Too Old for Art?

My first memorable physical encounter with Relational Aesthetics happened in the 2003 Venice Biennial when I came upon “the Utopia Station”. One of its components was a piece by Yoko Ono consisting of big maps of the world pasted on walls, under which a small platform held various stamps of the word "peace" [1] together with a bunch of dried out stamp pads. It was painfully obvious that “the viewer” was supposed to participate in the art work (or space) by using the visually uninteresting stamps, all of the same size and font, to stamp the word all over the map and “imagine peace”.

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Being allergic to any form of manipulation, I proceeded to “relate to this space” by using the “peace” stamps to form, in as big a way as I could with the dried out stamp pads, the word WAR. I remember being frustrated about the pads being so dry, being boo-ed by a bystander, feeling proud about that, and thinking "I'm getting too old for art".

Last November, I went to New York to get an art fix at the same time that the Guggenheim was putting on a whole show of this “stuff”. This time I opted out and stayed as far away from the Gug as possible. I don’t need art to, so transparently, manipulate me into action. Unfortunately, my allergic reaction to this stupendously boring form of art (for details, read the review of the show by John Kelsey in the March 2009 issue of Art Forum) prevented me from reading the fine print in the show listings and finding out that the Guggenheim was also showing a Catherine Opie retrospective; something I do wish I had seen.

An excellent commentary by Helen Molesworth on both offerings and how they interacted with each other (not by design) can also be read in the 2009 March issue of Art Forum, on page 102 under SLANT: Social Problem. And it seems that the Opie show is the unintended clear winner in producing the results that “theanypacewhatever” (the relational aesthetics show) was after; something to do with people interacting with each other within the space set by the artist. In viewing Opie’s photographs, people did just that without being manipulated into doing it. Yeah, good art can often bring people together without even trying.

I had read about "theanyspacewhatever" [2] when Jerry Saltz reviewed it in the New York Magazine after spending the night at the Guggenheim in Revolving Hotel Room by Carsten Höller, “a bed fitted with black silk sheets and presented in a hotel room-like installation...available by reservation only for paying guests” [3]. Saltz seems to have gotten something out of his experience; but my reading of his epiphany has done nothing to improve my disposition towards relational aesthetics at any level, intellectual or aesthetic. Works of this nature have always felt like nothing more than forced social gatherings that interest me not at all; and, in fact, totally turn me off because of their manipulative nature.

I finally turned to Molesworth’s article to see if there was anything else about this kind of work that I might be missing. I found nothing but a good definition of the practice, which Molesworth does a great job in presenting even though she does not seem to think the show was successful in carrying out its intentions. She provides quotes from foundational essays by Nicolas Bourriaud’s that, most definitely, confirm my feelings of being too old for this stuff [4]: ‘Relational aesthetics sees art as a way of learning to inhabit the world in a better way... It is not about utopian realities but about ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist... The exhibition is a special place where such momentary grouping may occur... and give rise to a ‘specific arena of exchange’’ [5]. And she elaborates that ‘The “theanyspacewhatever” crowd [6] eschewed concerns of identity-as-community (which is Opie’s practice) in favor of a lively and convivial model of the social... they offered provisional gatherings, ad hoc groups temporarily forming around similar interests... they offered food and movies and the potential of the space one found oneself in at any given moment’ [7].

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Well, this hammers the nail on the coffin for me. Apparently I have always felt relational aesthetics to be nothing more than forced social gatherings among strangers (at best) or parties among insiders (at worst) because, hey, that's exactly what they are! Mystery solved.

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[1] although the word 'various' connotes 'variety', and there was none of that here.
[2] a heavy handed attempt at a "cute" translation of Deleuse's term 'espace quelconque'... you know, some shit just does not translate from French to English: stop trying people!
[3] AF p.237
[4] Or maybe it is that I am too young, for one might have to have been born a decade before me to actually buy this.
[5] AF p. 102
[6] god, that’s a mouthful!
[7] AF p. 101

Promises, promises

One night, while visiting my mom in Switzerland, and while The Ranting Economist slept, I browsed what seemed to be an infinite number of TV channels only to snuggle up to a program about working dogs on the tried and true European version of The Animal Channel. One of the dogs featured was a Bouvier des Flandres named Canaan shown working in a farm, coincidentally enough, in Simpsonville, SC, just forty miles from where we live. I fell hopelessly in love with this gentle giant. "Le lendemain", wanting to show the Bouvier to Curtis in order to add it to the long list of dogs I will adopt in my imaginary future, I logged on to search for more information on the breed.

