one more letter to one more editor

I know, I know, Modernism has come and gone, but I’ve always thought that “form follows function” was a good principle to follow.  I’m having a tough time negotiating the form of your latest issue with its function.  If I’m supposed to hold and open it in order to read it, or even to look at its ads, you have finally found the magic formula that thwarts such action: a 10”x10” magazine format with 550 pages.

There is a certain beauty in the symmetry of those numbers, but their combination yields an issue that is finally so heavy, and so squirmy that it is impossible to hold, much less behold.  I keep trying to read it; but every time I pick it up, I find myself putting it down.  The only way to get into it is to put it on some kind of podium as if it were an unabridged dictionary in a library.

If the intention for your 50^th anniversary issue was to help readers correct their posture by forcing them to read it on a flat surface, then maybe form still follows function.  However, I like to slouch on the couch while reading about art criticism in a “glossy”.  Next time you want to investigate your own history, please put it out in a format that facilitates reading, such as a hardback book that holds itself rigidly together, or maybe two skinnier magazine issues…. Of course this implies that legibility be one of ArtForum’s functions.

Sincerely

addendum weeks later:

I wrote a few weeks ago to complain about the size and weight of your 50^th anniversary issue whose mass only equals that of your 2007 summer at the height of the housing boom.  I am now sheepishly writing to tell you how much I enjoyed its written content after getting over my comfort issues with its form.   

Sincerely

...weird how this blogspot graphic interface works

Ponto Final (end of the line)

My family hails from Egypt.  My father loved his birth country, and I grew up listening to stories of what sounded like a magical kingdom.  ...And kingdom it was.  I spent countless hours listening to stories of his fascinating Egyptian life, of his great friendships, of his home and family I never met, of his horse rides along the pyramids with his dog Faris, and of him crossing the desert on a jeep with only a wet handkerchief on his head which he kept wet by dipping in a bucket of water he had on the seat next to him.  Stories illustrated by beautiful black and white photographs my mom has in deteriorating photo albums in Switzerland.

It was a different Egypt then; an Egypt where Jews were welcomed and thrived.  So much so, that when my father, who was in the equestrian team that was slated to go to the Olympics before the Second World War, was denied a visa because he was Jewish, the team leader decided that if Raymond, my father, could not participate, then the team would not be going to the Olympics.  And they didn’t. 

After the war and the creation of Israel, all that changed.  Nasser took over the kingdom and made life miserable for Egyptian Jews by persecuting them and expropriating their wealth.  My father always thought of himself as Egyptian first and Jewish second; but he eventually was forced by circumstances to leave the country he loved.  He ended up emigrating to Brazil, a country my parents knew nothing about and whose language they did not speak, in order to create a new free life.  A country he did not die in, but where I was born, and where I learned to be rootless.

Today Mohamed Morsi announced that he was shutting down the last working Synagogue in Egypt for so-called “security reasons”.  To the world at large, it’s just one small blip on the news ticker.  To me, it should not matter. I am not Egyptian, not religious, and, hey, where there were once 80,000 Jews living in harmony with Christians and Muslims, there are now only 100, or so, who for some unknowable and insane reason remain in a country that has long ceased to welcome them.  What does it matter if they can no longer get together and celebrate their beliefs, right?  No, it should not matter to me, yet the news weighs on me because of the stories I grew up with, learned by rote, and understand now, many years later, how they form who I am. 

If this Arab Spring goes on for much longer, god help us when the summer comes. 

The Adam Smith of Art Criticism

I just wasted a couple of hours reviewing The Invisible Dragon for Amazon- so what the hey, might as well post it on my digital diary:

I fully understand David Hickey’s impulse in writing these essays.  The strongest essay being the one in which he reacts to the Academy’s defense (or not) of Robert Maplethorpe during the culture wars of the 80’s.  I thought it was really incisive and a truly creative way of seeing things, and it gave me a lot to think about.  As to his more general thoughts on Beauty, the essays themselves are cogent and in the abstract, if not in the particulars, convincing.

