Nope.

One of my favorite occurrences in the Art world is when an artist acknowledges the viewers’ expectations, and actively denies them. In a time seemingly ruled by art with the highest sensational value, I can’t help but root for the heroic and/or obstinate people unabashedly making minimalist conceptual art that allows for none of the easily digestible catharses one might hope for. This is not to say that the work is underdeveloped or shallow; I think a closed door holds as much if not more mystery, potential narrative and freedom to expand upon than an open door through which we can clearly see everything. It is the same “closed door” potential that completely saturates Edits, the current exhibition of Jason Kraus’s work at Jessica Silverman Gallery.

Inside the gallery, the installation is seductively minimal and almost entirely monochromatic. Extracted pieces of Kraus’s studio walls hang mounted in frames, the dry-wall marked with the charcoal smudges and traces of the artist’s process. A large-format, b&w photograph titled An Empty Space documents the void created by hundreds of drawings made on Kraus’s studio wall, where the charcoal that escaped the paper’s surface marks off the edges of the absent pieces of paper. The Serra-esque drawing board learning in a corner reinforces the trompe l’oeil effect of An Empty Space; the two objects acting as the signifier and signified of something that is much more abstract than the expected tangibility of a sign, such as a chair.

The real star of the show, however, is the pairing of two wooden crates locked with combination locks, and a framed envelope that Kraus mailed to Jessica Silverman, the gallery owner. Completely unassuming, the crates (probably) hold all the drawings that we see the traces of in the surrounding works. The corresponding envelope contains the combination that opens the locks on the crates. This is a simple enough concept: there is a lock, and there is a combination that opens the lock. The punch-line is that the two pieces may never be acquired by the same person, ensuring that the drawings will never be revealed. Now, I have to admit that the inner-brat in me loves this restriction. As I see it, basically Kraus is saying, “Oh, you wanted to see the art we’re talking about? Too bad.” Of course, the work absolutely should not be pigeon-holed in the sort of school-yard teasing with which I indulgently associate it. The dialog between the works in the show also heavily references the performative act of making art, emphasizing that the process can hold just as much importance as the final product.

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At the end of William Kentridge’s miniature theatre piece Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005) a rhinoceros gets shot. The shooting, taken from old black and white film footage and projected onto the theatre’s back screen is clumsily executed by a clearly inexperienced rhinoceros hunter. After the deed is done, said hunter runs back and forth between the animal and his original position to check the status of his prey, anxiously trying to ensure he killed the beast and did the right thing. The awkward killing foregoes a celebration of the victory over the immense powers of the rhinoceros. Seconds after the first shot, a group of human beings is seen strapping the animal’s legs together, preparing it to be carried away. A strange mixture of guilt and pride can be sensed in the hunters’ eyes.

Black Box/ Chambre Noire is a 21-minute performance, starring sometimes quirky but often deeply sinister motorised creatures in a theatre crafted from paper and wood. The creatures, including a melancholy megaphone and robotic soldiers who commit violent killings, move in rows across a multi-layered stage. In the background, images of charcoal drawings, postcards, documents and archival video footage are in an intentionally chaotic manner projected onto the theatre’s structure. The work draws inspiration from what the UN named the first genocide of the 20^th century. In 1904, in what is now called Namibia, over 80.000 people found their death when the indigenous Herero and Nama people came into resistance against the German colonists. Many died instantly through the force of the violence, others were forced into the desert and died from exposure to extreme temperatures and draught.

Kentridge created the theatre as a means to communicate his contemplations about the killings.  He ploughed through Namibian state archives, visited sites and collated material. He did extensive research and visualised his findings and thoughts in charcoal drawings – of people, landscapes and rhinoceroses – often on the original Namibian papers. It was a project born less out of political conviction and than out of social engagement and intrigue. The work is not so much politically opinionated, but explorative – Kentridge asks questions about history and behaviour and pierces through the core of human nature to find our need for violence. It is something that crosses borders, cultures and times.

Saying that Black Box/Chambre Noire tells the story of a genocide would not be doing Kentridge justice, and it wouldn’t be true. The story of the genocide is told by the museum – written on the walls and available to take home in the shape of the freely available literature. Kentridge’s work is a visual landscape in which fragments of information follow each other in a quickly changing, illogical sequence. This manner of animating and projecting gives the historical events a place in the world, but it also makes them anonymous and archetypal.

