I think that I’m finally going to make it out to see the Deb Sokolow exhibit that’s been up for a few weeks now at the Kemper Museum. Here’s how the museum describes it:
“For the Kemper Museum, Sokolow will work directly on the gallery walls to construct a new storyline based on an amateur detective’s attempts to unravel a mystery involving barbecue sauce, food critics, condiment espionage, and Kansas City’s SubTropolis. Written in the second-person and following the narrative structure of a Choose Your Own Adventure-a popular series of children’s books-viewers will assume the role of the central character and determine the fate of the inquisitive detective.”
I’m really and truly, completely unsure of how I’m going to feel about the show–or even how I’m going to determine how I feel about the show. I feel a little like I’m not sure what criteria I’ll need to pull out of the magician’s hat in my mind if I want to decide whether it’s a good show; if I’m having a good time or if I’m learning anything from it.
So I’d like to ask you, our readers to talk, not about this artist or the exhibit, but about what criteria do you bring to seeing a show? What do you look for? Are these criteria consistent, do they vary, and how universal do you think they are? The larger question here is, of course: how do you define quality? how do you place value on an artist’s work (aesthetic, not monetary value)?
I want to hear from a lot of people here. I want 200 comments. This is the one that everyone ought to be able to jump in on–students, starving artists, art stars, non-artists, curators, bloggers, etc. etc. I have some ideas about who reads this thing, and who never leaves any comments. I’ll be frowning at you until you jump in…
Thanks!
i think if i see work that looks new, or shows me something new and….then I surprisingly connect with it.
or..
work that i feel a connection to automatically, yet see it in a new way.
bringing criteria to a show makes less sense to me. maybe like a blindfolded taste test or something. not that one walks into a gallery with a checklist in hand, but it does sound like a one-size-fits-all approach. but…that does and does not work.
ultimately we look first, respond. then, afterwards, create criteria to describe our feelings/response to the work.
how about adding a question: Is there a difference between painting and art? if so, what is it. and when I say painting, I might mean strictly the medium of painting for convenience sake, but I might mean painting/drawing/sculpure/printmaking. technical/medium differences aside.
painting vs. art?
I have been thinking lately about how paintings follow these natural laws. have always followed these natural laws. and oddly, when they break these laws, they are still following laws. and isn’t this true of any language?
the way that we can see simultaneously drastic differences between Porter and deKooning, and at the same time see so many similarities. Both speaking the same language.
Another comparison might be josef albers and wolf kahn. Or Vermeer and Mondrian.
work needs to speak this language, for me. in order for me to be able to respond to it in a meaningful way.
art…on the other hand, comes from a different place. usually. the difference between artists who want to make art and painters who make paintings.
it is also different because I don’t go to gallery shows unless it is work that I am interested in before seeing the show, or work that I believe I am interested in, or believe I will be interested in.
I am moved by unknown work (seen NOT in reproduction) when I go to a museum, or/and breeze through galleries, usually familiar galleries.
this relates to the way I listen to music: I can never just buy an album on a whim and enjoy it. I tend to buy familiar music, but enjoy being surprised by music via the radio (ala the musuem/gallery walkthrough: the new bouncing off the familiar)….
when i come to a show of any sort i try to suss out the context, and then try to look deeply for the evocative aspect. to me what art is can be defined as the interaction of context and evocation. of course, i’m often armed with more or less of a context, more or less a set of assumptions. but often i’m thrust back onto myself and surprised. for example, i was in the whitney back in 98 or 99 and saw the barbara krueger show. i was armed with all of these negative assumptions, but the graphic power of the works overwhelmed me. by the time i exited i was certain of her strength and importance as an artist, in that she won me over visually, creating a compelling, almost visceral experience for me. the exact opposite happened at the rauschenberg show on the same visit. left me totally alienated from the work. i think a lot of shows function like this – they push back on your investigative eye.
I’ll hold off a little longer before I write about how I approach a new body of work. Not that it’s really novel or anything, just trying to be a good host.
I want to hear from some students…I know that the blog is read by a fair number of art students.
I know that you folks are constantly getting exciting discovering new artists. Somebody tell me, what excites you, what gets you going?
