Catching Feelings
I’ve been trying to ignore all of the panic and mania surrounding swine flu, since as far as I know anxiety has not yet been proven to afford protection against infection and death. An article in yesterday’s New York Times, however, caught my attention, noting the ways in which Mexicans have become particularly marked by the stigma of the flu even though cases have appeared throughout North America and Europe. Apparently healthy Mexican travelers were placed under quarantine in China; several Latin American countries suspended flights from Mexico; groups seeking to limit Mexican immigration to the U.S. have been referring to the virus as “Mexican Flu” in the media.
What struck me about all of this is that it is nothing new. Remember the Gay Plague, anyone? What is important here is not the transmission of disease, but rather the transmission of affect: anxiety, fear, disgust. I drudged up NBC’s very first coverage of the “gay cancer” (1982), which had not yet been identified or named as HIV/AIDS. Right from the start “lifestyle” was named as the cause of the illness, a way of life as disease vector.
In contrast, a 1976 public service announcement from the CDC about swine flu emphasizes the ways in which anyone can catch it, and anyone can transmit it. We should all be scared into vigilance and personal responsibility.
All of this brings me around to thinking about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose artworks involving stacks of posters or pieces of candy free for the taking enact the spread of a virus from a single source. His 1991 work Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) perhaps most directly links the transmission of infection to the transmission of affect. As viewers take a piece of candy from the 175 pound pile (the weight of the artist’s lover Ross in health), they symbolically take a piece of the lost lover’s body as it wastes away at the hands of AIDS. They also take a bit of melancholy-tinged shiny sweetness, a communion with the beloved in joy and death.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)," 1991
This morning I found my piece of gold-wrapped candy from an installation of this work. I still can’t bring myself to eat it. Maybe I can’t make the move from melancholia to mourning? I seem to be resisting the work’s designed disappearance. But then again, the work is also designed for constant renewal; the pile of candy is replenished to its original weight each morning. Perhaps if the work were permanently installed around the corner with its promise of a breath of life each day, I could take that sweetness and loss into my mouth.
My shiny piece of "Portrait of Ross" in LA
For the Love of God: The Artist as Capitalist
Damien Hirst, "For the Love of God," 2007. Platinum, diamonds, and human teeth.
In 2007, artist Damien Hirst exhibited a work at the White Cube gallery in London which is reputed to be the most expensive contemporary artwork ever made. Entitled For the Love of God, apparently in response to a question posed by the artist’s mother (“For the love of God, what are you going to do next?”), the work consists of 8,601 of the world’s finest diamonds encrusting the platinum cast of a human skull from the mid-1800s, complete with the skull’s original real human teeth. Financed by means of an investment of $28 million of the artist’s own money the work is reputed to have sold for $100 million, paid in cash. The artist contracted with Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner in order to acquire the collection of fine diamonds on the international market, which steadily pushed up the precious commodity’s price globally over the months of acquisition.
Inspired by Aztec turquoise mosaic skulls held in the collection of the British Museum, Hirst thought it would be great to create a diamond version, but was originally deterred by the prohibitive cost. Upon further consideration, he decided that the ludicrous expense could actually be the work’s rationale: “maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.” This idea of laughing in the face of death resonates with the artist’s belief in the value of art collecting as something that can confer a certain kind of immortality: “I don’t see what else you can spend your money on. If you want to own things, art is a pretty good bet. Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That’s as close as you can get to immortality.” When asked to think about the work in relationship to the current controversy over African blood diamonds, Hirst declined, but did comment on the deadly potential of the object as an extreme luxury item: “That’s when you stop laughing. You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”
Apart from the obvious gossipy interest that this work inspires, For the Love of God provides an illustrative case study for thinking about art and value. While Hirst suggests that a certain kind of immortality may be attained by the art collector who acquires unique commodities and pulls them permanently out of circulation or makes them available for public use, Karl Marx suggests that the only immortality is held by the ways in which capital is endlessly transforming money into commodities (in this case, artworks) and back again. In For the Love of God, we can see capital’s maintenance of itself in the artwork’s surrender to circulation and indifference to form when it comes to its place in the market. Almost by a certain alchemy, formaldehyde soaked sharks and dead butterflies are transformed into expertly cut diamonds. For the Love of God has the simultaneous status of money itself (diamonds being one of the objects that expresses exchange value more perfectly than others), and of a product which is constituted by objectified labor in the form of raw material and labor as an instrument of the artist’s goals. Inasmuch as living labor is used as both a raw material and an instrument of labor in the mining of diamonds, this action works as evidence, to quote Marx, “that the capitalist desires nothing more than that the worker should expend his dosages of life power as much as possible without interruption.” Human life is a raw material in the construction of this artwork, not only in the form of the actual skull which provides its mold, but more importantly in the expenditure of life power in the often deadly process of mine working and in death resulting from armed conflict financed by the diamond trade.