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Let’s delve into a weird place. Tunneling towards a mine of suppressed, latent, and untapped oddities, this rabbit hole burrows deep into the human psyche. Like a cognitive roll call, every repressed thought is buried here: the traumatically humiliating moment from your childhood, the impure dreams you had as a teen, and the irrational fears you disguise as an adult – this is a den in which the taboo hibernates. Rousing these dormant compulsions are Michelle Carla Handel and Eve Wood in their two-person exhibition at Garboushian Gallery, Your Mouth, Undone, an inaugural exhibition for both artists at the space. As the title suggests, the show appears as if the stream to a collective consciousness doth runneth over – the previous barricade between social restraint and inhibition deteriorated in its wake. Immersed in this liberated visceral flood, Handel and Wood create this deluge’s disturbingly alluring remains.

With a dexterous manipulation of industrial materials, Michelle Carla Handel transfigures wood, polyester fiberfill, muslin, silicone, rubber, urethane, vinyl and rope from the banal to the corporeal. She coyly references the dichotomous nature of her mediums – which are as easily used for commercial purposes as they are deviant – to evoke a purely visceral confrontation with our most lascivious associations.

“Private Dancer” (2011) – an unabashed pun in itself – gracefully dangles from the ceiling, a fabric and latex sling allowing its fleshy form to take a suggestive bodily shape. As its southernmost point slouches towards the ground, one can’t help recalling the flaccid, drooping realities of our most exposed selves. Tapping into a lineage of body politics, Handel employs a comical tone in her evaluation of beauty constructs, her deformed anatomies misshapen and vulnerable in their configurations.

“Vestigial Slump” (2011) is poised atop a wooden bar stool, as if casually gossiping with its viewer. Endearing in its awkwardly frank repose, the squid-like object also evokes the anatomical womb models used in “Reproduction 101,” staging a blunt encounter with an otherwise cryptic issue territory and ownership. Seated, reclining, suspended, or bound, Handel’s abstracted forms summon conflicting notions of the erotic and repellent, and evoke an instinctive grapple between the carnal and discriminating.

Eve Wood embraces a similarly fearless exploration of the subliminal and innermost cast of mind. Painted on seemingly raw wood panels, her paintings are ingenuously primeval. Elements of absurdism and phantasmagoria in her portraits forge a naked sincerity, as if traversing the non-sequiturs and anxiety rampant in our unencumbered dreamscapes. Wood’s sharply rendered figures personify the illusion of control; illustrations of a shared plight to discern rationality from irrationality, and the lucid from the incoherent.

In “Avian Configuration I” (2012), an angular figure attempts to clutch his face – which is shrouded in a fluttering headdress of hummingbirds. Wood’s mastery lies in her resolute ambiguity, as her subject’s feathered infestation is indeterminately a captivating fantasy or phobia-induced nightmare. Another work, “Babies Are Born Every Day” (2012), depicts two disfigured males in hauntingly frail configurations. The first, his hunched belly spilling over weathered jeans, feebly rests his forearms on his knees – reddish stumps where absent hands should be. He appears dejected and unavailing; his internalized failure exaggerated by a similarly deformed, nude peer compassionately gazing in his direction.

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Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is cosponsored by KQED.org.

I have been a semi-successful studio artist for almost 30 years. For about the last 10 of these I have been able to support myself financially with my work. I consider this a fortunate situation but recently I have had to admit to myself that I’m getting tired and that the satisfaction of being an artist no longer seems worth the hustle of maintaining a viable studio practice. However, I am still an ambitious person (possibly out of habit) and I feel very acutely the pressure to produce work in a certain quantity. Being an artist has been the central part of my identity for so long, and I still romanticize it but I’m just not sure I can do it any longer. If I did stop making my work, I think there’s plenty I could do to make a living in the city where I live, but the thought of giving up a national reputation is frightening. Not that I think that there’s an adoring public who would be devastated but I can’t deny that my studio practice is externally motivated at this point. Is there a way to gracefully wrap up an art career without dying? Is there a way to turn down opportunities and quell the beast of the “artist’s ego” in order to lead a more sane and relaxing existence?

Of the many possible dilemmas to have, let’s admit that this one is rather attractive. Selling work steadily enough to provide a livable income is something that many artists yearn for, a marker of capital-S Success—at least on the commercial market. And for the past ten years you’ve had it, but now it has lost its luster.

Certainly, you could start bowing out. A regular job worked forty hours a week would surely make you too busy (and definitely too tired) to meet your current production demands. If this is what you really want, you need to have some honest conversations with your gallerists and dealers. Tell them that you need some space to pursue other goals right now and will be slowing down your studio work. It will be a hard conversation to have, but if you’re going to go down this path you need to be candid with the people who have helped support your career.

But before you initiate those conversations, you need to have one with yourself first. Clichéd though it may be, it’s absolutely true that age has a way of putting things into perspective and it might be that you’ve matured and grown distant from your current life. Before you lock the door to your studio and throw away the key, let’s try to figure out how you got here in the first place. To put it bluntly, let’s make sure that this is a well-considered course of action and not just a mid-life-crisis maneuver that ends in remorse.

