Help Desk is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving.

I’ve now reached the age where the question regarding children has become increasingly relevant. To have or not to have? How does a successful artist combine her career with her life as a mother?

Louise Bourgeois. The Curved House, 1990; marble; 14 x 37 x 13 in.

Today we bring you a treat from our archives, Michael Tomeo’s review of Raymond Pettibon’s 2010 show at David Zwirner in New York. The reprinting of this review is occasioned by Pettibon’s upcoming conversation with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon at Strand Book Store on June 25, 2014, in which they’ll chat about his new book Raymond Pettibon: To Wit. This article was originally published on November 17, 2010.

Raymond Pettibon. No Title (Where’s the Green…), 2010; 30 x 22 1/8 in.

The title of Raymond Pettibon’s current show at David Zwirner, Hard in the Paint, riffs on basketball, art making, the Southern hip-hopper Waka Flocka Flame, and maybe even the YouTube parody Baraka Flocka Flame. By signing the gallery wall “Rajon Flocka James,” Pettibon, whose given name is Raymond Ginn and who is no stranger to cultivating an artistic persona, is partaking in a little fun. He seems to have relaxed—a tiny bit—from his mad-as-hell 2007 show, Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture), which was the penultimate Fuck Bush show of the ’`00s.

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From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Jeffrey Skoller’s response to the workshop “Appropriate Technologies,” which was part of the practicum Valuing Labor in the Arts hosted by the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley. Skoller asserts, “Given how many young artists today are making art as social practice, relational aesthetics, and cultural activism, and who are devoting their careers to social activism, it is striking that there is so little serious discussion about the politics of public art policy.” This article was originally published on May 22, 2014.

Jeremy Deller, Scott King, and William Morris. A poster in response to the British government’s 2010 proposal to cut funding for the arts by 25 percent.

The “Valuing Labor in the Arts” practicum at UC Berkeley on April 19 was a stimulating day of solidarity, exploration, and discussion among artists, curators, academics, and other cultural activists about the current problems of economic support, sustainability, and working conditions for artistic labor in the current context of the free-market economy. I was a respondent for the “Appropriate Technologies” workshop, and participated in the “Sharing Knowledge is Sharing Power” lectures and the “Wrap-Up Session.” Much of the discussion I heard centered on developing alternative entrepreneurial models and economies for funding and selling art, exhibition, and access to publics outside of the commercial art world. The passionate, creative discussion of self-advocacy and ways of working in the margins of the commercial and nonprofit art worlds was inspired and inspiring.

With the day’s nearly exclusive focus on creative entrepreneurialism, gift economies, and DIY forms of collectivized exhibitions, as well as crowd-sourced funding from “art CSAs” and Kickstarters and artist-pooled grants, I became acutely aware of the near total absence of any discussion of the role of public arts funding as an integral part of the development and sustainability of the labors of contemporary art practices. With all the talk of unionization, self-empowerment, collectivization—of being able to ask for what one is worth as an artist—why was there no serious discussion of the role of national arts policy in its current state in the U.S.? Perhaps my preoccupation with the place of public (federal and state) arts funding in the public sphere is a generational question for those of us who emerged as artists and cultural workers in a time in American political life—not so long ago—when public arts funding was understood as a social-justice issue, alongside health care, education, environmental justice, military spending, and media democracy.

Read the full article here.

Painting and collage are processes composed in layers—often opaque in nature, each altering or shrouding its antecedent. Traditional two-dimensional compositions begin with a canvas, then some form of underpaint, followed by a series of strata—at times scraped away and at others built up—that eventually form a composition that becomes an entirety greater than the sum of its parts.

Chris Rusak. The Origin of Chance, 2013; acrylic on fiberglass; 12 x 13 x ¾ in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Chris Rusak’s newest works, a series called Tension & Light (2013), break with the aforementioned conventions of painting and collage, yet are clearly painterly in their use of light and energetic mark making. Rusak’s works offer a highly meditative transparency to the picture plane; his compositions are replete with subtle shifts in tone and the graceful overlap of lines. Paintings The Origin of Chance (2013) and (Good) Argument (2013) weave together materials and medium in a seeming effortlessness delivered through the use of bold lines and a palette that is limited in color yet rich in tones of gray, shades of white, and delicate shadows.

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The cleverly titled Sticks and Drones at Paradise Row Gallery is Los Angeles-based artist Eric Yahnker’s London debut. On entering the gallery, viewers are confronted with Daddy Issues (2014), a crudely carved wooden cobra with the words “Daddy Issues” lovingly wood-burned into its hood. With a sequined magenta bow on the middle of its head, it’s the Honey Boo Boo of county-fair handicrafts. “Daddy Issues” might as well have been the title of the show, as Yahnker skillfully remixes American pop culture in a way that both reveres and skewers it. As I made my way through the gallery, I wondered who this “Daddy” might be: an American government and globalized pop-culture machine, or a more antecedent, art-historical “Daddy,” one from which American culture was born—namely Britain, but also all of Europe.

