This is the first sentence on the Whitney Museum’s webpage for the upcoming 2008 Biennial: “Today there are more artists working in more genres, using more varieties of material, and moving among more geographic locations than ever before. ” [italics mine] The thing is, looking over the list, almost all of these artists are living and working in New York or LA. A few people live further down the East Coast–Virginia, Florida; one lives in Berlin. THERE ARE ONLY TWO ARTISTS LIVING IN THE MIDWEST IN THE 2008 WHITNEY BIENNIAL. This kinda annoys me.
One of those Midwestern artists is photographer Melanie Schiff. I’ve been enjoying her Neil Young, Neil Young (above) at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City for a few months now. Here is a link to her website.
there is some interesting background given about this artist in a Chicago Reader review. especially considering some recent dialogue we’ve been having that considers the permeability of the boundaries between the ‘self’ as subject matter and the viewer (and the difficulties that artists encounter when trying to engage rather than alienate the viewer, in an experiential sense, with things that otherwise might seem to be too intimate to be relatable).
i am not yet sure how i feel about this person’s work. but i enjoyed reading more about her.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/nowshowing/2007/070105/
schiff does speak about how she really is drawn to trying to emulate the emotive power that music has…but through using the photo. this seems to tie into threads from the past and raises a similar question.
i wonder if visual stuff can really ever be on par with music in this regard. we use our eyes so much. in a way, i think their function becomes more tied into our powers of analysis than emotion. just think of how many times a smell or sound will instantly jar us into reverie. if our eyes functioned in a similar manner, life would be a living hell fraught with little emotional landmines around every corner.
also, we have appropriated music as a tool through which we mediate our emotions. i am thinking of jamie’s reference in the kunstler piece to driving down her hometown street, intoxicated on the fine young canibals. music is like taking a happy pill or a sad pill. and it is something that we can use and claim in a very private way in our day to day lives. on the other hand, when we look at art, it is usually in someone’s studio, or gallery, or museum. it is a more nuetral space. it is not tied into our lives in the same manner. i rarely feel elated and think ‘now what painting will complement this feeling exactly?’ but, i will pop in a cd.
i am kind of wondering about sam’s feelings on this one. because of his interest in music and because he said in a previous comment that much of his life has been a ‘crusade against nostalgia’. does music provoke nostalgia in a way that visual stuff doesn’t?
I actually met Melanie at Ox-Bow. I heard about Claire Sherman through her recommendation. I like her photographs a lot. I’m envious of her, in fact. Her work has this just-right quality–smart but not too thinky, well made, well composed, not dodgy but not obvious.
I think what any ‘fine artist’ should envy about music is that music, especially pop music, is generally denied status as a ‘fine art’, but it’s way more present and powerful in most people’s day to day lives. So, when I think of aspiring toward the condition of music, I think of something very direct.
I guess I have to admit I was only halfway serious about that ‘crusade against nostalgia’ line. Joking but serious. Music makes me incredibly nostalgic.
you’re both (jen and sam) hitting on elements that have drawn me to schiff’s work several times over the last few years. i’ve been aware of her adjacently (i was in a show at unit B gallery in chicago around the time she was and saw a work or two in other places around the chicagoland art scene) for a while.
anyway, what specifically resonates with me is this charged nostalgia or kind of yearning that i really sense in these works. i did not know until today that she spent time at ox-bow, but i’ve consistently felt the pang of connection with some of these works based on my memories of my three month stint there in 2001. seeing a schiff piece a while ago i remember thinking, “damn, this could have been created at ox-bow…” some feeling was present there that rang some mnemonic bell for me.
so taking that and dovetailing the ideas about music that schiff, jen, and sam mention above, i’m even more worked up, because i’ve got this dense music accoutrement to my memory of ox-bow…
along time ago barry [gealt] expressed frustration that his paint[ing students] seem to know more musicians than painters. i felt kind of bad about that at the time but i don’t know if it even makes sense to compare the two. i mean, i also know a lot more about kinds of food than i know names of painters. imagine if we could drive down the road to a painting by guston…what would that mean? how would it happen? would you get in an accident when beckman came on?
if you could turn on paintings when you get in the shower or chow down on paintings while you watch the office oh, man would we know about a lot of paintings.
but then, would we need paintings? how would we even know them from everything else?
i’ve always excepted nietzche’s birth of tradedy as a work about art generally as much as music in the same way that i’ve accepted plato’s words as thoughts for people generally and not just powerful greek men. but music is music is music. and thank god for it. what is better for making paintings to?
interdisciplinarity is fun and a great way of expanding what you know about what you know by analogy–like thinking about the possibility of paintings about smelling or v. woolf writing about blue.
Jamie, you just gave me a little bit of the nostalgia:
When I was in grad school and I would make the 7 hour drive to visit Melanie, I would load up the passenger seat with painting books and slowly and carefully flip through them as I drove. Or just steal glances at one page over and over, during that slow couple of hours through Illinois. My car only had a FM radio and for much of the drive I was actually music-less and driving to paintings.
That said, I agree 100% with the point you’re making up there, and I think you just coined a word “interdisciplinarity” that I am going to start using as often as I can.
I really dig the idea of trying to making the emotive qualities of music work through visual art. I wanted to also point out, in keeping with the Neil Young image that these “Sleevefaces” are something that’s been catching on around the net. I don’t know if you guys have seen ‘em. There are some here: http://welistenforyou.blogspot.com/2008/01/sleevefaces.html
she started something…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=514545&in_page_id=1773
So I was a little late picking up my copy of Modern Painters this month…lo and behold, within it an article on Melanie Schiff. Barry Schwabsky wrote it, quite literally (literarily?) glowing about her work.