Santiago Sierra, "250cm Line Tattooed on Six Paid People," 1999. Black and white photograph.
If Damien Hirst’s work incidentally acts to show us the machinations of capital in the interest of giving us an extreme example of the product of objectified labor, the work of artist Santiago Sierra intentionally uses the power of capital to harness living labor. While Hirst’s work makes no pretension of acting as a form of institutional critique, Sierra’s purports to reframe capitalist activity within the symbolic confines of the gallery in order to offer it up for analysis and criticism. One of Sierra’s most well known works is a performance project from 1999 entitled 250cm Line Tattooed on Six Paid People. Each of the unemployed men who participated was paid $30 to have a line permanently tattooed on his back. Sierra’s work presents us with the live act of the transformation of the worker’s living labor, or bodily and energetic potential capacity to work, into use value for capital. In this case, the use value of the worker is set in motion by capital in the specific scene of the art gallery—the worker mobilized as a raw material, as labor in the moment of objectifying transformation, and in that action as the art object itself. What is most striking is perhaps the worker’s absolute indifference to the specificity of his labor, which is in fact what separates and distinguishes the worker from the capitalist (or in this case, the artist). This is not the transformative decision-making process of the capitalist, nor the interested craft of the artistan or jeweler or even tattoo artist, but the bare exchange of time, energy and bodily integrity for a wage.
Touring Prospect.1 in Photos (Part 2)
As promised, here is a small visual taste of the sights and sounds of New Orleans’ Prospect.1 biennial. More detailed posts about the art in the Lower Ninth Ward, the French Quarter/Marigny & the Warehouse District will follow in the coming days.
In the Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
Mark Bradford, Mithra (2008)
At the New Orleans African American Museum, which is located in Treme–the oldest African-American neighborhood in the United States.
William Kentridge, What Will Come (has already come) (2007)
McCallum & Tarry, The Evidence Of Things Not Seen (2007-8)
DUMBO Art Tour: Art Under the Bridge & the 2008 Triangle Workshop
It was a rainy Saturday and it was the kind of day that amplified the bizarrely romantic quality of Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. During the popular Art Under the Bridge festival the city comes to this compact post-industrial neighborhood to see what’s new and happening.
Unlike the northern Brooklyn art enclaves of Williamsburg or Bushwick which are composed of sprawling webs of studio and gallery spaces, DUMBO is dense and manageable. Officially there were 123 open studios (and approximately 175 artists on display) during the three-day event.
One of the curious realities of festival events is that street artists are increasingly making their presence known whether through specially prepared work for the weekend or their growing presence on the streetscape. This year chalk aficionado Ellis G. decked out Front Street with a multi-colored drawing and French stencil-master C215 was unavoidable (he’s been in town from France for about a month I hear). There was another box-y talent which may be Aakash Nihalani but something tells me it isn’t.
While the street art may be part of the attraction it is the commissioned and studio visits that undeniably bring in the art fans. It’s always a pleasure to wander around private studios and catch a glimpse of trends (if any) emerging. All artists are usually polite and welcoming though some became instantly paranoid whenever I present my camera for a photo, often insisting I don’t snap a pic. “Fine, I won’t blog about it,” I retort. They always seemed disappointed when I say that and often offer up a website with images which I never accept as a compromise–the reason why is a whole different post. Continue reading »
Shooting in Broad Daylight
Many teachers I met over the summer had some connection to teaching photography or working with a variety of students who are photographers (for example, in an AP Studio Art class). During a few conversations the subject of Art21’s developing collection of featured photographers came up, so the purpose of this week’s TWCA column is to highlight various Art21 artists that allow students both traditional and non-traditional approaches to taking pictures.
Some photographers, like Robert Adams and Gabriel Orozco walking with his camera, give students the chance to see photographers who inform their work through discovery and re-discovery of the landscape, be it beautiful, surprising or desolate. Others like Laurie Simmons (who clearly says she is an artist who uses the camera simply as a tool) and Eleanor Antin meticulously set up their photographs, arranging the compositions and designing the space in particular ways with models, props and even stagehands. Then there are portrait photographers, to use the term loosely, such as Oliver Herring and Sally Mann, who create more than a representation of the person photographed through particular interaction with the model(s).
