OPEN SPACE

“We work too hard. / We’re too tired / To fall in love. / Therefore we must / Overthrow the government.” —Rod Smith……………

Spring, at art school is an emotionally schizophrenic season. The weather tends to be glorious (and pollen-filled) as it was today, and campuses pulse with alternating currents of stress, anxiety, hope, exhaustion, and celebration as everyone lurches to the finish line. That was definitely the mix at SFAI this evening when the campus was buzzing with multiple activities—MA thesis presentations, exhibitions, food carts, bands, red plastic cups, and a keg. To this, was added the Northern California stop of Teach 4 Amerika, a Creative Time-sponsored project by the contrarian art collective Bruce High Quality Foundation. San Francisco is the next to last stop in an eleven city tour of American art schools. (Full disclosure—I invited them as part of SFAI’s Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series, which I coordinate.)The group, perhaps best known for their ambulance/hearse/gallery in the last Whitney Biennial, has been touring in another potently reconfigured vehicle—a tattered limo, crudely painted to look like a school bus.

According to their Wikipedia entry, the BHQF was “created to foster an alternative to everything,” this tour intending to counter the pervasive model of art school, which their spokesperson, of a group of Bruces named Seth, termed “MFA-mills.” The presentation itself fit right in to the seasonal ebullience and anxiety combo. It started off with convivial spectacle—the lecture hall was littered with multicolored balloons as the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band, perched in upper seats, belted out American standards and late model rock hits, as BHQF members, wielding a bazooka-like device, shot tie dye tour t-shirts and pint-size pennants to an audience primarily composed of art students. The transformation of the space was remarkable—a room more used to witnessing art history lectures or artist talks, now hosted a cross between a game show and pep rally.

BHQF is nothing if not snarky, and the Powerpoint presentation was just that, essentially offering a child of the 1970s as the model for the current, aspiring art student. While comprised primarily of images that played like art savvy America’s Funniest Internet Nuggets (and numerous clips of Barack Obama), it couldn’t live up to the energetic pre-show promise. In a nutshell (though more often, the presentation compared art school to a nut house via numerous clips from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest“), Seth’s point is that the increasing cost and accredited standardization of arts education is anathema to the core of creative activity—if you took away all the galleries, art schools, art fairs, museums, etc, would people still make art? He went on to suggest that the very real increase in art schools, and the students that graduate from them, has little to do with an expanded market or exponentially rising interest in contemporary art.

All of which is true, but the argument, which admittedly, is condensed here, seemed thin. Neither did it seem to resonate with this crowd, as the semi-Situationist presentation didn’t offer a glimmer of an alternative other than a lunatics-are-running-the-asylum sense of escape. There was a fittingly contentious tone to the audience’s questions, which called out the lack of articulated options, trouble with the choice of so many Hollywood generated images, and BHQF’s complicity with the institutions they critique. The answers weren’t always satisfying, and yet the Bruces did manage to stir up dust and dialogue (which they’re following up with a less public conversation at a local alternative space). Ironically, it seemed that many of the students, and maybe even faculty, seemed to express more resolve in their choice to be engaging in an art education.

I was reminded of something that was spoken earlier this semester in a professional practices course (another thing called out in the Bruces’ arch polemic) that I’m co-teaching at CCA. We had invited a group of artists who got their MFA three years ago, and are each approaching their life as an artist their own way. When we asked them if any of them regretted the sizable loans they’re in the early stages of repaying, none of them did. They all admitted they’d do it again in a heartbeat. You can’t help but wonder if BHQF would say the same about this tour.

Positive Signs is a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism* and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June.

*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.

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Next Wednesday: Positive Signs #16, 17 & 18 on pervasiveness, permanence, and personalization.
See all Positive Signs to date.

[On Thursday April 14 Open Space and Art Practical hosted the second of three conversations organized loosely around issues and themes raised by Stephanie Syjuco's multiartist project Shadowshop, on view now. Today we present three responses to that evening. Do join us for the last evening of discussion, on Thursday, May 12. Please welcome critical theorist Clark Buckner.]