In my research I found out from Wikipedia that the Bouvier des Flandres “possess sophisticated traits, such as complex control, intelligence, and accountability” and that “they are rational, gentle, loyal, and protective in nature”. I also discovered that Ronald Reagan had one named Lucky. Given that dogs seem to embody their owner’s personalities, Curtis found it telling that President Reagan would have chosen this particular breed; while I marveled at the fact that President Obama is still vacillating about what dog to get. One can only hope that he is better at keeping the promises he has made to the American people than he is at keeping the one he made to his daughters.

Fuck

Everything is dying.
First the frogs, then the bees, now the bats.
...fuck...

How We Got Here

As a person in a household that has been doing the right things, that is, saving, investing, paying bills on time, and keeping up with our mortgage, I most definitely relate to Rick Santelli’s rant about the Obama mortgage bailout plan. Yes Rick, 90% of us will be bailing out losers and putting more money in the hands of crooks; however, this does not come as a surprise in an America I have learned, over the years, to disrespect.

Rick Santelli was on Kudlow last Friday night expressing, once again, his dislike for the new Obama mortgage bailout plan and he said something to the effect that “there are no do-overs in life." Weeelll... I’ve been an educator in this country for twenty years now; and the single most important thing our education system has been set up to teach is that life is nothing but one big do-over, and that, in fact, one does not have to work very hard at all to get “bailed out”. Take for instance what happened to my husband, a professor in one of our top public universities (ranked #22 by U.S. News[1]).

As in all universities in this country, final exams are scheduled for periods of three hours, but that does not mean they have to be three hours long (or at least it didn’t when I was in school). On one semester my husband decided to make his final a short one and told the students that he was giving them a one and a half hour test. In other words, he was giving them a short test that would not require more than one and a half hours to complete.

The day of the exam came; most students were done before the shortened period, and after one and a half hours my husband collected the test. Unsurprisingly, one little prick, who incidentally got a B[2] in the class and whose career grades hovered in the B and C range, started calling my husband’s office to complain that he had not had enough time to complete said exam. My husband explained to him that he had told the class that the exam was short and that the student should have been prepared. Little Prick then called the chairman of the department who told him that the professor (my husband) acted within his rights.

Little Prick, having learned how to milk the system, then grieved. My husband had to go to “court”, where a panel of administrators and brain-washed professors decided that Little Prick should have had three hours to complete his one and a half hour test. Me, I would have given him the do-over of his life: a three hour multiple choice test that no one but the best student from the University of Chicago Economics Department could possibly pass. Little Prick would have begged for his B back and would have even accepted a C[3]. But that was not what the Grievance Committee was recommending, it recommended that Little Prick get an A; and Little Prick got the A he so valiantly fought for.

So Dear Rick, in a world where A stands for okAy and B for Bad; and where if one gets a B, one can get an A just by asking for it (kinda like a mortgage a few months back), it is no wonder we have arrived at our current state of affairs. Maybe at one point in time America wasn’t about do-overs; but it is most certainly about that now. And, you might ask, "What of us who do 'the right thing'?" Well Rick, we just keep getting fucked over by little pricks....

[1] A ranking that seems as meaningful as Moody’s rankings of mortgage backed securities.
[2] Remember B? It used to stand for “Good”.
[3] Remember C?! It used to stand for “Average”.

Letter to South Carolina State Legislators

Dear Sirs,

I am writing to request that you work at getting the South Carolina legislature to accept the 2.4 billion dollar loan the Federal Government is willing to extend to the state. I understand the loan will possibly result in future state tax increases; but at this point we can’t afford not to take it.

The Federal government has and is about to spend what might as well be gazillions of dollars to bail out the crooks in Wall Street that put us in this position in the first place; we’ll be paying taxes on that forever, and the least we can do is get a little relief here and now. Please try to override Governor Sanford’s ultra-ideological stance on the issue. His standing on his principles might do his heart some good (assuming he has one), but it’s not helping those of us with our feet in the trenches.

Sincerely,
Katya Cohen (educator)

Sure Sign of Bad Times

Got my Art Forum today. Removed the protective plastic and had an unusual haptic experience; one I don’t usually associate with the handling of this age old art world "institution": I could lift the thing with one hand! I could roll it, I could wave it, I could play with it, I could easily open it to read. I knew something was seriously weird because, for the first time in years, it looked like a magazine and not a cube!

In the summer of ’07 I got an Art Forum I could barely carry from the mailbox to my house; it was the fattest Art Forum I had ever seen. And the haptic experience I had then has led me to want to dissect the damn thing and get to know it intimately by reproducing it by hand like an illustrated manuscript (not quite, but sorta). That issue, at the height of our lend and spend spree, had grown to the whopping size of 541 pages, with 3/4 of them being devoted to advertising. This latest issue has a mere 240 pages! The magazine has not been this thin since 2004! I have not done a head count of advertising pages versus “content” yet, but my guess is that advertising is down my a good 30-40 %, mirroring the plunge in the Stock Market; after all, auction house sales are down by that much.

