artist to artist.  It’s our turn to attach some twisted, shape-shifting, amorphous meaning to the still-oozing object/painting/creature we see before us, and hopefully we don’t embarrass ourselves on verbalization.  If the artwork that is currently furrowing your brow says to you, “Ah, clearly  a canonical correlation via plasticity between the Manson family and Paris Hilton,” well that’s fine by me.  It’s probably a passive aggressive tendency with a side order of Reaction Formation, but good for you.  Whoa, look at the time, let’s pick this up next week.  That’ll be £100 Bubba.  Please pay the museum guard on your way out.

Art, if you haven’t noticed, doesn’t pretend to know boundaries. I’m pretty sure it couldn’t find them if it had night-vision goggles, taped up with sonar-enhanced earplugs, connected to Scoville Chili Pepper Heat Index tongue extensions.  The common law of physics that applies to everything else we know, anything within the upper limit of the planet’s atmosphere, is just a bothersome, trifling annoyance for art.  Art doesn’t adhere to science, doesn’t care about it, doesn’t bother listening to it.  Or does it?

The other world, Science Inc., seems to play the game nicely.  The unambiguous world of science throws off a division of itself called Theoretical Physics.  Scientists who are Theoretical Physicists are the comedians of their dull, pragmatic, un-humorous industry.  Forget what you hear about popular stage comedians, these wacky revolutionaries are truly our comic geniuses.  They think of bizarre realities, and try to interpret what life would be like inside this unconventional city.  What’s the distance of the British coastline?  Infinite, say theoretical scientist, because the more you magnify the rough edges, the more undiscovered gaps will appear.  How about days with 25 hours instead of the earthbound, rotationally stuck, 24 hours we usually complain about not having enough of.  We could simply ignore the bothersome planetary rotation thing and make up our own arbitrary rules and abide by a new, albeit flaky, order.  We’d get to see fireworks in the middle of the day.

the art of science

Sean Carroll is one such Theoretical Physicist at California Institute of Technology.  What he thinks about, he admits, isn’t science, and some of it isn’t even theory.  It’s just a different direction in which to take the messy business of reality.  His new book, “From Eternity to Here” wonders why it is that we can remember the past, but can’t remember the future.  In space, we can go up or down, left or right, forward and backward, but time is a dimension with a one way street.  The arrow of time, despite what Hollywood tells us, goes only forward.  It never moves toward yesterday.  Even heavies like Newton and Galileo wondered this, and suggested that we could remember the future, if we only knew everything there was to know.  In theory, the events in our half-baked, unhinged blue marble of a planet could be determined because we’d know fully why things happen in the order that they do.  Say you lose your wallet every twelve years.  You’d plan on carrying no money and credit cards in your wallet on the day you were due for a shocker.  On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a shocker because you would have been prepared for it.  Oh this damned warping of space-time is so confusing!  Someone get Michael J. Fox on the phone.

But you see what I mean about the art of science.  Science at least gives the sinister “other” a go.  A close example from the Art Camp is Anne Truitt, who creates minimalist sculpture.  To sum up her work in a brutish and not very kind phrase, think of very colourful, tall-as-a-woman, square-ish, wooden posts.  Art Forum claims that photographs don’t do the pieces justice, but as I try not to listen to the pretension of Art Forum, I’ve included one of her pieces here.  Art Forum also warns of danger when categorizing Truitt’s style as Minimalist, because, well, categories are for doormats like the scientists, and not for the gallant artist. They don’t like leaving their safe houses, these artists.  Struggling onward into the wooly world of science, however, is Anne Truitt’s concept of life as a sculpture.  Not a life as a sculptor, but that which sculpting begets - the mysterious 3D spawn of artistic invention.

pillars of the community

One morning, while standing in the front room of her house, probably wondering, as all artists do, just what the hell she was thinking graduating with an art degree, Truitt was focused on passing shadows as the sun continued its formidable and inevitable slipping into sunrise.  To paraphrase Truitt’s quote from Art Forum, it is we people, as sculptures, who stand firm, while the sun continues forward.  In that sense, we disarm time; and while we’re not subject to it, we are illuminated by it.

OK, a neat trick, you’re thinking, and we should applaud the metaphysical breakthrough for art in escaping its earthly white cube, and into the chilling cosmos of scientific law.  Scientifically speaking, of course, what she said is not true, but it lends itself to thoughtful poetry, and certainly useful to Truitt as a devisor of art.  You can imagine that a stationary person waiting patiently for a bus, might notice more of life, and therefore time passing, than someone running for that same bus, falling down, spilling a double latte on themselves, with the stationary person not helping at all by laughing loudly.  By the way, this didn’t really happen to me anytime, ever.