Is this work putting out or is it taking something from me?
Is this work sharing some form of inexplicable phenomena or is it about an artist making art?
It’s a constant battle to negotiate one’s desire to make good art. I appreciate art which makes this stimulus irrelevant. I get caught up in the ‘making-art’ mentality myself, but am much more aware it than I used to be.
It’s a big issue for me in my own work, and so it greatly affects my reaction to others’ work. Still, if one is going to limit their experiences so, it’s not the worst criterion with which to do so, eh?
More substantive response later, but I just want to applaud the idea of a distinction between painting and art, even though I am not sure it is a distinction we should perpetuate. The historical position of painting has obviously changed over time. It used to BE art. But I won’t wander off topic.
Usually, I look for something that pleases me, that comforts me, that tells me what I already know and want to hear. I want art that tells me how smart I am.
I’m not hijacking the seriousness of this issue. I’m not joking. Only sometimes to I snap out of it and look more adventurously. I think this is true for many other people, and therefore the open-ness to reordering our aesthetics, when we allow it, is all the more significant.
i just found out this weekend how much my reaction to work in general (new or familiar) is colored by the environmental experience that surrounds me outside of the visual experience of the work itself. definitely even outside of the visual experience of the space that the work occupies. this of course referring to fact that i was in dallas at CAA and that i found it to be an almost impossible task to engage with anything in a visually joyful or even curious way.
can we open this discussion up a little in terms of not just the ‘new body of work’ experience? i say this because i tend to find bodies of work (when i am unfamiliar with them) to be usually so ubiquitous as to make me speed along through them without engaging. i almost rely on the concept of visual comparison in order to assimilate or qualify any of my own reactions. that is why i think i tend to prefer the museum experience over the gallery experience. for one, because i tend to hinge a good portion of my own enthusiasm on the ability of things to surprise me. even familiar museums offer this to me, because so much of my relationship with pieces changes from visit to visit based on nothing more than what i might be intrinsically seeking to get out of them on a given day, or based on the order in which i encounter them…the feeling of having ‘a new favorite’ every time i go.
john lee’s comment about buying music was interesting. i tend to do the opposite. i buy things that are almost all but completely unfamiliar to me. i read once that most people get musically ‘stuck’ in their 20’s. like a time warp, they cement musical taste more or less at that age. maybe that was a cautionary tale to me. what i find when i buy a really unfamiliar album is that the first time i listen to it i generally hate it. because it is dissonant to my ears and brain. but that if i give it about 2 weeks of consistent listening time, i start to like it… and sometimes i start to really like it. makes me wonder if appreciation is more or less about going through a sort of training. aurally/visually?
Thanks to everyone who’s written so far.
to John: I think, let’s save the painting as “different from art” discussion for another thread. Sam or I can work up a post to discuss it sometime soon.
to Jen: sure, let’s throw out the word ‘new’–it wasn’t part of the original question anyway.
to Carla: I like your Rocktown, IN blog. Thanks for commenting.
keep the reins held tight, sir. ha
i don’t try to deviate, but I do think that questions like art vs. painting…and new vs. old…are part of searching for that criteria you are asking for. are we really that wide open in our looking, or do we create divisions, and if so…what are they? Is it possible to like work that is completely different than your own, or own taste? (what would that really mean…?)
And how does ‘guilty pleasure’ fit into it. I might like watching the Lord of the Rings for production values and mass experience. Sort of like, everyone is going to the _________ show at the PMA.
in other words: CAN we appreciate art that we do not in SOME way connect to…in some…way?
even if it is a buddy. for example, have you ever found yourself endorsing work of a friend, etc. that you may not have if you did not know the artist personally. (don’t name names…)
but that is another sort of connection (friend, peer, teacher, studiomate, family member) that is different from relating to art via style or subject matter, etc.
i would buy music that was completely new, but created by my favorite producer (RR) for years…
I like the fearlessness in saying that we want to see what we want to see in VC’s comment. shows us how smart we are……That was largely what I wanted to say originally.
honestly, i strongly disagree.
