NEWSgrist - where spin is art

The Treachery of Images

Above: Robert Hovden's four nanolithographs in When Art Exceeds Perception at the Jill Stuart Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Courtesy of Robert Hovden.

 

When Art Exceeds Perception is an exhibition of works produced and conceived by Robert Hovden, a PhD candidate in Applied Physics at Cornell University. Hovden has mounted an exhibition to probe our assumptions about the copy, authorship, and ownership. Predictably, he has provoked the ire of one (dead) artist's estate and the admiration of those who dispute the wisdom of overreaching copyright, including the editor of this blog. See below for excerpts from blurbs and press.

~ the editor, NEWSgrist (where spin is art)

 

Cornell Council For the Arts - Intimate Cosmologies Projects Biennial
WHEN ART EXCEEDS PERCEPTION
Robert Hovden
Dates:  Oct 30, 2014 - Dec 15, 2014
Location: Jill Stuart Gallery, Human Ecology Building
Link

When Art Exceeds Perception explores the implications of replication and plagiarism by reproducing famous works of art inscribed onto the surface of a silicon crystal wafer at 500x smaller than the eye can see and 5x smaller than the wavelength of light.

The art was inscribed by accelerating charged ions to high-speeds and focusing them on the silicon wafer. By scanning an ion beam in an image pattern, molecules on the wafer surface were sculpted and etched like clay. The material sculpted at this scale is high-purity, crystalline silicon with an atomically smooth, flat surface. This is the same silicon medium used in modern digital devices for transistors and provides an exceptional medium for physical manipulation and design.

In a digital era where information is encrypted and stored in the atomic bits of nanoscale devices, answers to philosophical, moral, and legal questions surrounding artistic ownership and copyright become muddled. When Art Exceeds Perception focuses on this issue through the creation of tangible, if immediately inaccessible, art — not stored as bits, but rather as an indirectly interpretable image. Its final representation is not digitized or encrypted, but identical in image to the original, if merely too small to be perceived.

Above: Source images used for nanolithography. Courtesy of NEWSgrist.

 

via Torrentfreak:

This ease of copying has provoked legal aggression and endless debate as to the purpose of copyright law and its role in protecting the interests of artists. In particular, entertainment industry companies often declare that no matter what its nature, infringement negatively affects those creators. But is that always the case?

A new project developed by Dr Robert Hovden at Cornell University aims to provoke discussion on that very topic by pushing replication of content – and indeed the law – to their absolute limits.

A self-confessed gradeschool downloader and former undergraduate at Jet Propulsion Labs, NASA, Hovden went on to study nanoscience at Cornell. His passion for studying the world at the tiniest possible levels has given birth to “When Art Exceeds Perception”.

The project, which will be exhibiting at Cornell University this November and December, explores the implications of copyright infringement, replication and plagiarism when the ‘pirated’ works are so tiny they cannot be perceived by human senses.

To this end, Hovden has ‘pirated’ four famous works of art by scribing them into the surface of a silicon crystal using a focused ion beam. The features in the artwork replicas are five hundred times smaller than the eye can perceive and five times smaller than the wavelength of light. [...]

Above image courtesy of Robert Hovden.

via Torrentfreak, cont'd:

 

“To take a piece of art, copy it, and share it with the world without the original artists’ permission is traditionally viewed as wrong and, in most cases, violates copyright laws,” Hovden says.

“Such laws are intended to protect an artist’s financial interests and provide incentive to create. However, in a digital era where information is encrypted and stored in the atomic bits of nanoscale devices, answers to philosophical, moral, and legal questions surrounding copyright become muddled.”

This leads to Hovden’s big question: When a copyright work is copied, framed and presented for public consumption on a nanoscale as it will during November and December at Cornell, has something been taken from the original artist?

“Thus far, people have discussed this project from a science or art perspective, but I believe that the readers of TorrentFreak are best equipped to understand this work. The exhibition is highly conceptual – completely beyond perception – and critical of current views on replication,” Hovden told TF.

 

via The Verge:

Artist M.C. Escher died in 1972, leaving behind iconic optical illusions that are now generations old. Painter Joy Garnett was born in 1965, and her career is in full swing. But when nanoscience researcher Robert Hovden copied works from both for a recent project, he could use Garnett’s with impunity. Escher’s estate, meanwhile, thinks he’s breaking the law.

Unless he told you, though, you’d never know he’s ripping off someone else’s work.

When Art Exceeds Perception looks like an exhibit of blank gray discs. Those silicon discs, however, hold a series of miniscule etchings: sketches made by a process called nanoscale lithography, in which charged ions blast away silicon atoms like an invisible chisel. The technique can be used for beautiful effects, like sandcastles printed on a single grain of sand. In this case, the images' individual details are roughly a tenth of a micron wide, and each picture is so small that it’s impossible to see even with a high-powered optical microscope — you’d have to turn to more recent inventions like the scanning tunneling microscope. At Cornell University’s Jill Stuart Gallery, where the installation will hang until December, "people will stare, and they usually find small imperfections in the disk," says Hovden. "They think maybe that's where the art is. But probably not."