Hickey is basically ranting against the “Academy” (or Art Establishment), and not because he sees it as colluding with the market, like some reviewer inferred, in fact, quite au contraire.  In these essays Hickey defends the marketplace for being the ultimate arbiter, through democratic wrangling, of value, beauty, and meaning.

Again, I do get the impulse behind this kind of thinking.  It must be born of years of looking at too much uninspiring art sanctioned by the Academy due to its prescriptive value instead of that thing that good art can do, which is move us in ways that perhaps will always remain essentially undefinable.  And boy is there ever a lot of that crap out there passing for Art (and the word Art still implies “good” even after all these years since Greenberg). 

Hickey decries the Academy (in which he includes even what I find to be our no-real-lover-of-the-arts Government) for funding such art on the basis of it being “good for us” instead of “making us happy”.  And he does this by riffing on the Declaration of Independence and by quoting Thomas Paine.  And again, I feel his pain (no pun intended); but I think his approach might be simplistic. In essence, Hickey calls for Beauty to be determined in the Forum, the laissez-faire marketplace.  Given that in this day and age a lot of the art sanctioned by the Academy has precisely to do with investigating the deleterious effects of the market on the production of “true” art, I can see where he might have ruffled some feathers; and I smile at the thought of that.

I love his attitude and his writing; and I viscerally feel what he is longing for, but his solution does not ring true.  And I say this as a person who believes that markets work for the good of the people, most of the time; but even laissez-faire capitalism needs some regulation when decisions made according to its principles do more harm than good.  The market alone has made as many mistakes about what is good art as the Academy has.  Norman Rockwell is still crap[1], as is Thomas Kincaid.  Unfettered democracy might produce what the people want, and Hickey has the right to slap the word “Beautiful” on the result; but I don’t think it’s that easy.  That being said, the book is a good read and gets one really involved in determining and arguing one’s own value system.

---

[1] Even though, at some point, someone, probably “the marketplace”, convinced The Academy, or more precisely the Guggenheim to embrace it/him for a season.

Connected

I just started reading this cool book called Tubes about the physical internet.  It starts with a subject that is close to my heart since I am way more enamored with the physical than the cloud: the author going to a printshop in Milwakee to see a monster printing machine made in Germany print a map of the internet.  I wish I could have seen that.  The author was inspired to follow the "internet" one day when his modem stopped working because a squirrel chewed through the rubber coating of the wiring that brought the internet into his house.

For a few months now, Curtis and I have been experiencing intermittent problems with our internet connection.  The darn thing keeps blinking in and out.  We have called our internet provider several times; and I imagine that sometimes we actually speak to someone in America.  But judging from the wonderful accent (and I'm not being ironic here, I love accents) of some of the people we have talked to, a lot of the time we get connected to "Jason" or "Kelly" in India, where parts of the physical internet look like this:

As an aside, I would much rather that the web technicians answering my calls tell me their names are Satish or Padmani, Mohandas or even Mohammed; but I digress...

Our calls and their solutions have yielded no results thus far.  The answers the technicians have given us on the phone, because god forbid in this day and age they send a physical person, American or not, to diagnose our problem, has had to do with our filters or modem; all things we can change by buying new ones.  I don't mind buying new equipment if the equipment is actually the problem; but I hate buying new stuff blindly if that is not going to solve the problem.  It's a waste of... well, of everything: copper, plastic, energy, money, time... everything.  As it is, the last technician we spoke to, an American woman called Marie, pinpointed our problems to our filters.  After Curtis yelled at her on the phone, asked to talk to her supervisor, and finally handed the phone to me so I could talk to both women, I acquiesced to buying new filters.  We changed the filters and "voila": nothing happened, we still have intermittent problems.  At this point they want us to buy a new modem.  And at that, I put my foot down and asked for a wire technician to come here and touch my physical internet before I buy anything else.

