Critcal practice

insomnia is my productivity

2007-11-12T23:47:00.001-08:00

I love sleeplessness even as it decreases my quality of life.

-------------------------------------------------

I have been trying to qualify in text the concerns of my current work.
how does this sound? This is taken from what i hope will be the next draft of my thesis - written this week:

After conceptual art, after post conceptual painting (richter) what does one do?

Is it possible to maintain a 100 percent commitment to painting and at the same time have the work engage in a conceptual dialog with art history?

The work is discursive in that it attempts to engage through its conception and construction in a dialogical way with art history. It is also discursive in that it is comprised of elements which themselves are in dialog with one another although they may come from different historical painting sites.

My current practice is equaly invested in a conceptual practice and a very traditional painting practice.

I say “very traditional” because in order for the conceptual structure I am engaged with to function, I need to engage in the normative conditions of production and display. The robust functionality of my conceptual practice also requires a high level of output or productivity.

The conceptual apparatus I am enagaged with has to do with engaging painting as a discursive site where I can both fall in love with and interrogate the functionality of traditional painting practice.
The paintings I make are conceptual interrogations in that they are constructed by the continuous layering of lexical components which, themselves, refer to specific paitning histories. Through a quasi-Deridian layering, whereby each successive layer cancels out the first by centering itself in the field of perception, the lexical painterly elements at play in my work vie for dominance and create an aesthetic painterly entity.

This aesthetic proposition of painterly object/ idea object that is both a declarative statement about painting and the need for pleasure, and the visual iteration of an affirmative negation ala Adorno creates its own viewing imperative.

This project, despite the various painterly referents at play has little or nothing to do with expressionism. The conditions of production are such that the work, by nature of the aesthetic studio practice, looks like it does…. But this is a symptom of the need for the work and the practice to be viewed in tandem. When it comes to the display of work, a greater understanding of the works relationship to paitning history can be understood through a presentation that highlights the geneology or inter-relatedness of the work.

The paintings are made by continuous hybridization of the various lexical elements that are in play at any given moment in my practice. Currently there are about a dozen or so elements that are in the paintings: a specific type of gestural mark, a blurring mark, a gradiant, a color field, a loose (de-structured) grid, stripes made with tape that are made to look badly made, large single stripes that attempt to tie up the paintings like packaging, and nominally random stenciling made by echoing the loose grid mentioned above with tape and then covering it with a solid color and then removing the tape-stencil.

These elements, through their continuous recombination, create a narrative of structure. This narrative is non-linear and has more to do with a poetic structure than a story structure (to stay with narrative for a moment). However, the “words” or “sentences” that construct this narrative are not language but rather are the structural painting elements as I have laid out above. These “linguistic” elements are indexical in structure, but only refer back to their painting histories and themselves so that the narrative content of the work gets pushed onto the viewer and forces or at the very least, encourages vigorously, the associative power of what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the “Imaging Consciousness”, that is to say, the aspect of human mental experience that reads images into everything; a crack in the sidewalk is a face, a cloud is a whale or a palace, etc….

This push, onto the viewer, by the painting/painter is not an abdication of responsibility or authority, but rather, where the work becomes political, and links back, through its painterly construction, to the conceptual apparatus defined before. By forcing the viewer into the associate territory of the imaging consciousness, I hope to cause overwhelming visual pleasure. This pleasure, through its stubborn insistence on itself, causes the work, through opposition to take on political characteristics. This theoretical work (to paraphrase Yves-Alain Bois, theoretical work of which painting is the stake) asserts itself as political by asserting a hermetic (non-overtly) political identity, but one which engages the world through opposition and by way of this opposition assumes political characteristics.

Notes on Negation

2007-11-06T09:53:00.000-08:00

This is a response to a note from Kristen:

"The market obliterates the possibility of work within it to deal with the problems of people." Or at least makes it very, very difficult! I agree with you and your description of your feelings and decisions related to your practice are similar to mine. The question for me, and which I think your concerns implicitly raise, is what to do and more particularly why to do it within the site of art.

I suppose my interest in art lies at the intersection of my hope at what I imagine the social space of art could be and my disappointment at what it is and seems to have great difficulty of escaping; expressive cliché, grotesque commodification, hermetic professionalism. But then why should it be different from any other institution?