Above: Joy Garnett, "Laylah K.", 2003, oil on canvas, 26x36 inches. Courtesy of the artist. CC-BY-SA.

via CNET:

You're looking at a reproduction of an M.C. Escher drawing, but you'd never know it. It's inscribed onto the surface of a silicon crystal wafer at a scale 500 times smaller than the eye can see.

Robert Hovden etched the Escher tessellations using focused high-speed ions. Why? Because he's a nanoscientist who spends his days studying objects with electron microscopes. And because maybe no one will notice he's copying famous works of art if the reproductions are so tiny.

But don't call the intellectual-property cops just yet. Hovden has copied famous works of art deliberately and openly for his exhibit “When Art Exceeds Perception,” an exploration of plagiarism in the age of bits and bytes.

"To take a piece of art, copy it and share it with the world without the original artists' permission is traditionally viewed as wrong and, in most cases, violates copyright laws...However, in a digital era where information is encrypted and stored in the atomic bits of nanoscale devices, answers to philosophical, moral and legal questions surrounding copyright become muddled," reads Hovden's statement for the exhibit, part of the Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial  "Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology."

For the campus-wide show, which runs through December 22, artists and scientists "explore the cultural and human consequences of seeing the world at the micro and macro levels, through nanoscience and networked communications." Participants have done things like render the microscopic textures of a sheet of paper as a 3D inhabitable landscape and create wearable sensors to detect methane and poisonous gases.

Hovden, a Cornell Ph.D. student in applied physics, etched works of art onto the atomically smooth, flat surfaces of silicon wafers used in modern digital devices. He chose works "where copyright is relevant to the discussion" -- pieces by Escher, Magritte, Matisse and contemporary artist Joy Garnett, who releases work under a Creative Commons license.

Above: Robert Hovden: "Nano-Laylah K," 2014, nanolithography. Dimensions: diminutive. Courtesy of Robert Hovden.

via Art Law Blog:

M.C. Escher is well-known for his finely crafted compositions integrating mathematics and art, creating brain-teasing images, transforming creatures and impossible architectures. Escher’s optical illusions, explorations of geometric patterns and perspectives make him a favorite among scientists and mathematicians. So it is no surprise that Nanoscientist Robert Hovden chose Escher’s Regular Division of the Plane  as one of the microscopic etchings in his new show, When Art Exceeds Perception. Hovden chose this Escher work for its ” lovely tessellation with symmetries that can be found in the crystalline silicon substrate on which it was etched.” Unfortunately, the Escher Estate sees the use of Escher’s image as nothing more than a copyright infringement.

As readers of the Art Law Journal are keenly aware, Copyright Law has few bright lines, made even hazier when confronting issues surrounding new technologies, such as nanolithography. Is copying art that nobody can see an infringement? Does this new technological process, or the pattern created by millions of Escher’s, transform the work such that it is considered fair use? Does an analysis of this issue even work within the bounds of the Copyright Act and current case law? Let’s take a look.

Above: Focused Ion Beam device. Courtesy of Robert Hovden.

LINKS

Cornell Council For the Arts
Exhibition: WHEN ART EXCEEDS PERCEPTION
Artist:  Robert Hovden (Applied Physics)
Dates:  Oct 30, 2014 - Dec 15, 2014
Installation Location: Jill Stuart Gallery, Human Ecology Building

Cornell Council For the Arts - Intimate Cosmologies Projects Biennial


PRESS

Torrentfreak
Scientist Deliberately Pirates Art on a Nanoscopic Scale
By Andy on November 2, 2014

ACM News
Cornell Biennial Celebrates Nanotech as Art
By Anne Ju, November 4, 2014

WIRED (Germany)
Design | Robert Hovden schrumpft Raubkopien, bis sie keine mehr sind
06 November 2014 von Max Biederbeck

Above: "Rofl"

The Verge
These are the tiniest copyright violations ever made:
Good artists copy. Great artists steal, in nanoscale
By Adi Robertson on November 19, 2014

CMOA Blog (Carnegie Museum of Art)
How Museums Affect the Brain, the Art of the Cover, and Other News
By Matthew Newton, Associate Editor, Friday, November 21st, 2014

Art Law Journal
Artist is in Trouble for Nanoscale Copies of an M.C. Escher
Steve Schlackman, November 22, 2014

CNET
These works of art are too tiny to see (but trust us, they're there)
A Cornell Ph.D. student in applied physics etches famous works of art -- Escher, Magritte, Matisse -- onto silicon wafers used in modern digital devices.
by Leslie Katz, December 3, 2014

Every Eye (Italy)
Robert Hovden: copyright e nanotecnologia - Speciale
Inviato il 03/12/2014 da Luca Chiappini


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Joy Garnett: Piss & Vinegar (art and ferment) at Smack Mellon

 

Pictured: Dr. Abushady and Annie (with Fahmy) in Benson (ca.1922). Photo courtesy of David and Peggy Sidebottom, Toronto, ONT and the Abushady Archive.