Eric Yahnker. Daddy Issues, 2014, wooden cobra on pedestal, 25 x 14 x 7 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Space Jam (2014) is an almost eight-foot-tall colored-pencil drawing that features Michael Jordan slam-dunking into a basketball net whose backboard is the scandalous 1866 painting by Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du Monde (Origin of the World). It is well rendered and beautifully composed—from the swish of the basketball net to the gilt gold frame, from the brick wall behind Jordan to the wrinkle of his sweatshirt; of course, the copy of the famous painting itself is a feat of impressive draftsmanship. Space Jam pokes fun at the male-centric sports lingo for sexual intercourse and even compares the worship of a sports star with the worship of a woman as a sex object. But this piece also attempts to bridge the gap between Yahnker’s own hyperrealistic and pop-culture-based artwork and the work of the great European masters. It grapples with the idea that the United States’ chief export is culture—even and especially to its ancestral countries—and that particular culture is no longer the fine culture of high art, drama, and architecture (although given the pornographic nature of the Courbet he chose to reproduce, maybe it never was), and is instead  a vapid consumer pop culture. This entire show grapples with and pokes fun at the pop culture the United States exports (which is both consumed and berated), and also the way that current events are understood outside of our own country.

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From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Patricia Maloney’s response to the workshop “Gauging the Gray Area: Standards for Artistic Labor,” which was part of the practicum Valuing Labor in the Arts hosted by the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley. Maloney notes, “…negotiation is the most demonstrable and effective means of creating agency.” This article was originally published on May 22, 2014.

Gauging the Grey Area workshop, Valuing Laboring in the Arts practicum, April 19, 2014, UC Berkeley Art Museum. Image courtesy of the Arts Research Center, UC Berkeley. Photo: Joseph del Pesco.

“Gauging the Gray Area: Standards for Artistic Labor” is both the name of the workshop organized collaboratively by artists Helena Keeffe and Lauren van Haaften-Schick and its product. In their stated goals for the workshop, they posit that the prevailing measures for valuing artistic labor fluctuate between its contribution to a collective good (vis-à-vis a gift economy) and its potential for professionalization (with the ensuing promises of exposure), and that both measures leave artists and institutions with insufficient means to establish fair compensation. “Gauging the Gray Area”—the workshop—sought to formulate a set of standards by which artists can evaluate proposed opportunities (both compensated and non-compensated) as they arise, based on criteria related to the impacts and risks the terms on offer create for the artist. The resulting eponymous broadsheet is conceivably a viable tool to help artists measure subjective, difficult-to-quantify conditions, but its most effective application may be as a precursor to evaluating what negotiations are necessary and what precedents are established in the working relationships between artists and organizations.

Read the full article here.

Today from our friends at Glasstire, we bring you a review of Sandra Ono’s solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery in Dallas, Texas. Author Alejo Benedetti notes, “While many found-object artists attempt to aggrandize the ordinary, Ono recognizes her materials for what they are. The works are beautiful, delicate, and have a commanding presence, but they are also in on the joke.” This article was originally published on May 29, 2014.

Sandra Ono. Untitled, 2013; mop heads and glue, 37.5 x 49 x 9 in.

Banal, low, cast-off: These are all words that could accurately describe the San Francisco-based Sandra Ono’s material list for low tide. While sandwich bags and shoe inserts are not particularly spectacular in everyday life, in the hands of this artist, moments of virtuosity punctuate the plain and ordinary with twinges of comedic clarity.

The show at Dallas’ Conduit Gallery is sparse and understated. Though the works are assembled collections of junk, the space is anything but a hoarder’s trove of keepsakes. Instead, banal materials have been assembled into two strains of works: lurching masses and ethereal constructions.

The more substantial and hulking pieces include everyday objects like mop heads and shoe inserts, which are stacked and fused together. These two works exude an air of sturdiness and quasi-monumentality, but they are far from the sincere attempts by minimal artists to create reductive monolithic objects. Ono’s works hearken back to her West Coast predecessors like Mike Kelley and Ed Kienholz with castoff materials and self-effacing humor, but with greater restraint and reductive tendencies. Substantial yet farcical, the mop-head work bends and rests its bulk on a wooden ledge. Similarly, the collection of fused shoe soles leans against the wall, unable to stand on its own, a possible subtle and lowbrow nod to the West Coast minimal artist John McCracken’s planks. Both works, given status and presence through their assemblage, have a newfound vulnerability in their awkward mass.

Read the full article here.