Regardless, I am interested in taking up the problems of art because I think the social site of art has been and can be a unique (but not privileged) site of (ethical) social engagement. In order to do so it must operate on different terms than those fashion production and market exchange and hermetic historicism. The way I am choosing to do this is through what I suppose I would call utopian negation. Negation because I am increasingly looking to make art by not making it and utopian because hope is the only justifiable motive to engage this space; and hope seems to me utopian, romantic and naive.

I think about how someone like Richter engages art. His practice is paradoxical by design in that it is based on a negation of painting through the physical act of painting. Richter proclaims a profound commitment to the "idiotic" practice of painting (putting paint on a surface) while simultaneously demonstrating and articulating a rejection of what painting is capable of. In a sense I guess I would say that Richter simultaneously makes and unmakes painting by being a painter.

For a long time I was concerned with attacking art and sought to define my practice in negative terms, "its photography that is not... Its not this or that.." I am no longer interested in making things whose energy lies in what it is not but rather in conceiving ways to make my practice, whether it is understood as art or not, something useful.

The metaphor I often use of moving the velvet rope further and further away from the institution may ultimately result in me deciding the site of art is not the site where I want my work to register. I hope not, but maybe....

....

2007-10-23T20:47:00.000-07:00

....

Philosophy recovers itself...

2007-10-04T16:42:00.000-07:00

John Dewey wrote that "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers for dealing with the problems of men."

What happens when we substitute art and artists for philosophy... Art recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of artists and becomes a method, cultivated by artists, for dealing with the problems of people.

Are we at a point, culturally, where this idea resonates?

Art as Cultural Production that extends beyond art...

2007-10-04T13:54:00.000-07:00

The confusion of terms is immediate, but putting those aside, the concern for me is the for art to function beyond the professionalized world of art production, it need to provide points of access beyond the art historical or the "professional" debates of insiders that, while they ostensibly claim to be grounded in a larger cultural politics, are very often specialized, hermetic and, to the "laymen," indecipherable as to their relevance to the "real world."

As you know one of my common points of reference are the ideas of the philosopher Richard Rorty, who sought to move beyond what he saw as the paralyzing debates of both continental and analytical philosophy by a) reinvigorating American Pragmatism and b) more importantly seeking to transform what it is that philosophy does. By that I would argue that Rorty's project was to return philosophy to its origins grounded ultimately in action in/for/with the world and not, as it seemed to him, to become mired in highly esoteric debates on minutiae related to the continental or analytical philosophical traditions.

One hope I have for this forum is that we (or at least I and the rest of you :) ) can work towards applying this idea to art. To explore where and how art can engage culture more actively while still being good "art." To figure out how to locate work so that when it "works," it's effect is more durable than just a momentary disruption that fails to leave the site of professional art because it's interests (or reception at least) is grounded so narrowly in professional art structures. There is certainly work that does this, but I think it is fair to say that most doesn't or perhaps cannot because it cannot escape the market, cannot escape its "thingyness." Maybe there are no more compelling markets for art to function in (ghettoized in its own house so to speak) so some argue it is fatally undermined by its exchange value. (I don't agree with this necessarily, but I think we need to address this idea in order to produce in the face of reductive economistic moralism.)

I think we begin by agreeing on terms. What is a cultural product? What is a critical cultural product? What is the intersection between cultural products and cultural politics? How is "art" like other cultural products (like philosophy) and how is it different? Must art engage the market to reach other cultural sites of interest?

Please add more if they come to mind. I apologize for the stream, but I like the blog as a place for thinking out loud...

Peter

2007-10-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

October 1st

Something we’ll work on together to produce some traction in this conversation
Start with the notion that you are all making art

Why make art question is important if it’s already being asked in the practice.

If you’re not making art already – what are you making
If it’s not necessary to ask set it aside

If it is necessary – IT IS NECESSARY
That necessity speaks to that notion of what we want to get into

What is the difference between that which is critical to the practice and a critical practice

Why make art is not a first principle but rather a question in play

Moving away from criticism because there is something generative about critical as crisis, urgency, etc…
This implies a position which is not stable or secure – and this is different than a position which is so stable and outside that it can offer criticism.
This is the problem
Instability that is generative of the necessity to make art.