i like seeing things that make me feel a little stupid. or at least things that challenge my own strengths and abilities. sometimes, i enjoy this because it provokes me. lights a fire. makes me want to be better. sometimes it’s because they force me to try to make sense of them through the use of my own intellectual structures (things already in place in my mind/aesthetic/reasoning powers). in this way i start to see the exchanges that exist within the disparities.
for instance: if i see a sara sze installation, initially, i am seeing it as a painter. in terms of the way i make sense of a painterly/pictorial world. not in terms of real space/real time. but this lapse between grasping at something first in terms of what it is not, naturally leads to the understanding of your own work in terms of what it is not. in this case: that the painting is never ‘real’. that illusion, if it is a type of magic… it is also a type of dissapointment.
that i need the real world in order to understand the mysticism of the illusion. that i need the knowledge of illusion in order to affirm the habit of looking at even real things in terms of their ability to elevate themselves beyond the pedestrian’ness’ of reality.
isn’t this growth? the self reflection that takes place in the lapse between knowing and not knowing?
this also directly relates to the way i attempt to teach my students. i don’t want my intro painting students already coming into class ‘knowing’ what constitutes good or bad work (in this case ‘good or bad’ painting) and many times, they do think they know this: based on images out of art history/things that they are familiar with.
i see it to be my function to decontextualize the reality of the motif just enough, so that they can’t make decisions based on what they assume to be true about making an image. then, i hope that they begin to figure this stuff out for themselves. that innumerable things can exist/work.
i really mourned the loss of this naievity in myself after i had been a bfa student for a few years. in a way, i guess part of how i characterize my own process as an artist and as an observer is through all of my attempts to reclaim that kind of insecurity regarding my own knowledge of things.
I guess I could go ahead and weigh in now. As said, it’s not really profound, and it is mostly idiosyncratic.
First–I look for an appearance of investigation. I distrust definitive statements in all forms.
Next–I want to see some appearance of ambition. I want an artist to be trying to say something important and hopefully not too pretentious–which is why I tend to give a little more credit to more is more types like Angela Fraleigh and Caleb Weintraub.
Context probably comes next, then formal inventiveness.l I wouldn’t say I differentiate between new and old, or anything else before this stage.
And I agree with Jen that I do like to be challenged by work, when the artist convinces me that they’re after something subtle and hard to get right, I’m willing to put in some effort to figure out what she/he’s saying.
where’s the line between “saying something important” and “pretentious”? is the line a matter of individual taste or might there be something formally that signals it (like “definitive” statements, etc)?
I really don’t think that I can locate that line exactly. It’s definitely a matter of taste. I don’t tend to discount works for being pretentious very often.
I’m having a hard time trying to imagine a work of art that could truly be called (defined..) as ‘definitive’….what would that be? Arno Breker?? no, but, seriously…
also, out of curiousity, what do you mean by “saying something important”?
if you think historically in terms of genre painting, a lot of the thematic content that artists had to choose from wasn’t much more than a grab-bag of declarative types of statements. you know…painters painting for the church. paintings to paint: annunciation. crucifixion. deposition. stigmata.
so then, how does a work supercede the declarative nature of it’s statement. to become something more timeless and universal?
seems like a simple question. but, maybe it’s not.
This is, to use John’s term, the ‘music,’ I think.
This is also why there can be good minimal art and bad minimal art. Even a very simple statement must be expressed resonantly. Otherwise, you’d be better off with word form.
On topic / off topic: Does anybody else think there’s a noticeable gap between Matthew Ritchie’s art and what he says his art is about?
On topic / on topic:
Does anybody else think this work is kind of like a handmade website?
The ‘investigation’ and ‘ambition’ would be like filters I would use first encountering a work (‘declarative’ would have been a better term than ‘definitive’). Probably it’s better if the terms are a little subjective. Just a way for me to acknowledge presumptions that I bring to the experience. Interpretion and evaluation wouldn’t really happen until I start thinking about context.
Not everything I come away liking would even receive a thumb’s up on the first two criteria.
My definition of ‘declarative’ would be very similar to the way that you talked about Bo Bartlett’s early work last week, John. I’m not sure how exactly a work trancends the declarative, I just look for a sign that the artist is trying.
Saying something important would just mean feeling that the work is not entirely insular, but that there is an attempt made to be a part of a larger discourse.