You see, last year at this time, our sewer line made in the 70's of tar impregnated paper finally gave up the ghost and we had to have the plumbers install a new, this time PVC, sewer line. And as we were inspecting our backyard to find out what the best way to lay the line was, we found our phone line; the one through which our internet connection also comes through.

Yesterday after talking to one more internet technician somewhere in the world, I braved my mosquito infested woods to go take a picture of my "tube", my very own little physical connection to the Big Cloud.  A connection in a little woodland creature paradise, where everybody loves to gnaw on wires and plastic coating, that has looked like the pictures below and has been out there for more than a year through sweltering heat, freezing cold and an unusually rainy season.

I, personally, with no training whatsoever, think that maybe, just maybe, my connectivity problems might, just might, have something to do with the way the fiber optic tubes are coming into my house.  Hey, I'm not ruling out the modem, mind you, but the following pictures give me pause.  Forgive their quality as I was taking them while standing on a patch of poison ivy, in a hot and humid day, while being consumed by those little black and white mosquitos we inadvertently imported from Asia in water collecting in the wells of old tires being transported from there to here on some ship.  Yes we are all very much connected...

1 is the phone company box

2 are the flags the technicians put out signifying something

3 is my favorite, I call it my "al fresco connection", close ups follow

The arrow points to the cable snaking around the tree and disappearing underground once more

first world country my ass

fragment of the day

Reading a review of an artist I did not know of, Roman Ondák, I ran into a sentence containing a fragment that explains human behavior, if not from the beginning of time, certainly in this time in which we exist in what seems to be the eternal present.  It went like this (I quote and I rip from its context, a good article by someone called Ina Bloom in this month’s issue of Artforum):

...evoking the kind of gung ho spirit that actually covers a chasm of cluelessness...

And I thought of the creation of the Euro.

on a personal note on representation

Ziggy Primavera

Two years or more ago, a friend asked me to paint a portrait of her dog; I acquiesced and did it. Ever since, I have painted a few more pet portraits for others.

Liz and Burt

I am not trained as a portrait painter.  Fuck, when you go to art school, as I did, you actually get trained to do fuck all.*  What, too many “fucks”?  I am “The Raving” after all...  Anyway, when you go to art school, you don’t necessarily learn to make anything; and if you are lucky, you learn to think about the nature of representation and cultural production, and you learn to talk about it.  You learn to read things like this by Carlyn Christov-Bakargiev who was appointed Artistic Director of this year’s thirteenth edition of documenta, dOCUMENTA (13):

I think that right now there is an urgent need for what I call a wordly alliance among so-called cognitive laborers of every sort, artists and scientists and fiction writers and so on.  It is very urgent to speak together and to work together and to be in a state of the propositional together. And here is the interesting part, to me, as far as choosing to go to art school in this day and age goes: The notion of “the artist” is a very limited notion historically.  The ancient Greeks did not even have a word for “art” as we understand it today.  They had the word techné, which did not mean “art” as we understand it today but instead something like “craftsmanship” or “craft”.  So whether or not art will even continue to be defined as a discrete field for much longer is an open question.  (Artforum, May 2012. p. 750)

Did I say “lucky”?  Well, maybe you’d be luckier actually learning techné.  But I digress… 

...So I started doing these pets.  And doing them always gives me heartburn because I know the owners want the paintings to resemble their pets.  My “art self” gets into making these, and all I want to do is break all the rules and just “play”.  Like I said, I get the heartburn and procrastinate doing them until I eventually succumb to getting down to the business of translating snapshots of animals into paintings of loved ones.  In order to get into it, I start manipulating things so that the context in which I place the pet starts functioning more abstractly and more like “paintings of my own”.  

this is no longer a working numbuh

In other words, I start having fun; but eventually there comes a point when I have to reign myself in and curb my impulses in order to start getting a facsimile of the animal in question down in paint. 