Piss & Vinegar (art and ferment)

a project by Joy Garnett

for

FOODshed

An exhibition of upstate/downstate NY artists who work with food and agriculture

Curated by Amy Lipton

Smack Mellon
92 Plymouth Street @ Washington
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Gallery hours are Wednesday - Sunday, 12:00pm to 6:00pm
Directions

ARTISTS:

Joan Bankemper/Black Meadow Barn; Joy Garnett; Habitat For Artists Collective (Simon Draper, Michael Asbill, Carmen Acuna, Dan McGinley, Brandon Cruz, Jessica Poser, Lisa Breznak and Sean Corcoran); Natalie Jeremijenko; Kristyna and Marek Milde; Peter Nadin/Old Field Farm; Leila Nadir + Cary Peppermint (EcoArtTech); Andrea Reynosa, Brooklyn Grange and Alloy; Bonnie Ora Sherk; Jenna Spevack; Susan Leibovitz Steinman/Mona Talbott; Tattfoo Tan; Elaine Tin Nyo; Linda Weintraub

Exhibition Dates: June 7 to July 27, 2014
Artists’ reception: Saturday, June 7, 5pm-8pm

FOODshed: Agriculture and Art in Action focuses on sustainable agriculture, entrepreneurship, and artists' use of food as subject matter or medium. The exhibition and programming include 14 exhibiting artists in the gallery at Smack Mellon, 3 public projects in the nearby DUMBO community, as well as public workshops in collaboration with the artists in the exhibition. The gallery exhibition features artworks and inventive projects around agriculture and food that address farming as both activism and art form. Many of the artists in this exhibition are known for bringing community-specific issues into their work and are exploring the real-world implications of small-scale farming and raising community awareness about our food systems. Their varied practices include growing food, cooking food, raising animals for food, and engaging communities around local food production as well as instigating new artist-based economies.

More about FOODshed

FOODshed on Facebook

 

Joy Garnett: Piss & Vinegar (art and ferment) is an installation of artworks and foodworks that reflect the pioneering DIY industriousness of the artist’s maternal grandparents: Egyptian poet and beekeeper Dr. Ahmed Zaky Abushady and his English wife Annie (née Bamford). As steward of their archive, Garnett produces works that reflect its compelling intertwining narratives. The installation for FOODshed at Smack Mellon includes two limited edition prints based on images drawn from the archive; a batch of Garnett’s bottled home-fermented red wine vinegar, labeled with an adaptation of Dr. Abushady’s logo; and photo-documentation of both the Abushady’s apiaries and Garnett’s own DIY vinegar-making process.

Background:

Dr. A.Z. Abushady (1892-1955) was an influential Egyptian poet and Victorian polymath who lived and worked in England and Egypt. A physician, bacteriologist, beekeeper, inventor, litterateur and publisher of an array of scientific, cross-cultural and poetry journals, Abushady was an indefatigable builder of libraries and institutions. His wife Annie was an independent-minded globetrotter and self-described freemason. She came from a family of Stalybridge cotton weavers descended from Samuel Bamford, the renowned 19th-century labor organizer and author of Passages in the Life of a Radical. Together, Annie and Zaky introduced innovations to agricultural and beekeeping practices in England (1919-1922) and in Egypt (1922-1946). As a team they were full of piss and vinegar.

In 1919,  Dr. Abushady founded a bee research institute called The Apis Club in Benson, Oxfordshire, with an apiary of 600 hives, and launched a scientific journal, Bee World, which continues publication to this day. After returning to Egypt, he established its Egyptian counterpart, The Bee Kingdom League and its bilingual journal, The Bee Kingdom (Al-Mamlaka al-Nuhal), printed and headquartered in Alexandria.

A heady mix of nature poetry, political idealism and Utopian visions fueled Annie’s and Zaky’s thinking. At the apiary in Benson, they implemented principles of the 19^th and early 20^th century English Co-operative Movement, exporting them to Egypt when they relocated there in 1922. These are the same principles of agricultural and economic co-operation that provide the foundation for co-ops around the world today. “Piss & Vinegar” celebrates the temerity, ingenuity, and perseverance—qualities inherent to DIY undertakings—of the Abushady’s prescient implementation of standardized practices and co-operative principles in their day.