Jean Tinguely

Do you ever wonder what artists were like when they were young; when they were a mere five paintbrushes high?  I had a visit to Tate Liverpool this past week, where an exhibit for Jean Tinguely had been in place for a few months.  Tinguely is the perfect artist for men, or as women would say, for boys.  In the 1940s and 50s, Tinguely constructed kinetic sculptures made from bits of metal, electric motors, and some cardboard.  His machines revolved, turned, pivoted, spun, rolled, drew, and even painted, for no other reason than just to move or make marks.  Tinguely was young at heart, and interested in amusing himself first.  His concepts had no other purpose, no bigger reason, than just to exist.  In a 1960’s filming of the construction of one of his mechanized events, a television interviewer asked him what he was trying to express.  Tinguely refused to be caught up in meaning, and said he did it only to express himself.  More artists should be so forthright about the real purpose of their work.  If nothing else, it keeps the curator-speak at bay.

Although difficult to prove, I can imagine Jean Tinguely must have spent tireless hours constructing robotic mechanisms from Meccano (Erector Set in America).  Mecanno was invented in Liverpool during Victorian times, and the city is also the site of a recent James May video which documented the making of a Meccano-built bridge over a canal.  The historical centre of the universe for mechanized rigs seems to be focussed at Liverpool’s Albert Dock these days.

The mechanized artist for the 1950's

Most of the Tinguely’s machines at Tate Liverpool couldn’t be turned on, which was a great shame.  Restoration goes on for a great many oil-based masterpieces; why can’t someone replace a motor, or strengthen a steel joint?  Still, if you have an active imagination, the guts of the machines are visible enough for recreating the motion in your head.  Which is exactly what I did, and enjoyed the show produced in the theatre of my mind.  Those pieces that did work reminded me of watching a factory; like one of those industrial films where cars are snapped together on assembly lines.  This was the real stuff of boys.

Supposedly Tinguely built his mechanisms with the possibility that part of it might not work as predicted.  This bit of predisposed, random chance provided the machine with its own unsupervised form of life, eliminating the artist to at least some extent.  Tinguely didn’t mind this, and in fact knew it would upset the hierarchy in art-dom at the time (1950s).  In this way, he’s the Everyman’s hero.

a mechanized artist - one that can swim

Expressing himself was Tinguely’s main concern, which, in many respects, is what we humans do every day.  For me, Tinguely formalized what art is all about.  It’s something that any one of us does, nearly every day of the week.  If anyone asks what you do for a living, you could always say you’re an artist, and you wouldn’t be lying.

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).

I don’t quite understand the idea of trompe l’oeil, the french phrase for fooling the eye.  Other than the obvious: to prove you can make something so good it fools others into thinking art is reality, it seems to be more science than art.  To be accomplished at it is to be technically skilled, and enormously patient at your special ability.  But that also describes people who make Ferraris.  You’re proving your own virtuosity. Although you could be having a laugh at fooling other people.  Like the roadrunner and coyote in Warner Brothers animation, where the coyote paints a tunnel on a solid face, only for the roadrunner to make the trick a reality.

This week I made my way to see this sort of thing firsthand in Sheffield.  I’ve never been to Sheffield before, itself a trompe l’oeil of English pastures from the Victorian era.  The show was called “Out of the Ordinary” at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, and focused on craft usage in contemporary times.  Among the handful of artist was a Japanese person called Yoshihiro Suda.  The short biography of him is, “He creates hyper-realistic flowers and weeds from wood.”  I get the irony, but isn’t that like carving the perfect pebble from a rock.  Or to use the Ferrari analogy, making a car out of a new refrigerator.  His flower “sculpture” was protected by walls and a security rope where you couldn’t get any closer than about 12 feet.  I was beginning to doubt the quality.  How good can it be if I’m standing across the room to look at it?

Yoshihiro Suda

Trompe l’oeil comes up in the Autumn issue of Tate Etc. magazine as well, where a section of the magazine is devoted to the history of fooling the eye, back to the early 15th century.  Back then the point was to make it as realistic as possible because until then, I guess, nobody did it.  The article continues to 20th century artists like Rene Magritte, Duane Hanson, Andy Warhol.  I remember seeing my first Duane Hanson “statue” of an overweight tourist.  It was more creepy than sublime, but nonetheless it made me flinch, which is what good quality art is supposed to do.  Let’s add that to the list of results from trompe l’oeil: in addition to be impressive by way of its craft quality, it can creep you out too.

In the same article is a reference to a work at the Venice Biennale: a mural by Thomas Demand called “Clearing”.  It’s a very large photograph of the very thing it’s supposed to hide: the forest behind it.  This one goes one loop further though; it’s a photograph, of a sculptural stage, of a photograph of trees.  A long way to go, right?  The sculpture is made from 280,000 separate pieces of coloured paper, constructed by 30 people working for three months.  That IS a long way to go.  Apparently not only do you need the technical mastery to do these things, you have to have a lot of friends, or a lot of money.

Thomas Demand: Clearing

Discoveries this week are this: trompe l’oeil requires loads of patience, technical ability, friends, money and a sense of humour.  All this work to prove one thing: you can do something better than anyone else.  Just like making a Ferrari.