I see. and I suppose declarative and definitive are.. really the same thing.
but weren’t the painters painting for the church seeing their work as being exactly that: timeless and universal??
and maybe there is a declarative-ness to a non-declarative stance…Cubism, esp. Picasso, being about the idea that there is more than one vantage point, and Declaring that idea…
handmade website….that’s hilarious!!
declarative helps me to see it. thanks jen and chris. and when I was trying to imagine the definitive, I realize I was only thinking of ‘good’ art…
which segues into what is ‘quality’ for us?
but before that….
Insular, Chris: What is Insular? Greenberg school was criticized for being Insular. Everybody gets Warhol. Granpa loves Wyeth, so is Matthew Ritchie ‘insular’? Is Insular the result of a conscious decision? It very much sounds contradictory to looking for work that would be challenging if you are eliminating what you see..as insular.
suddenly ‘declarative’ and ‘insular’ are looking a little similar..
Again and again: I never said that I’m eliminating, just allowing myself a subjective entry point into thinking about work.
Someone, anyone else?
thierry de duve would say that any work has, as its fundamental root, a projection toward universal address. that is, it is declarative and, ultimately (de duve here, not me) proselytizing: i make this painting so you’ll know what i know, think what i think, accept what i accept, believe what i believe, etc, et al.
when a society has moved beyond all-encompassing (that is, assumed to apply to everyone) social mores (as the western world has), artworks that function as declarative statements or flow from conservative philosophical notions automatically transgress the autonomy of the self (the fundamental value of postmodern societies). this makes saying something “important,” “ambitious,” or (perhaps) inspirational pretty hard (in a sense), because we’ve run into a reality where truth or revelation can only be truth or revelation to the individual sensing the truth or revelation… but then someone seeing the declarative work resonates with it… and, and…
of course, that we sense these things at all brings the lie….
anyway, all i’m saying is that when i come to a work or body of works, i’m assuming i’m being addressed. when i don’t sense a will toward ambition or, at the very least, the artist’s self-declared assumption of “hey, i’ve got something important to say here” i feel a little laid out.
I think that squares with my idea of getting a feeling that an artist is ‘trying to say something important.’
About being declarative: I’ve said aloud before that there is a difference between an artwork that ‘makes a declaration’ and an artwork that ‘asks a question’. Again, kind of an ill-defined concept. I could illustrate it by saying it’s a difference between David Ngirailemesang and George Rose, or Bo Bartlett and Eve Mansdorf, or even Tom Gregg and Augusto di Stefano. Is there anyone else that would be on board here?
Also, I’m enjoying the discussion. However, I have a feeling there are comments being almost-posted and then abandoned because the discussion is getting contentious. I know from talking to people in Bloomington and Indianapolis and Columbia that this happens.
So I’m being contradictory here, I know. Asking a question to the floor and then asking for some space to encourage the silent majority out there to weigh in. But if we could reign in the debate just a little…
still…how do we define…1. ambition, and 2. ‘having something important to say’???
can it go beyond taste? individual taste? When we look past, or look at less, work that is seen as being less ambitious, or not having something important to say, we are eliminating..by definition. I realize that the elimination is not the primary impulse, yet….
John, I still think you’re just trying to read too much into these terms. My words have consistently been ‘trying to say something important’ not ‘having something important to say’.
All of us involved in this part of the discussion teach. And we all know that occassionally one gives an assignment, and one finds that some students do the very minimum amount, or slightly less than asked for, and some students really investigate the assignment and do more than asked for. The exact criteria for judging this would depend from assignment to assignment. Can we at least agree that when you teach something like this happens.
And I’m not confusing ambitious with grandiose. I’m not always arguing for the long Russian novel in 3 parts, possibly incomplete when the author dies. The haiku, the really clever peace rally chant, even the kid who puts a This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb sticker on their fixed gear are trying to say something important.
i agree with that…
and I really am not trying to be inciteful, etc. I feel like we, in this thread so far, are just trying to answer those original questions. and it takes defining terms….
how many times have we heard one of our art profs use the word Ambition, and thought, or knew, that they really meant “Large”…..or that large = ambitious.