 

Links:

Limited Editions

Red Wine Vinegar ‘Xtra’

A.Z. Abushady on Wikipedia

Piss & Vinegar Album

Additional images

FOODshed images on Facebook

Smack Mellon

The Bee Kingdom

Artist homepage: http://joygarnett.com

…

Press clippings / related articles (PDFs):

Download GARNETT-Hyperallergic-2013

Download GARNETT-Arabic Literature 2013

Download GARNETT-C-Magazine-2011

Download GARNETT-WithFoodInMind_catalog-2011

Memphis Social (May 10-18) curated by Tom McGlynn

Video and objects from my ongoing unmonumental project will be included in ‘Memphis Social’; an unmonumental book will be made available to coincide with the exhibition, as well as a selection of unmonumental multiples. More info at http://unmonumental.org

 

Memphis Social
an apexart franchise exhibition

organized by Tom McGlynn for the Beautiful Fields collective

Click here to read the brochure. [PDF]
Click here to download map and schedule of events. [PDF]

May 10 - 18, 2013

Participating venues:
Caritas Village, The Cotton Museum, Crosstown Arts, David Lusk Gallery, Earnestine and Hazel's Bar and Grill, Jack Robinson Editions, Leadership Memphis, Memphis College of Art, Marshall Arts, The Russian Cultural Center, and Tops Gallery.

Opening receptions:
Friday, May 10
12-8 pm: South Main and Union Avenue art installations on view
5-8 pm: Memphis Social opening reception, Hyde Gallery at Nesin Graduate School, Memphis College of Art

Saturday, May 11
5-7 pm: Exhibition and reception at Marshall Arts
8-10 pm: U-Dig Dance Company Jookin' dance off and reception at Caritas Village

Sunday, May 12
4-6 pm: Drumline and band presentation at Crosstown Arts

Participating artists:
Merry Alpern, Ryo Arita, Doug Ashford, Joshua Azzarella, Will Boone, Suzanne Broughel, Bullet Space NYC, David Sanchez Burr, Dwayne Butcher, Jose Camacho, Brendan Carroll, Andrew Castrucci, Paul Castrucci, Closet Gallery Stockholm, Mike Cockrill, Lisa Dahl, Alex Dipple, Michelle Doll, Elizabeth Dorbad, William Eggleston, Brigitte Engler, Mitch Epstein, Rev. Howard Finster, Joe Fyfe, Joy Garnett, Matthew Garrison, Glen Garver, Lisa Gideonsson, Leon Golub, Max (Buck) Henri, Tyler Hildebrand, Stewart Home, Erin Jennings, Terri Jones, Jelle Kampen, Richard Kern, Eric Knoote, Alexandra Kostrubala, Scott Lawrence, Anthony Lee, Bachrun LoMele, Gustaf Londre, Jessica Lund, Norma Markley, Taylor Martin, Patrick McNicholas and One None Drums, Lester Merriweather, Christopher Miner, Tracey Moffatt, Haley Morris-Cafiero, Anthony Murrell, Greely Myatt, Laura Napier, Virginia Overton, Terri Phillips, Quimetta Perle, William Pope.L, Gunars Prande, Aviva Rahmani, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Jack Robinson, Alexandra Rojas, Tim Rollins and K.O.S, Denis Romanovski, Kara L. Rooney, David Sandlin, Rob van der Schoor, Babette Shaw, Walter Sipser, Jared Small, Henry Speller, Nancy Spero, Mark Tribe and Chelsea Knight, Anton van Dalen, U-Dig Dance Company, Kara Walker, Martynka Wawrzyniak, Melvin Way, Aaron Williams, and Yurt City: Sheila Ross and Laura Ten Eyck.


A Franchise Program winning exhibition.

Curatorial Statement

Memphis Social draws upon a “social turn” in contemporary art and performance that has influenced curatorial criteria for some time now. In her 2006 essay, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” art historian Claire Bishop critiques contemporary, “socially engaged” practices as being philosophically based in a neo-Platonic idealism which proposes ideal solutions that don’t reflect contingent reality.  She explains that this attitude generates, “homilies (that) unwittingly push us back towards a platonic regime where art is valued for its truthfulness and educational efficacy—not for inviting us to confront the more complicated considerations of our predicament.” Bishop observes how contemporary artists have responded to this tendency, writing, “Instead of extracting art from the ‘useless’ domain of the aesthetic and fusing it with social praxis, the most interesting art today exists between two vanishing points: “art becoming mere life or art becoming mere art.” While Bishop addresses artists’ strategies for making relevant work, the philosopher and cultural theorist Jacques Ranciere positions both artist and audience as “emancipated spectators” jointly escaping the hypnotic trap of the mediated spectacle. Ranciere suggests that we not merely react to what he calls “partitions of the sensible” that perpetuate a fractured sense of society, and that a refusal to do so might lead to a more profound experience of both aesthetics and ethics. Memphis Social seeks to combine, and critique, both of these ideas in an exhibition that examines how to present artwork that is truly socially engaged with its environment and audience. The project is a temporary intentional community of artists and cultural organizations gathered together to form a contingent society that addresses combined aesthetic and ethical concerns.