This is where the heartburn and procrastination really takes hold.  It entails a real internal fight: my wanting to paint more freely while having to reproduce what I see in the photograph used as reference.  In this struggle, there often comes a point when I find myself losing to the act of copying.  I start getting frustrated because the photograph keeps winning; and nothing I do in paint seems to be able to compete with the seduction of a photographic image.  This is the main pitfall of working from photographs in a world where photographic reproductions are ubiquitous and, to my eyes, have become our main mode of communication.

It is always at this maximum point of frustration that my unconscious kicks in and frees me from the bonds of the photographic.  It’s when my being remembers that painting is not photography, and that its rules of representation are very different.  Even though I need to make the animal resemble, in paint, the animal in the photograph, I am free to do it differently than the way the camera does it.  In fact, not only am I free, I am required to do it differently.  This totally mundane realization that I keep forgetting and shouldn’t, given that I’ve taught hundreds of students to be aware of it, is always such a rush.  It is most certainly not an original insight, or a profound one; but it is one that happens over and over again when I am in front of a “canvas”, and it is what keeps me going.

Wiley Spot

...off to paint cats...

* upon reading this a couple of weeks later, I realize I must have been in one of my bad moods, because I did learn a lot in art school; I learned to make prints and books and some other stuff.  I also learned to see, really see, and I met people for whom I still have great love and respect.  What you don't learn about in art school is markets and how to make a living in them when you get out; but then that's not what art is about...


cats:

Stimulus

I recently drove to Georgia after having spent too long before going back there to visit with loved ones.  The minute I crossed the border between SC and GA on the interstate, I noticed something odd: the road markers.  They had multiplied and seemed to be on steroids.

As long as I can remember, after coming to this country and noticing them, road markers have been small inconspicuous signs on the side of the road marking each mile of interstate and state roads from one boarder to another, be it state to state or county to county.  In the past, they were helpful to drivers who wanted to gauge where they were in relation to their destination. And now, they’re still helpful to people like me who have not yet been convinced that they need to be tied to a “smart” phone or a GPS system that can track me on a computer/satellite network at all times, and in turn allow me to know where I am physically at all times. I don't mind being a little lost...

These new markers on Interstate 85 are skinnier and placed lower than speed limit signs, but are as tall, or maybe taller.  They are big, and to my eye, cluttered green signs.  Unlike mile markers of old which straightforwardly tell you the mile you are on, these have the Interstate symbol with interstate number printed on them under the word “Highway” or maybe “South”, I don’t remember and can't make out on my crappy pictures (scroll to end); I just know that the “coat of arms” symbol makes them look very official.  Below the official looking interstate symbol, these signs then have the word “mile”, with the mile number printed under that.  Also, most surprising of all, they don’t just mark miles, they also mark half miles in this new, big, and conspicuous way.  

Disturbingly, to those of us interested in good design and annoyed by bad design, the “.5” on the half mile markers does not fit on the same line with the main mile number, and is placed underneath it in a bigger font.  Something like this:

Truthfully, I found these new signs horribly distracting as they zipped by on an average of every 28 seconds or faster depending on what speed I was driving.  I also wondered why the state had spent so much money on these things, about 400 new signs since there is about 200 miles of interstate 85 in the state of Georgia, in an age when most people do have GPS and “smart” phones that tell them exactly where they are.  Those of us who are still electronically somewhat untethered were doing just fine with the old small inconspicuous signs once every mile and paper maps.

It seems as if that quick and dirty, first and maybe only, spate of Obama stimulus money went to Georgia to be spent on new interstate signs for an old interstate in serious need of real infrastructure repair.  Contemporary politics moves too quickly to allow for slow and thoughtful disbursement of funds on big long-term projects with real effects.  These days, everything is window dressing.  I wonder what Obama got in exchange for his stimulating of Georgia signs since the place still voted for Newt Gingrich in the primaries and probably would elect him president if “it” could.  Let's remember that Newt was promising to build a colony on the moon; a very loooonnng-teeeerm project indeed.

Here are some crappy phone pictures, obviously not taken with an Iphone, of our tax dollars at work:

mile 163

28 seconds later

mile 163.5