Is there a relationship between making art and crisis.
That crisis could be generative of art or it could not be
But it is a worthwhile thing to explore

Critical thinking is winded at the top of a hill and as we pass it, it is wheezing and telling us to push on.

Developing critical thinking faculties isn’t our primary means of engaging our question.

A lot of critical thinking was about the unfixedness
But the language of the theorists or interpreters became fixed
Lacan, derridda, barthes,

Inadequacy of critical language does address something that has a heartbeat.
We are thinking throught he language we have and the practices we have available and trying to find a valuable, productive “alliance(?)” between them.

We have a dislocation between the modes of discussion and the need to work.

When artists can no longer be in dialog with their work and around their work – it fundamentally disrupts the circuit around which contemporary art has been built.
Artists have been asked to be in dialog with a market – market not a good conversationalist – answers back with only one answer.

Is there something like a Pavlovian discourse in the art market.

peter
A disappointment with what art can be
I can barely tell the difference between artforum and vogue

Kathrin
Sometimes you can’t differentiate between the ad and the art

Peter
I was totally befuddled

In art school you – john knight said the purpose of art is to engage the world critically

That mode itself can become ossified

This is as “mediumistic” as being a painter

Searching for a place to have a conversation
Warhol, koons, engage the market

Cletus
What we’re doing here
Art does something
Does art do anything –can you say art does art
One other questions is art a parallel discourse,

Greenberg made a very strong and industrial case for artists to specialize
His argument for modernist painting could have been given to any car part maker in Detroit in 1951
Get known for one thing in modern culture – it’s how you survive
Kosuth said – art should just do art

Barry
What’s the point in engageing in a conversation where the participants are etched in stone

Peter
Art is a space which is different than any other space you can occupy
It isn’t business or social science- it engages in parts of these but it moves differently and uniquely

Barry
Inherently within the rules of art – is the rule that it can never be fixed
As soon as art is assigned a fixed meaning it ceases to function as art

What is the means by which meaning is fixed
(if it’s ever actually fixed)

peter
does anything ever get fixed?
I was interviewing sociologists
When the catholic church in Europe started to spread catholocisim – paeganism was alive and well so what we have now is an amalgam of Catholicism and paegaanism

Barry I would agree that maybe there are voices who say that things aren’t fixed

Cletus
Art is made in the unfixing of meaning
Art is occupying this space which is distinct from other fields because it is enagaged as an agent of unfixing

Kathrin
I think we have to shift the position
I think it’s not so much an authoritative voice
How the art object functions – the art object functions as an authoratitive voice or tries to fix meaning

This leads back to criticism

The modes of production in contemporary photography
Criticism literally fixes meaning

Work that works

This actually depends on a misrecognition
I know what that is and then it’s not

Early greek thought on art

Episteme - knowledge - law
Techne -craft of the making, degraded because it wasn’t making law
Poesis means transformation – where poetry comes from- used in medicine transformation

Episteme is most noble
Law – criticism

You can never remake the ready made

If you think of the ready made – the mode of the ready made is choice
I choose to put this here – the difference between choice and making – doesn’t matter if you made it - you chose it

The written piece that accompanies “fountain” explains it – Duchamp's apologia perhaps

is there a repetoire of meanings or techniques which enable artists to unfix meaning

The lesson from kosuth is that the artist’s choice gives meaning
That’s not duchamp

Choosing vs. making

Not choosing not making

Antagonism between choosing and making
The power of that statement – of that work
Is that duchamp establishes a relationship between making and choosing

That’s why klein groups – looking at krauss and jameson is helpful
What’s important for us is that there is nothing important or necessary or rational about the initial binary relationship
On our part there is a necessary relationship of two terms
In the case of krauss
Landscape ------- architecture
Work ----------play
Unpredictability------------crime
Non crime--------------predictablitity

Dilemma – problem between two parties
Trial between three
Quarrel implies four

Nothing necessary about relating choosing to making but that’s where duchamp went

Choosing← →making
Not choosing ← → not making

How do we work out of the notion of crisis