My experience curating Memphis Social has placed me unequivocally on the ground, tasked with negotiating both public and private concerns in presenting a show that mixes discrete works of art and social performance with community organizations in both institutional and non-institutional settings. This alternative model for an exhibition creates its own, often unpredictable, dynamic and I have needed to be ready with a contingency plan at every turn of events, often navigating the boundaries between the public and private. Maintaining this permeable grey area between private and public might be seen ineffective when attempting to initiate social movements or galvanize political change, but I have found it to be quite practical and humane in its open-ended and non-ideologically driven way of being. The risk of losing one’s private aesthetic stake is taken on the chance that its public enactment is integrally connected to its share, not in historical time, but in ethical contingency. The actual social can therefore be seen as differentiated and cohesive, not necessarily toward a historically determinist normalization, but toward an awareness of an organic continuum of both liminal and embodied agency.

While the balance between public and private has been important to my personal experience curating the show, it has also been a critical part of how the exhibition has come together in relation to its physical presentation. One of my goals in organizing Memphis Social has been to present a wide array of artists as a group ensemble in gallery spaces at the Memphis College of Art, and also individually in alternative locations and public spaces throughout the city. As curator I have worked to problematize “the partition of the sensible” head on by literally displacing many of the artists and their works to locations less ideologically determined than the typical institutional venues. These diverse locales include Marshall Arts, Caritas Village Community Center, and Crosstown Arts—an art center housed in an old Sears warehouse—and many of these locations feature new, site-specific work. Each of these organizations helps to focus social activity and serve communities in real need of coalescent civic centers. The curatorial intention behind presenting art, dance, and musical performance at these locations has been to augment what already takes place there and to offer an objective acknowledgement of their significance to the Memphis communities that they serve. In addition to these alternative spaces, the exhibition is also sited in specialized institutions such as The Cotton Museum, which was the location of the commodities exchange for the crop that defines the South in its agrarian economy and also links it, inescapably, to the history of slavery. The screening here of Kara Walker’s 2005 video 8 Possible Beginnings, along with a collection intervention by the younger, Memphis artist Lester Merriweather, brings to the fore (in this institutional partition) the explicit and implicit national assumptions of economics, labor, and race.

Other participants in Memphis Social such as Tim Rollins and Doug Ashford, represent artists responsible for setting the standard of socially inclusive presentations of aesthetics and ethics in their work as respective members of Group Material (1979-1996). An older generation of artists in the exhibition—Leon Golub and Nancy Spero—extrapolated idiosyncratic imagery from their social experiences in addressing the Vietnam War, Central American death squads, and contemporary feminism. Their work draws attention to what Ranciere has called “allegories of inequality” in social perception. Singular individual vision in the ensemble is represented by the work of the pioneering photographer William Eggleston, who has created a lyrical documentation of the remnants of the Old South in and around his home in Memphis. Younger artists in the show such as Mark Tribe and Chelsea Knight examine the contemporary social phenomena of militia groups in their collaborative work in progress, Posse Comitatus.

While rooted in Memphis, the exhibition brings together artists from such diverse backgrounds and experiences as Tracey Moffatt from Australia and Alexandra Kostrubula from Sweden, and presents the work of artist collectives such as Bullet Space from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The nomadic nature of contemporary art is underscored by the inclusion of artists such as Virginia Overton, originally from Tennessee but currently situated in New York City, and William Pope L., born in New Jersey but now living and working in Chicago. For Memphis Social Overton is contributing a large site-specific work, which will be presented on a pair of outdoor billboards located across from Marshall Arts; a selection of Pope L.’s Failure drawings will be presented at the Hyde Gallery at the Memphis College of Art. Aviva Rahmani has charged her art with an environmental awareness in restoring wetlands habitats near her home in Maine. She brings this practice to bear in her participation in Memphis Social with a work that interprets the degradation of the Mississippi watershed. My own orientation in the Northeast has, to a certain degree, effected an itinerant defamiliarization and dislocation in my curatorial perspective in Memphis encounters. Artists based in Memphis such as Greely Myatt, Dwayne Butcher, Anthony Lee, and Haley Morris-Cafiero each in their own way interpret both the universal and specific aspects of the life in the city. Myatt is known for his public works that draw upon the history of art and aspects of folk culture. His Rockers sculpture, presented in Memphis Social at the Hyde Gallery, employs a ubiquitous signifier of Southern culture, the rocking chair, in a way that both charms and undermines viewer expectations. Dwayne Butcher also references Southern social stereotypes in his rhetorically succinct paintings like You Can’t Be The Fat Redneck Forever. Anthony Lee’s work, The Reclamation of Color, addresses shades of perception in skin tone colloquially used in the Black community to designate social status. Morris-Cafiero’s photographs such as Swing Set, also on view at the Hyde Gallery, examine the social dynamic of body image in contemporary culture. These artists’ works speak to the broad aim of the exhibition because of their ability to draw from localized experience without being limited to it. This “de-territorialization” of a sense of place in individual and collective experience is also an important subtext of Memphis Social.