Would the Real Artist Please Stand Up?

The second round of Shop Talk was framed by the central question posed by organizers Suzanne Stein and Patricia Maloney: “What is the perceived value of the artist’s production, or practice, and how does it change as art or artist traffic in different environments? The question developed out of the issues raised during the first gathering of Shop Talk, concerning whether Stephanie Syjuco’s project for the museum, Shadowshop, was beneficial for or ultimately at the expense of the artists who participated in it. Originally these issues were posed primarily in terms of finances and professional development; and, during the second round of Shop Talk, they were first taken up again in a similar vein, as a matter of cultural capital and institutional validation.

Artist Charlene Tan asked: was it fair for contributors to Shadowshop to claim to have shown at SFMOMA?  Some clearly thought so.  Tim Roseborough explained that he had forced his way into the museum’s 2009 exhibition, The Art of Participation by taking advantage of an opportunity to bid on gallery space offered by artists Joachim Blank, Gerrit Gohlke and Karl Heinz Jeron, in their work 1rst Public White Cube. While once he had thought that his presence in the show was accordingly illegitimate, Tim said that now indeed he included it on his resume, and thought that participants in Shadowshop ought to do the same.  But others drew a distinction:  Stephanie, not the museum’s curators, solicited the artists in Shadowshop.  As one person cleverly put it, their work was “in the museum, but not of the museum.”  However, a remark by Suzanne suggested that these apparently opposing positions might be re-framed (dialectically) as altogether consistent with the intended role of the project within SFMOMA.  Shadowshop, she reminded us, was part of the larger exhibition, The More Things Change, which surveys art of the last decade collected by the museum.  In this regard, the work in Shadowshop was clearly set apart from the art the museum had sanctioned by adding to its collection.  At the same time, however, Stephanie’s project served as a supplement to this very narrow set, by providing space for other artists who have indeed contributed to the development of art over the last decade, even if they have not achieved the same degree of success, or simply work beyond the reach of the museum’s radar.  In this way, while distinguishing it from the art collected by the museum, SFMOMA simultaneously extended its sanction to the work in Shadowshop – albeit indirectly, by way of Stephanie’s curatorial discretion.

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[On Thursday April 14 Open Space and Art Practical hosted the second of three conversations organized loosely around issues and themes raised by Stephanie Syjuco's multiartist project Shadowshop, on view now. Today we present three responses to that evening. Do join us for the last evening of discussion, on Thursday, May 12. Please welcome poet and critic Jasper Bernes.]

The second Shoptalk seemed to run aground, rather quickly, on the question of whether Shadowshop “devalued” art and artists by asking them to submit to various mercantile (and mercenary) constraints. People in the room espoused what seemed to me a surprisingly expansive sense of the artist’s vocation, and were quick to produce hoary notions about the specialness or freedom of art. Which is fine, I guess. Except that this freedom turned out to mean not freedom from mercenary concerns but participation in a very special market—the gallery system—whose chief distinguishing features is that it allows everyone to pretend that money isn’t going to change hands at some points. The gallery system, it turns out, provides people with a simulacrum of such autonomy from market.  So, as one gentlemen sitting in front of me paradoxically suggested, flirting with markets in the manner of Shadowshop actually compromises the market-value of individual art-works.  Steering clear of things like Shadowshop is the surest path to those five- and six-figure sales prices.  I don’t know that there’s much to say about this. It seems like ok advice, I guess, if one wants pragmatic guidelines for success. I think some of the people present wanted that pragmatic conversation, and some people wanted something else.

Overall, what stuck with me was a kind of tone or mood. There was a palpable sense of scarcity and even desperation in the room, and though it was clear that Shadowshop had tapped deep-seated and long-standing resentments, I couldn’t help but feel that those resentments were left  unnamed.  This sense of scarcity points to the very real character of the economic world we currently live in, as all around us capitalism in general and in the US exhibits its diseases of old age. This is what strikes me as profoundly different about Shadowshop in comparison to other artistic experiments with economic value and exchange, most of which seem predicated on the possibility of endless abundance, where art can create value ex nihilo merely by convening a set of bodies in a given space. Art as fictitious capital.  But no more – such fantasies of abundance probably seem as naïve today as the optimism people once attached to Obama.