Juxtaposing these pairings, or across these pairings, can give student photographers a chance to look into how a camera in the hands of an artist with a patient and experimental eye can stretch common themes and subject matter- making viewers look again.
Have any of these artists, or other Art21 artists who use photography in their art, influenced your work or the work of your students? Please share with us by posting a comment and even links to images…
Have a good start to the new school year!
Welcome to the Good Life
Until recently, it hadn’t crossed my mind that I could be Kanye West. I did a double take the first time I saw the advertisement one morning on a downtown C-train: “Be someone else. Be KANYE!” the large print suggested. “For a few hours or a lifetime, now anytime can be Kanye time in an Absolut world…. Fast-acting tablets transform anyone into Kanye West,” it continued. Even Kanye himself—who as we know, doesn’t mince words —promised: “Two fast-acting Be KANYE Tablets can unleash the superstar within.” By dialing 1-877-BeKanye or visiting bekanyenow.com, the transformation could be mine.
Did I want to Be Kanye? The bling beckoned. But what, I hedged, might be the side effects. Deciding I’d wait for official FDA approval, I turned my thoughts to wondering how this peculiar and politically incorrect endorsement had elbowed its way into the subway’s ad space. My assumption was graphic guerilla tactics—someone had snuck onto the train late at night and replaced an NYPD recruitment poster with the suggestion of Being Kanye as an alternative route to self-improvement. It was not until I got to work that morning and as first order of procrastination, went to bekanyenow.com, that I learned that BeKanye is Absolut Vodka’s new ad campaign.
At a glance, or even a look, you are not meant to know that ingesting BeKanye Tablets stands for drinking Absolut Vodka—the brand name is only printed twice and in both cases, through clever graphic maneuvers, it is practically invisible.
Why would an advertisement conceal the brand-name it endorses? Continue reading »
Bantamweight Flickr Battle!
After the gorgeously gargantuan show at MoMA that held New Yorkers spellbound in its midtown courtyard, the whole country of France is now making a fuss this week over Richard Serra. The New York Times slideshow revealing his latest steel monoliths at the Grand Palais is surprisingly vertical. Plus, who can resist Richard Serra’s craggly mug, above.
Meanwhile, the blogosphere is a-twitter about whether Serra could be gathering steam as the most popular artist captured on Flickr. A recent Flickr search has revealed that at time of posting, there are 6,192 Flickr photos that match the search terms ‘Richard Serra.’ A new bantamweight contender, ‘Olafur Eliasson‘ is up to 4,256 and averaging about 30 adds per day, presumably fed by visitors to his current show at MoMA and PS1. Surprising names in the flyweight division are ‘Matthew Barney‘ at 1,139, ‘Marcel Duchamp‘ at 1,408, and the white canvas master ‘Robert Ryman‘ trailing with just 107 Flickr posts. Please note that photographing museum paintings by Robert Ryman is not encouraged.
In the heavyweight division, readers have suggested that Henry Moore, at 14,563, and Alexander Calder at 17,471 (by last name only), are positioned to defeat the overall reigning champion Andy Warhol, who currently has 18,900 Flickr photos tagged with his name. Further investigation has revealed that not all works tagged with Andy Warhol actually are by Andy Warhol, but include some creative appropriation.
Photos from Charles Atlas/Lia Gangitano at NYPL
Check out the pictures from yesterday night’s screening of Paradox and discussion with Charles Atlas and Lia Gangitano, Director of Participant Inc, at the Mid-Manhattan Library.
Art21 is co-presenting monthly screenings of each Season 4 episode at the NYPL throughout the spring.
Art21 & Mel Chin at NAEA
Check out Art21’s photos from last week’s NAEA conference in New Orleans. Featured are Art21-featured artist Mel Chin’s SuperSession, Art21’s professional development workshop for teachers (coopted by Chin), and Art21 and Mel’s team on the ground around town.
Photos from Judy Pfaff/Betsy Sussler at NYPL
Check out the pictures from last Monday night’s screening of Romance and discussion with Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff and Betsy Sussler, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of BOMB Magazine, at the Mid-Manhattan Library.
Art21 is co-presenting monthly screenings of each Season 4 episode at the NYPL throughout the spring.