Memphis is a place, which, like many others, becomes universal in its specifics. The city is a locale, vicariously known and practically experienced. It is important to the world at large that Memphis is a birthplace of the Blues, yet more locally, the blues still lives there. Its being the location of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination is significant to the wider public, but in a local context, the struggle for racial and class equality continues. Memphis Social is not ostensibly about Memphis, but the city as a specific environment has proved fertile ground to explore socially engaged artwork. The site of “the social” is a moving target that can pop up in the most unpredictable places. Organizing Memphis Social has taught me to re-orient my own position in ways I couldn’t have rightly mapped. The artists and cultural practitioners I have chosen as my guides to wend my curatorial way through Memphis Social play with sometimes blatant but often subtle relations of the aesthetic and ethical. The meaning of the exhibition is contained in their diverse experiences of these relations.

-Tom McGlynn (Beautiful Fields Collective) © 2013

2012-2013 Franchise Program Winner

'Economy of the Ephemeral' Exhibition and panel discussion

I'll be moderating a panel on Wednesday evening composed of the six great MFA students of DIAP who organized the exhibition:

 

ECONOMY OF THE EPHEMERAL

An exhibition curated by MFA students of DIAP - Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice at The City College of New York (CCNY).

Works by:

Hilary Basing
Levi Gonzalez
Abigail Levine
Douglas Mackenzie
Kim Sargent-Wishart
Cody Schlanger
Buster Simpson
Yi-Jou Sun
Christine Sun Kim

Reception // Tuesday May 7th 5:00 - 9:00

Panel Discussion: What Is the Economy of the Ephemeral? (Moderated by Joy Garnett) // Wednesday May 8th 6:00 - 7:30

Everything is happening in the DIAP Studio, aka Shepard 408 !

 

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Art is eternal; economy is ephemeral

The “Economy of the Ephemeral” refers to a system of labor where outcomes are not translated into dollars, but instead are valuated in terms of the experiential. The fruits of such labor, expressed as sensory experiences or forms that are fluid and flexible, include outcomes that could lead, ideally, to cultural dialogue. If art is to be considered a type of labor, its value goes beyond the monetization of the object, drawing instead on its relevance in the realm of memory and history. While an object’s monetary value is determined by the fluctuating economics of the art market, its ephemeral value is decided by the uniquely human experience of the viewer.

Performance plays an important part in the economy of the ephemeral, whereas the term “economy” can be applied to any system of measured, result-driven performance. While that which is “ephemeral” is understood as something short-lived, unpredictable, and often hard to measure, its full impact may only be felt somewhere down the line. For example, a forgotten childhood memory or experience can live deep in the subconscious, only to re-emerge and trigger strong emotions later in life. Here, the economy of the ephemeral allows for a period of dormancy before the full power of an experience is felt and expressed.

In a world obsessed with the material, how do we value the not-solid and the unseen? Digital mediums and contemporary financial practices muddy the waters of material exchange--we monetize the future through derivatives, and attempt to quantify immaterial goods. How to assess the value of electrons, or the future? We want to muddy the waters of exchange even further by questioning the need to create monetary value in every facet of our lives. What if we reject capital as the system for determining value? And how do we create value that doesn't depend on capital?

The economy of the ephemeral describes the budgeting of intangible, organic, immeasurable performance. The work that comes under this rubric doesn’t beat you over the head with its intentions, but rather it acts like a time bomb: it ticks inside you, seeps in, marinates, and then explodes.

 Links: Economy of the Ephemeral on Facebook; City College campus map and directions.

(Take the 1 train to 137th St City College and walk a few blocks east from Broadway.)

Art Markers

 

  

This is an excerpt from a longer article by Anton Vidokle in e-flux magazine. Read the full article here.

_{Natascha Sadr Haghighian, What I Do For A Living/What I Really Do?, 2007. Binders with vynil letters.}

 

Anton Vidokle

Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art

[...]

Early modernist poets like Baudelaire were extremely influential in shaping the attitudes of artists towards commerce and business. Implicit in the way of life of “bohemian” artists and writers in the Latin Quarter was a rejection of bourgeois professional and commercial pursuits, as was a rejection of industrialization and emergent capitalism. Baudelaire was actually rather critical of the bohemians, being very much a radical dandy, an aristocrat who despised the squalor of bohemian life. Nevertheless, he spent much of his life in this milieu and immortalized it in his work: “In murky corners of old cities where everything—horror too—is magical, I study, servile to my moods, the odd and charming refuse of humanity.” Despite the marginality and political insignificance of bohemia, its cultural impact was absolutely enormous. It remains ever-present, a specter that reappears in various times and places.