Although I am delighted to have a magazine I can actually carry around with me, this is a bad thing; just one more concrete sign of the troubles around and ahead of us (translate into: job losses for thousands). The economic downturn in the '70's led to conceptual art and art of the Other, and the one in the 80's gave us Uber-macho post-modern art; now that this latest bubble has burst, it remains to be seen what kind of art will be produced in this market.

An Honest to Goodness Rave

The Ranting Economist sweetly characterizes my blogs as “civil”; I fear I will be unable to maintain that veneer on this one. Plus The Ranting Economist will probably tear me to shreds on my economic thinking; so be it, I enter the new year full of piss and vinegar.

December 31st: Woke up this morning... 8.4% unemployment rate in the State of South Carolina: one of the highest in the nation. Why? you might ask; we’ll come to that....

...So, 77,000 people are unemployed while the Employment Security Commission is about to run out of money at the end of December 31st while pleading with that asshole (told ya) of a governor of ours, Mark Sanford, to accept a $146,000,000 loan from the Federal Government (to whom we all do pay taxes after all) to cover unemployment benefits until March. The Asshole refuses to do it until the ESC allows for a state audit of its numbers. The ESC is willing to undergo a federal audit but refuses to deal with Sanford. Meanwhile, 77,000 people, that is biological entities that are about to go hungry without their unemployment benefits, are hanging in the balance waiting for the resolution of this state of affairs; though most of them, probably being somewhat uninformed (’cause how else would that asshole get elected to be governor twice), might be unaware of the shenanigans going on in Columbia.

The Little Fucker is one of those ideologue Republicans that believes in his stone heart of hearts that “the market will take care of everything”: education, infrastructure, the insane, inter-galactic travel, you name it. Given that our current financial crisis, the worse since the great depression, has occurred under the most “laissez-faire-let-the-market-decide” administration ever, we can see how good that has been for nation building. Well, it’s just as good a plan for State building.

Sanford is such an ideologue about his view of reality that even though our state is completely broke (like others), he claims that he will refuse any federal bail-out money (unlike others). Again, I want to stress that I do pay federal taxes; taxes, that by the looks of it, will go to bail out states like California while, here, Little Fucker sticks to his principles! I could go on about the rest of the legislative body of this state (all male and mostly Republican in the Senate, whose sole purpose in life seems to cut taxes for their rich cronies); but I’ll refrain, since even they seem a little miffed at the current state of affairs.

And how, pray tell, have we been weathering this financial storm? Oh well, we have cut our services of course. And what is one of the few services (other than prisons and roads and facilities for the mentally disabled- oh no, I forgot, those they just closed down) this state deigns to provide? Why, that would be education. The state has furloughed and fired people all over the education landscape to save money.

...And this brings me back to “Why oh why is our unemployment rate so high?” It is so because we have very low human capital in this state. We have a severely under-educated population whose best use is in manufacturing, an industry that the powers that be in Columbia love to bring into the state by handing out nice tax incentive packages; thus once again cutting down the tax base that could possibly be used to finance things such as, oh I don’t know, education... That is, assuming we could attract firms by other means of course... Oh hey, with an educated populace, firms might seek out this state without even needing tax incentives: what a novel idea, and hey, it even sounds like, dare I say it, the free market!

Last I checked, due to global pressures and free trade and the fact that as a nation we decided that we are "too smart" to work “with our hands”, simple manufacturing has mostly moved out of this country. The little that there is we’ve imported to states like South Carolina, where labor is cheap precisely because it is under-educated. In good times, manufacturing firms needing unskilled labor settle in the area; in bad times, large numbers of this unskilled labor gets to be unemployed labor. One might want to ask, what is the one thing that could mitigate this and make it so that we wouldn't have the largest unemployment rate in the nation during bad times? Well, that would be education --> the real thing, not just lip service to it. But hell, that seems to be exactly what this state finds reasonable to cut.

An Update: By the end of December 31st, Mark Sanford did accept the federal loan that will make it possible to deliver benefits to our unemployed. He is however still pressuring the ESC to open itself to a state audit (the litigation will keep lawyers employed). I imagine Sanford accepted the loan because he could not afford to have 77,000 people pissed at him; after all, he might want to run for president one day....

Picture this: a Sanford/Palin ticket! A Republican wet dream! The Ranting Economist optimistically thinks it would be the death knell of the Republican Party; but to quote that paragon of present-day Republicanism, President Bush himself, never “mis-underestimate” the American public.

Happy New Year!