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[On Thursday April 14 Open Space and Art Practical hosted the second of three conversations organized loosely around issues and themes raised by Stephanie Syjuco's multiartist project Shadowshop, on view now. Today we present three responses to that evening. Do join us for the last evening of discussion, on Thursday, May 12. Please welcome poet Erika Staiti.]

Suzanne Stein, community producer at SFMOMA, and Patricia Maloney, editor of Art Practical, begin the second Shop Talk conversation with opening remarks and a useful framework. They pose two questions; [What is the perceived value of the artist’s production, or practice, and how does it change as art or artist traffic in different environments? and What are the economic realities for artists?]; identify six overarching categories [sustainability, autonomy, transparency, authorship/anonymity, valuation, and motivation]; and use quotes from the respondents to the first conversation to provide context for the group.

Amanda Hughen, Shadowshop participant and Shop Talk presenter, is the first to respond. She says that for her, being an artist is less about being successful or making money and more about her identity as an artist. She thinks through the idea of what it might mean to “cling to an identity.” Following her comments come others, about what we consider ‘work’ and how people see the world through their own filters. The contributors start with themselves, their experience, or their practice or their thoughts, and end with a general idea that could be expounded upon should someone choose to pick up the conversation from there. The discussion is organic and inclusive, an open field where anything can come up.

Then, a shift in dynamic occurs. Someone voices a strong sentiment about Shadowshop—how it strips the intention and spirit of the artwork it holds; that if the same piece can sell for $1000 in a gallery, and it sells at Shadowshop for $200, it is not the same work. The work is likened to a cheap object rather than a piece of art worthy of its price. Hughen mentions that she has two different works in the shop—mugs crafted specifically for Shadowshop (made under the name Sweat Equity and Co.) and also some of her prints with her name on them. She says in the shop environment, she is more comfortable selling the mugs than her own work. There’s some discussion about whether artists feel they can put their participation in Shadowshop on their resume, or more accurately, whether they can put SFMOMA on their resume. Another person discusses his opinion that both curator and artists could have been more thoughtful about their participation; that artists don’t know how to price their work; and that it would have been a very different project if the artists contributed their own work set at the price that it cost them to create. I nod along to some of these comments, but gradually I become alienated from the lines of thinking in the room. The conversation has shifted in style, from an open exploration to targeted complaints and criticisms.

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As previously stated on this blog, arts institutions and concerned citizens are calling for the release of artist Ai Weiwei, who was detained by Chinese authorities.

Ai’s whereabouts are still unknown. According to FreeAiWeiwei.org, today marks the 22nd day since Ai disappeared.

Readers seeking additional perspectives might see “Release Ai WeiWei: An Overseas Chinese Perspective,” an op-ed I posted on New America Media.

Shirin Sadeghi interviewed me about it for New America Media Radio. You can listen to the segment as an MP3 here.

Because April 2008 was when Open Space first appeared, I thought it might be nice to mark its third anniversary with an interview with the poet Jack Spicer from June 17th, 1965. It is published by Jacket magazine online. Click HERE to read it.

And to get a sense of the impact he has had on the San Francisco creative community click HERE to read a short bio online at Poets.org.

“Palimpsest i.e. a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another.” H.D.

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Speaking of rhyming and dreaming,

“That one image may recall another, finding depth in the resounding, is the secret of rhyme and measure. The time of the poem is felt as a recognition of return in vowel tone and consonant formations, of pattern in the sequence of syllables, in stress and in pitch of a melody, of images and meanings. It resembles the time of a dream, for it is highly organized along lines of association and impulses of contrast toward the structure of the whole. The impulse of dream or poem is to provide a ground for some form beyond what we know, for feeling ‘greater than reality’.”

Robert Duncan, The HD Book, p.99

Positive Signs is a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism* and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June.

*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.
 
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Next Wednesday: Positive Signs #14: Explanatory Style & 15: Learned Optimism.
See all Positive Signs to date.