Andy Warhol’s Factory is fascinating in this respect: both a murky, magical corner for misfits and eccentrics, and simultaneously the workplace of the first self-proclaimed Business Artist. Warhol’s artistic position is very interesting insofar as it combined stances that were thought to be diametrically opposed: he was at once a dandy, a bohemian, but also someone who did not disguise his interest in business and commerce. His interest in business did not only extend to sale of his artwork; he also pursued the publication of a commercial magazine, film production, a television show—what amounted to his own media industry. To my mind, Warhol’s position was much more honest and productive than that of artists who pretend that the artist can or should stay innocent by delegating (or appearing to delegate) business-related activity to gallerists or other agents, and who maintain that this is the only condition in which critical or culturally significant art can be produced. By turning his art into a kind of a business, Warhol managed to achieve independence, though not independence from the art market.

But since his time, Warhol’s economic independence seems to have been misunderstood. The independence that came from his bridging of the bohemian sphere and the sphere of day-to-day commerce has been converted into a vast proliferation of so-called artistic practices that treat art as a profession. But art is not a profession. What does being professional actually mean under the current conditions of de-skilling in art? We should probably be less concerned with being full-time, art-school-trained, professional artists, writers, or curators—less concerned with measuring our artistic worth in these ways. Since most of us are not expected to perfect any specific techniques or master any craft—unlike athletes or classical musicians, for example—and given that we are no longer tied to working in specific mediums, perhaps it’s fine to be a part-time artist? After all, what is the expertise of a contemporary artist? Perhaps a certain type of passionate hobbyism, a committed amateurism, is okay: after all, we still live in a reality largely shaped by talented amateurs of the nineteenth century, like Thomas Edison and so many others. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to work in some other capacity in the arts, or in an entirely different field, and also to make art: sometimes this situation actually produces much more significant work than the “professional art” we see at art fairs and biennials. Ilya Kabakov supported himself for decades by being a children’s book illustrator. Marcel Duchamp worked as a librarian and later sold Brancusi’s work to make a living, while refusing to be dependent on sales of his own work.

It interesting to note that this emphasis on professionalization emerged simultaneously with the disappearance of bohemia, which is usually described as a shared creative space that allowed for fluid communication between poets, artists, dancers, writers, musicians, and so forth. The notion of bohemia as something to aspire to went out the window a few decades ago; it vanished at the same time as the visual art sphere was becoming more segregated from other fields of art. “Bohemian” has become a primarily derogatory term that seems to imply a kind of uncommitted, naive dilettantism, but within the history of art it has a greater significance. According to T.J. Clark, bohemia refers to a movement by a group of artists, writers, and poets who apparently renounced the normative bourgeois society, a move that, unlike the gestures of the avant-garde, was not a calculated temporary tactic intended only so that one could return to the salon of art in a more advantageous position, but a more permanent departure. The bohemian artist would absolutely reject the notion of professionalism in the arts—this was something for lawyers, accountants, and bankers, not artists.

 

These days it’s becoming more and more difficult to imagine the production of significant art without a training system that educates future producers of art, its administrators and, to some extent, its consumers. However, until only a few decades ago, many if not most artists, curators, and critics, never attended masters programs or studied curatorship and critical writing in specialized training programs. The field of art is becoming professionalized in a very, very narrow way. There’s still the old problem that professionalization is really about a division of labor, and a division of labor produces alienation. It’s a contradiction that a lot of people go into the arts because they want to be a little less alienated from what they do in life, even as what is increasingly imposed on artists, curators, writers—and it comes both from the market and public sector—is the professionalization and precarization of their activity.

The problem of professionalization is connected to the proliferation of MFA programs, which have become a prerequisite for young people entering the arts. In a sense, universities and academies have created a perfect economic feedback loop that perpetuates their own existence: most artists depend on having a teaching position. This is because, as Walid Raad recently pointed out, the average life-span of financial success in the art market (in places where there is such a thing)—a period during which a successful artist’s work is in active demand by collectors—is a mere four years. How do you support yourself when your work does not sell anymore? You teach—and to qualify for a teaching position, you need an MFA degree. This means that most artists who aspire to a life-long practice have little choice but to enroll in MFA programs and often pay astronomical fees and go into debt in order to have a chance of teaching in the future or selling their work in the lucrative art market. But unlike other fields, such as law or medicine, where graduates can reasonably expect a job upon graduation, there are no guarantees that an artist with an MFA degree will find a teaching job. With recent shifts in hiring policies at most universities—towards part-time, untenured, adjunct labor—very few artists ever get a tenured, secure position. To me, this resembles a kind of pyramid scheme or institutional blackmail in which money is extracted using false promises, with the benefits going to very few—primarily the institutions themselves.

I attended graduate school in the ‘90s. I did all of the coursework and the final exhibition, wrote the dissertation and submitted it. I thought I was all done, but then suddenly I found out that in order to get the degree itself, I needed to package my dissertation and photographs in a very specific type of a black plastic folder, which could only be purchased at one stationery store located in Manhattan near Canal Street. The secretary at the art department told me that the Chairman kept the folders in a closet in his office, and that the folders had to conform exactly to the dimensions of the closet’s irregular shelves. No other folders would be accepted. I was idealistic and thought that the Master of Fine Arts degree had something to do with the acquisition of knowledge … but it came down to a surreal formalism. I never got the folder or the degree!

