Radical News (ART)

“There’s no empirical evidence, but I’m convinced it’s true that the amount of people globally who consider themselves artists is radically different than in the mid-20th century, and so, this term has become much looser. Artists are people that use culture for a number of reasons. Sometimes saying the obvious is radical. When the news is so far removed from daily life, artists who are not afraid to say what’s right in front of them, to represent the world around them, can form radical news.”

-Nato Thompson ( Brooklyn Rail article)

Chance Upon – Shared Time

“Wearing the same combination of light blue shirt and jeans as she did 18 years ago, Swinton was watched by hundreds of people while she slept in a glass box at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on Saturday.
Little has changed since the exhibit first appeared in 1995, with the notable exception of a pair of glasses next to Swinton on the mattress
Arms crossed and lying on her side with her eyes closed, Swinton did little to amuse the crowds but is due to appear again on six further occasions this year – but the public will get no warning. A MoMA statement said: “Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real – shared – time.””

– Sam Masters (The Independent)

Complex of Reality

“… Art is perceived through the senses first, and probably also second and third. Small details have profound sensible impacts, no matter how thoroughly an artwork is motivated by concepts or plans. And though we may not always be drawn in by quiet artworks on silent walls, we cannot have lost our human capacity to be moved. If Freud suggested a structure to consciousness, he also offered a model for its depth: much experience remains beneath our immediate awareness. The entire complex of “feeling”—materiality, sensation, affect, sensibility—is inevitably percolating in our experience (as are thoughts), so we needn’t worry, or even wonder, about whether words will win. 

The question is: do we dare to acknowledge that realm beyond thought, to explore that unmoored ocean of the senses? If we focus too strongly on critical angles or sensationalism, we may miss opportunities to dive more deeply into reality.”

–Karen Schiff (Brooklyn Rail article)

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Art Forms Knowledge

“One of most intriguing aspects about art today is its entanglement with theory. In fact, contemporary art practice is now so highly saturated with theoretical knowledge that it is becoming a research practice in and of itself. Artists have not only taken up art criticism and negotiations, they now also integrate research methods and scientific knowledge into their artistic process to such a degree that it even seems to be developing into an independent form of knowledge on its own.”

– Kathrin Busch (art & research editorial)

 

Conceptual Materiality

Teacher as conceptual artist is first and foremost an emancipatory gesture. It is born from a very real frustration that artists have when they find any part of their practice, time, or resources occupied by various forms of institutionalization (i.e. work, school, family, religion, state, nation, the cosmos). “Teacher as conceptual artist” draws attention to the materiality of those binding institutions and allows creative practitioners a mental, cyber, and communal space to put forth proposals for the manipulation of this “new media”.

Conceptual artist Jorge Lucero is the principle author of this tumblr, but he is not the maker of teacher as conceptual artist. Lucero is someone in the middle, a bracket-er, if you will.

– Jorge Lucero Teacher as Conceptual Artist

surrogate art experiences

What is a substitute teacher? Typically, it is a person who fills in for the regular teacher when he or she is unavailable because of illness or vacation or other personal reasons. For our purposes, a substitute teacher is any being, situation, or object that has the potential to impart knowledge.

The exhibition and its related public programs act as an alternative syllabus for art-life learning. The installed artworks, the participating artists, the curators, the exhibition, and the institution can all be considered “substitute teachers” that encourage visitors to assess and challenge their own wealth of knowledge while embarking on new journeys of discovery.

As an exhibition, Substitute Teacher examines reversals of authority and alternative forms of understanding, experience, and curiosity. It acknowledges traditional subjects of study as well as the slippage of one discipline into another. Informed by the structures of the classroom and other potential sites of learning (nature, city streets, places of worship, the internet, the home), Substitute Teacher brings together works in diverse media that become surrogate instructors. These works offer educational opportunities while challenging conditions of categorization, officialdom, and believability.

– Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (Substitute Teacher)

structures & possibilities

“I have come to realize that my work as an artist is very different than that of, say, a painter or true craftsman. I have decided to take on museum audiences, race problems, curatorial bias, cultural deficiencies; hell anything over my head! Making art is just a part of the fun. I have always been wired to think about the structures of organizations and the possibilities within them. I cannot separate my interest in these structures or in people from the objects that I make. As a result, sometimes the work is messy, with lots of cooks in the kitchen and presented in a way that would give a modernist a headache. So be it. It’s not for everyone.”

– Theaster Gates (New City art article)

expression over existence

“Am I overexisting or am I over existing? That’s my inside joke.” These words — evoking a doubt-free Hamlet unfazed about whether or not to be — bounce forth from the tumult of video, furniture, music, extreme makeup and insistent jabberwocky that form “Any Ever,” Ryan Trecartin’s game-changing exhibition at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens….At the heart of Mr. Trecartin’s elaborate worldview is an aspirational faith in the potential of uninhibited self-expression, both individual and collective, as an active agent against the mounting materialism of everyday life. This is in a sense the story of his own hypertalented overexistence, now aided and abetted by a fluctuating crew of co-conspirators with gifts, charisma and minds of their own. What he has unleashed is larger than himself, which is why both his sudden appearance and continuing evolution are such cause for hope.

– Roberta Smith (Ryan Trecartin NYtimes article)

Art Science Knowledge

But what of the collaboration between science and the arts? Are we really prepared to live with a permanent cultural schism? If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we’ll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture but that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement—perhaps a fourth culture—is that neither culture can exist by itself. Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments, which lead to new works of art and so on. Instead of ignoring each other, or competing, or co-opting each other in naïve or superficial ways, science and the arts will truly impact each other. The old intellectual boundaries will disappear. Neuroscience will gain new tools with which to confront the mystery of consciousness and modern physics will improve its metaphors. Art will become a crucial source of scientific ideas…At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No single area of knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science wrote, “It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach.” The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science and art, so that each completes the other.

-Jonah Lehrer (Seed magazine article)

Origins of Education

In August of 2001, just months after earning a B.F.A. in painting from RISD, Adam Marnie moved from Providence to Brooklyn. He had grown up in a small town outside of St. Paul, Minnesota, and was 23 years old. For the next several years, like many young artists, he supported himself with a string of odd jobs: carpentry, art handling, artist’s assistant. Often he didn’t have a studio. His practice suffered and his debts mounted. As he moved from one cheap living situation to the next, he felt increasingly isolated. “Many friends didn’t even know I was an artist,” he told me last winter. Toward the end of 2008, forced to vacate yet another studio, Marnie photographed the work he had on hand and decided to apply to M.F.A. programs. Now 30, he’d been toying with the idea for a while, weighing its cost and his reluctance to become a student again against the frustrations of more of the same. The painter Amy Sillman was instrumental in his decision to focus on Bard, in Annandale-on-Hudson, a few hours north of the city. The two had met by chance at a café in Williamsburg. “Adam was with a friend of mine,” remembers Sillman, who has co-chaired Bard’s M.F.A. painting department since 2002. “He had his hood up and seemed kind of remote. I couldn’t tell whether he was a hoodlum or one of those haunted hipsters you see with skateboards on Bedford Avenue. But my instinct was that he was a good guy.” Sillman wrote Marnie a recommendation for Bard, and he was accepted.

-Bard MFA Program (Brooklyn Rail article)