Days have passed since St. Valentine’s Day and the flowers are giving off a sweet waft of imminent mortality, which may make them a dubious token of love. But I am a fan of flowers and even Valentine’s Day (in principle more than practice) and can’t get through one without coming back to Ryan Trecartin’s video work, Valentine’s Day Girl, which features a young woman so obsessed with love symbols that Christmas carols hasten her demise.

Love doesn’t make frequent appearances in contemporary art in any serious way aside from the occasional Robert Indiana icon—which I would like to think of as less saccharine as its reception (though it has become a backdrop for a giant make-out session for the Philadelphia tourism industry). Trecartin’s video hasn’t anything to do with love and everything to do with obsession, hysteria, and other psychic excesses.

Kalup Linzy has created a cast of mostly-in-drag-characters, the melancholic Taiwan being paramount, who sing and act out their love lives with Fassbinder-esque theatrics and solipsism. Parodying a range of screen-based traditions—from early cinema to music videos—Linzy’s characters work out their anxieties about their careers and love lives with no sense of resolution, though partying is often a sufficient antidote.

If the work of Trecartin and Linzy are any indication, then the representation of things outside of reason, such as emotions, tend to find their representation outside of rationality as well. Never mind the much-anticipated return of affect to contemporary art—love is as crazy does.

But let’s allow that art can be a forum for things not easily spoken about or ways to speak, even to no one in particular or everyone at the same time. Brooklyn-based photographer Lauren Silberman has been recording communities or trying to create them through her projects and sometimes the photos become public postcards very much in the vein of Gillian Wearing’s confessional signs.

Lauren Silberman, "Valentine," 2009.

Such utterances need not be totally sentimental—even Wearing’s photography of the same period have depicted people in a mise-en-abime of x-rated narcissism, where the subjects are not holding statements but pictures of themselves…umm…loving themselves. And such lasciviousness brings us right back to the pagan roots of Valentine’s Day: a festival of lust and fertility.

There are some projects that are appropriately bawdy and bodily while maintaining a simultaneous sense of play and critique. Insert magazine made its appearance around Valentine’s 2007 as a sampler of both high and low-brow culture captured in a way that makes Barthes sound scandalous. Better yet, Insert plays on its form (a small zine that could exist inside a larger book or magazine) and is droplifted into other publications by its creators: Ryan Holmberg, Garrett Riccardi, Marco Roso, and Lan Tuazon. The zines are distributed by a generous act of civil disobedience while recuperating eroticism—its creator calls it “bookf**king”. If you’re lucky enough to come across one, share it with the ones you love.

The greatest thing I have learned about love and art is best expressed on this poster I saw in the art academy in Martinique:

"I have decided to love contemporary art"

This statement, “I have decided to love contemporary art,” says everything about making a conscious committing to those things that are difficult and challenging even when outside the realm of reason.

Not at all surprisingly for a corporate entity, the Associated Press recently established ownership of a photograph of Barack Obama taken at a 2006 National Press Club event by photographer Mannie Garcia. After some extensive sleuthing, the Garcia photograph was  identified as the source for Shepard Fairey’s Hope image that we all have grown to know and love. That image has, in turn, gone into the world to flank numerous buttons, hats, t-shirts, stickers and countless other presidential tchotchkes.

L: Mannie Garcia/AP, 2006. R: Shepard Fairey, c. 2008. Via www.nytimes.com

In a wise and pretty gutsy move, Fairey preemptively sued the AP, claiming that he cannot be accused of copyright infringement and that his image is protected under fair-use copyright statutes. Money is at issue here too, though I can’t imagine Fairey made significant, if any, profit from the image. The same cannot be said for his Saks Fifth Avenue spring season marketing commission that borrows from early- to mid-20th-century propaganda-style imagery. No shade…

This whole scenario recalls the Alberto Korda photograph of Che Guevara that too went on to have a more successful life as a high-contrast graphic (yes, I had it on a t-shirt also; black image on a red background, of course).

Alberto Korda, Ernersto “Che” Guevara at the La Coubre memorial service, March 5, 1960.