It seems to me that MFA programs have become a tool of indoctrination that has had an unprecedented homogenizing effect on artistic practices worldwide, an effect that is now being replicated with curatorial and critical writing programs. At the center of the problem is the black plastic folder: at the school I attended, the folder itself became the goal of the program—both the framing and the ultimate content of graduate studies in art. A folder, identical to hundreds of other folders arranged on a shelf, became a tool to valuate and legitimize artistic practice through a forced standardization. My school was not very different from how most museums, art centers, and galleries operate today, whereby systemic and logistical needs often demand legibility according to predefined terms. In the process, the folder replaces art itself.

The market of art is not merely a bunch of dealers and cigar-smoking connoisseurs trading exquisite objects for money behind closed doors. Rather, it is a vast and complex international industry of overlapping institutions which jointly produce artworks’ economic value and support a wide range of activities and occupations including training, research, development, production, display, documentation, criticism, marketing, promotion, financing, historicizing, publishing, and so forth. The standardization of art greatly simplifies all of these transactions. For a few years now I have experienced a certain sense of déjà vu while walking through art fairs or biennials, a feeling that many other people have also commented on: that we have already seen all these works that are supposedly brand new. We are experiencing the impact of contemporary art as a globally traded commodity that is produced, displayed, and circulated by an industry of specially trained professionals. The folder that replaces the art has undergone only a slight modification: into an investment portfolio.

This is not a new observation: I think Marcel Duchamp already fully understood this danger a hundred year ago. There are, of course, so many aspects of his work that could be mentioned in this essay, from his Standard Stoppages to his peculiar refusal to make a living by selling his artworks. In a way, one can understand much of Duchamp’s work as a repeated act of offering the folder back to the art establishment: whether in the shape of a valise, a box, a collection of notes and photographs, a literal folder, or even an elaborate gesamkunstwerk like his Etant donné, containing all the indexical references to his work. However, the folders he provided contained a bomb: they were capable of bringing down the shelf they were stored on.

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Today it would be rather futile to try to reconstitute bohemia—the free-flowing, organic creative space—because it never really existed within the constellation of institutions of art, the art market, and the art academy. If Warhol’s Factory was an entry into art that enabled a group of people of very different backgrounds to enter a certain kind of productive modality (both within and in spite of the surrounding economy), it was a space of free play that no longer exists. Instead, what we have now are MFA programs: a standardization not even of bohemia, but only its promise. Just to be clear: I am not advocating that artists should remain innocent, childlike amateurs; a certain mobilized dissidence wielded by young people engaging in specialized study in art structures can amount to something quite powerful. What I mean is that if one is really looking to produce a different kind of art, it is necessary to step through the standardization and professionalization it promises, and discover a way to access whatever may be on the other side—even if what one finds does not resemble art as we currently understand it.

This supposes that, somewhere close to the center of what we all know art to be, there is a kind of open, undefined quality. And this is something I feel to be increasingly difficult to develop and maintain both in art and other areas of life, when there are so many pressures in the market-driven economy to divide labor, to professionalize. As artists, curators, and writers, we are increasingly forced to market ourselves by developing a consistent product, a concise presentation, a statement that can be communicated in thirty seconds or less—and oftentimes this alone passes for professionalism. For emerging artists and curators there is an ever-increasing number of well-intentioned programs that essentially indoctrinate them into becoming content providers for an art system whose values and welfare are wholly defined by its own logic of supply and demand.

Being a professional should not be the only acceptable way for us to maintain our households, particularly when most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three fields that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. I feel that we have cornered ourselves by denying the full range of possibilities for developing our economies. In fact, the economic dimension of art is more often wholly suppressed under the specter of bohemia, condemning artists to a precarious and often alienating place in the day-to-day relations that hold other parts of society together. While artists like Warhol took some pleasure in operating a frontier economy that produced value and new economic protocols—much in the way a government might manage an economy—this is not the concern of most other artists, who would prefer to have a more straightforward connection to society without at the same time having their work regarded as mere craft. Unless hard-pressed by circumstances, we still think that the proper thing to do is to wait for a sponsor or a patron to solve our household problems and to legitimize our work. In fact, we don’t need their legitimacy. We are perfectly capable of being our own sponsors, which in most cases we already are when we do other kinds of work to support our art-work. This is something that should not be disavowed, but acknowledged openly. We must find the terms for articulating what kind of economy artists really want. This can be quite complicated, since not addressing this question implicitly reinforces the simplistic myth of the artist as an isolated and alienated genius. Without a captivating alternative, artists will always defer to this myth out of habit, in spite of how complex and interesting their real household economy may be. I suspect that if affirmed fully and radically, this condition could lead to a fluid, liberated state close to what Marx envisioned for humanity—the messianic promise at the heart of communism. After all, we are never one thing at all times.

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© 2013 e-flux and the author

Anton Vidokle is an editor of e-flux journal.