I am well aware that no one here would ever see that as being ambitious, simply so.
and I understand ambition in terms of students doing an assignment. When we ask for a 5 page paper, and some do 10 pages and some do 2 pages….one of those two groups is more ambitious.
but is it that cut and dry with art? more work = more ambitious. Therefore Duchamp and Warhol are less so…et al..??
ok: point blank: I would take one Neil Riley (who shows at Keny gallery and has taught at the Jerusalem Studio School) over 10…Gerhard Richters. (THAT is my TASTE (which is to say this simply an example, not about ‘hate’ or ‘evil art world’).
Riley excites me, makes small works that are not about ‘important’ things (or are they about important things). Richter makes large, ambitious work that IS about important things.
Just trying to define.
31 before 30
why try and define these things? it’s a lesson in semantics, and i think it might really be the turning off factor for people tentatively interested in posting. we all understand the deficiencies present in written language. it just so happens that we have to deal with them in a way that doesn’t constantly derail the potential for dialogue.
most of the language problems seem to be stemming from the difference in literal vs. non-literal translations of certain words. we all know that ambition is not akin to size or importance of subject matter. if we had a better term to describe ‘the intrinsic desire’ of the artist, then i am certain we would use it. can we assume that most of these words have broader implications than the literal break-down? otherwise people might get too self-conscious to post if they feel that their use of language will always be called into question.
Trying to answer the original question here without getting really involved in the current ongoing discussion.
I try very hard to take work that is new to me on the terms that the work contains within itself. The work should tell me how to understand or criticize it.
Also, always looking for the work to say something sub-literal or uber-literal not literal or ultra-literal.
Hate, hate, hate works that rely on words but still consider themselves painting, brings up bad Kosuth associations. They are something not painting.
well, the post is about defining…defining quality. ambition and importance are terms that are close to being synonymous with quality. I like art that is ‘good.’ I am not talking about language, semantics at all. I am just asking how particular posters define what they mean particularly by importance and ambition. otherwise, it goes without saying that art should be important.
My definition of importance and ambition? This will sound really romantic, but I like a sense of opposition, a turning away, which can very easily be faked with bombast and novelty.
ps: my comment about liking art that tells me what I want to hear is linked with the concept of guilty pleasure brought up a few comments ago. I think we all agree that art should be dynamic, should shake us out of complacent aesthetic habits. I jut can’t claim to always go for that.
But what about old favorites? “Great” artists? Can we enjoy/experience their work in the same way as ambitious new work that partakes in that questioning quality? (feel free to ignore this last question if it is off topic.)
I don’t think it’s off topic. I think it’s right on topic.
Personally, if we’re talking about the experience of viewing older works, I feel like my experiences with older works have been most of my most rewarding experiences (helps that a lot of these took place in Italy…).
I’m going to try to speak to the original question, too.
I approach ‘art’ (by art I mean pretty much any creative activity) this way: it’s relative it’s not relative.
Calvino gives some time to the issue VC brought up. His own writerly environment, per capita, was obsessed with evoking the day-to-day, the grit, the specifics of now. He saw this as something to transcend, because it was hopelessly yoked to what would soon become ‘then’, not ‘now.’
I do think that Sokolow is inside of an aesthetic context, friendly to etsy.com, some contemporary ceramics (did y’all know there’s conceptual ceramics?), DIY/zine culture (and the upper-tier designers who prey on it), McSweeney’s, and 70’s conceptual art aficionados. With that in mind, I then fondly remember my Batman choose your own adventure book I had when I was a kid, and recognize my weakness (it is a weakness) for jokes about Gary Busey.
Will it survive for generations? Yes, if history decides that early 21st century clever-reference-heavy, scrappy pen-and-markered collage/installation art is a noteworthy genre a la Futurism or Fauvism. Of course, to future generations it will mean something much different than what it does now.
I think the ambition here is to make something that is simultaneously light and fun AND also an acknowledgement of the paranoid urgency that wafts in and out of our days in the form of ‘orange alerts’, ‘CIA destroys tapes of’, and ‘war on terror’.
You know, if you think about it, our lives are a bit like a choose your own adventure book. We choose our activities, BUT we choose from a list of choices that we didn’t, um, choose.