Like Garcia’s photo, Korda’s image was taken while he was in the employ of a news service, which pretty much denies the photographer of any significant credit or direct financial benefits aside from the occasional lawsuit. What irony, considering Korda’s image ended up on the Cuban 3-peso note, but it also points toward the fact that legal courts are about the most effective option artists may have for financial remuneration for the lifetime of their artworks. Garcia, in a further twist, is claiming that the photo copyright is his and not the AP’s and that any credit or money should come to him. In the meantime, the AP wants credit and a cut of the profit from any subsequent use of Fairey’s image.

Um, I’m going to wager that no one from the AP has been on Harlem’s 125th street lately. Obama, unlike the litigants, has prudently distanced himself from the micro-economy that has sprung up around images of himself, his family, and that Fairey image. For instance, I ran into this guy in DC working the inaugural crowds and I normally see him in Harlem doing much of the same.

Harlem vendor in D.C.

Now that the president has become an icon, his image is, and has been, a boon for petit entrepreneurs in Harlem, and I’m sure any other site for a thriving street market where standards of “original” and “bootleg” are rarely considered. I wish the lawyers luck in tracking down all the subsequent profitable uses of the Fairey image.

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In the depths of a seemingly endless New York winter, my mind is already thinking toward late spring days on the Adriatic and the 53rd International Art Exhibition at la grande dame of all international art fairs, La Biennale de Venezia. There will be sultry nights, hobnobbing amongst the cognoscenti and, most importantly, a three-gelati-per-day minimum for all art lovers.

This year’s director, Daniel Birnbaum, has eschewed sections in favor of a thematically tight mega-exhibition. Organized around mostly “process” and “painting,” 53 seems poised to steer way clear of the epic knock-down-drag-out mainly between Okwui Enwezor and Rob Storr (with several punches landed by Francesco Bonami and Jessica Morgan) over the African Pavilion at the last Biennale. Though the debate quickly descended into sheer mudslinging, primarily at issue was Storr’s over-reliance on the holdings of a morally suspect Congolese collector. This time around, no African “big men” are rearing their heads, the unglamorous but stable and relatively prosperous west African nation of Gabon is participating for the first time and Mother Africa is present in Venice in a wonderful display of peace and inclusivity.

As it happens, I am re-reading Miwon Kwon’s book on site-specificity, One Place After Another, and like any good student of critical theory, I believe context gives meaning. I am having a hard time thinking about Italy outside the context of Africa, or more specifically, the increasingly precarious situation of African immigrants.

In the past few years, tens of thousands of Africans have illegally landed on southern Italian shores. While this is clearly many more than the southern towns and islands can legally process, police and support, the angst over the rapidly arriving clandestini has fueled xenophobic legislation, attacks against and murders of eastern Europeans, Roma and Africans—not to mention the number of immigrants who die either in boat crossings or are killed once they land ashore. I don’t mean to make too light of the situation, but you know something’s going slightly awry in Italy when there’s a serious move afoot that could possibly ban Sicilian cuisine in the north of the country.

The Biennale bears no responsibility for any of these racist developments, clearly, but there’s no point in burying well-coiffed heads in the Giardini’s gravel about it. And if the news is too depressing for any dear readers, I’d like to suggest two fantastic art projects that have deftly and poetically presented the movement of immigrant bodies through the Italian landscape.

Moroccan-born French artist, Bouchra Khalili, recently made a series of videos called Mapping Journey that trace the routes of several African immigrants through Italy to France where they have ultimately joined the French Foreign Legion.

Bouchra Khalili, "Mapping Journey #1," 2008

Very short and shot from a single vantage point in a documentary style, the videos leave the viewer almost confused while watching the matter-of-fact way the anonymous subjects dryly narrate their dangerous (and often multiple) attempts to cross the Mediterranean, slip past borders and only to find a safe haven in a military hangover from imperial France.

Isaac Julien’s high-calorie films and videos are as lush and beautiful as Khalili’s are straightforward and his WESTERN UNION: Small Boats (2007) is no exception.

Isaac Julien, "WESTERN UNION Series No. 8 (Sculpture for a New Millenium)," 2007

In a project encompassing multi-channel video, photography, installation and a collaboration with choreographer Russell Maliphant, Julien moves his viewers wordlessly through a sweeping visual tale of vulnerable bodies in sublime southern Italian landscapes. In interior scenes, Julien situates his protagonists in a baroque ballroom that Luchino Visconti fans (count me among the faithful) will recognize from The Leopard and, like Visconti’s epic film about an Italy in cultural crisis, WESTERN UNION is downright decadent in its beauty.

It is only a coincidence that the world’s largest franchised art fair and the international banking regulatory body share a moniker from their shared base, Basel, Switzerland, but no coincidence at all that each are currently in a bit of a funk. From Basel to Boston, institutions all over are now contemplating how to function in a financial black hole. Equally funky and oddly inspiring have been the community-based, democratically modeled responses to these crises-induced measures. One such example of this is an online petition to preserve the Rose Art Museum collection. No doubt this action is inspired by such tactics like the one that is lobbying the new Obama administration for a culture czar. How do we really feel about Quincy Jones at the helm of U.S. cultural institutions?

I’m more intrigued by artists’ responses to the increasingly challenging economic conditions—ones that are taking the form of community action groups. It seems that collaborations as community actions are the way forward for artists’ and art mavens’ take on large issues and institutions, even when the goal is individual empowerment. W.A.G.E. is one such feminist art group seeking economic parity for artists’ work.

Democracy in America: W.A.G.E. from Creative Time on Vimeo.

W.A.G.E. was formed well before the global credit crunch. In fact, it developed in the midst of a hyperbolic market where (generally male) artists such as Michael Landy, the Chapman Brothers, and Jeff Koons were parodying the same market forces that were feeding them. When the art world was awash in obscene amounts of cash, W.A.G.E. wondered why more artists weren’t seeing more of it. Granted, this is the complication of peculiar economic relationships in the art world based on buying, selling, and patronage, but not on the basic equation of labor and compensation. And thus the question remains: how do artists make a living from the practice of making art alone without wholly capitulating to market forces?

I have no answers at all to the big economic questions but personally, when things are a bit tight, I like to fall back on the old-school green motto that is both earth-friendly and cost-effective: the 3Rs. Below is an offering of some art projects that exemplify each in principle.

REDUCE
This collage is more of a collaboration between Art21 artist Andrea Zittel and MOMA curator Klaus Biesenbach featured in the latest W magazine. Biesenbach’s austere downtown digs inspired a collage, which adds some visual texture to his monk-like quarters. Granted, this is a design editorial for a luxury-goods magazine but it’s amazing how idealistically anti-consumerist it comes across.

Photographed by Dean Kaufman for "W" magazine.

REUSE
The largest of Phoebe Washburn‘s installations mimic landscapes and the most ambitious ones create their own biosphere.

Phoebe Washburn, "Manning Stay Station," 2005. Installation view.

Yes it’s cool that Washburn goes on walks, collecting discarded materials on her meanderings and then sorts them with her own cataloging system, but it’s even cooler that she retrieves the materials when the installations are dismantled and re-catalogs them for possible use in future projects. Granted, there are all sorts of formal and conceptual issues to tackle in this work and it’s really more about an obsessive practice, but it’s great to think about these practices as self-sustaining systems that form a tacit critique of consumption-based market systems.

RECYCLE
I think it may be high time to reinvigorate The Black Factory, William Pope.L’s peripatetic truck that solicits folks to bring objects they associate with black culture. The Factory’s workers then “convert” those objects into products to be sold.

William Pope.L’s “Black Factory,” 2006, via sokref1 on Flickr.

Perhaps these conversations on race would be interesting to revisit now that Obama is in office but, in a more compelling sense, I like that Pope.L’s art has often been based on the consumption habits of the working class and the poor. No one often thinks of the words “poor” and “consumer” at the same time, but those consumed things make for a material culture that has been fueling art projects for years.

* Lilly Ledbetter is the namesake of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, President Obama’s first official piece of legislation. It expands workers’ rights to sue on the grounds of race, sex, age, and/or disability discrimination.