There are some questions that you need to ask yourself. What are the specifics that make your current practice untenable? Could it be that production pressure alone is the cause of your reluctance to continue? How do you feel about fulfilling orders for work that’s not yet made, knowing it has to be good every time? Do you feel like you have room to experiment or are you locked into a saleable style, medium, or format? Do you have artist friends that you see regularly, or are you stuck in the studio? Are you working with studio assistants, or do you do everything yourself? How quickly are you expected to produce work? Take stock of your current modes and methods. How many of the pressures come from without, and how many from within? When was the last time you felt really inspired to work?

Take a couple of days to assess your studio practice and jot down anything that pops into your head. When you feel like you have a robust audit of what’s really going on, then it’s time to imagine the studio practice that would fit you perfectly. Would you work less? Change media? Work with others? Have a different space? This is total fantasy-land, so feel free to write down whatever you think might make you feel satisfied and engaged.

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Sometimes we all need a bit of convincing to go see a particular exhibition. In the case of  I Wish This Was A Song, the upcoming exhibit at The National Museum of Norway, Museum of Contemporary Art, all you have to do is skim over the ridiculous line up of artists included:

Nevin Aladağ, Dave Allen, Apparatjik and Autokolor, Fikret Atay, Tim Ayres, Johanna Billing, Christoph Brech, Catti Brandelius, Laura Bruce, Clegg and Guttmann, Sophie Clements, Phil Collins, William Engelen, Mohamed Ali Fadlabi, Graham Dolphin, Gilbert & George, Goodiepal, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Her Noise Archive, Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen (Complaints Choir), Idris Khan, Ragnar Kjartansson, Stian Eide Kluge, Erkki Kurenniemi, Jan Köchermann, João Ferro Martins, KILLL, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Bruce Nauman, Terje Nicolaisen, Camille Norment, Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Susan Philipsz, Adrian Piper, Santiago Reyes, Michael Sailstorfer, Tom Sandberg, Wilhelm Sasnal, Félix González-Torres, Tori Wrånes, and David Zink Yi.

With live appearances by: Apparatjik and Sølvguttene, Diamanda Galas and KORK, KILLL, Oslo Complaints Choir and Georg Wadenius, Cikada, Olaf Nicolai and Stuttgart Neue Vocalsolisten and Tetine (Brazilian slam-dunk duo), Tori Wrånes, Camille Norment, Catti Brandelius.

I mean, need I say more?

And in the spirit of prepping your aural sensibilities, today’s DS Archive pick takes another look at the 2011 MoMA exhibit, Looking at Music 3.0.

The following article was originally published on April 14, 2011 by Aimée Reed:

Where were you when the Music Television Channel was first introduced in 1981? I was seven years old and had a babysitter who, in her early twenties, was the coolest person I had ever met. I would follow her around just in the hopes that this perceived “coolness” would somehow rub off on me. It was through her that I was exposed, for the first time, to the brand-new phenomenon of the music video. Her family had just gotten cable and we would sit around and watch this small American network running loops of film shorts that visually illustrated the concepts and narratives of song by popular musical bands at the time. What we didn’t realize at the time, was that visual and popular culture as we knew it was changed forever. Read More »

For this edition of Fan Mail, Csilla Klenyánszki from Rotterdam, Netherlands has been selected from our worthy reader submissions. Two artists are featured each month—the next one could be you! If you would like to be considered, please submit your website link to info@dailyserving.com with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line.

Our back porch has a screen door but the rod that goes into the pneumatic closer is bent so we leave it permanently propped open. In the spring, we would leave the doors open and the fan going so Shadow could get out to the backyard at leisure. In and out of the kitchen door, bringing in sticks and strings, a wren went unnoticed for a while. It took us a few times of seeing the bird before we saw the nest. On the top shelf of the kitchen, the food dehydrator, which had been sitting there for a while, was the site of the nest. No babies, so we moved the home outside to be reassembled into nature.

Later in the summer, I picked up a box of Borax from atop the water heater closet on the back porch and it looked filled with dirt and dog hair, so I put is aside for Rebecca to examine and comprehend how the powder got so filthy. Unbeknownst to me, it had four baby birds in it. I even heard the peeping but thought it was outside birds. Only a few days on the back porch and they had all left the nest. The parent bird was busy darting from and returning to the box. I brought my cousin and Dad to check it out but the babies were gone. I had caught only one glimpse of them, and then I doubted seeing them at all.

That same spring, a mockingbird built its nest in the spiny bush next to the front door. When we’d walk through the yard, the mockingbirds were on patrol to protect the nest and would dive at you or graze you on the back to protect the chicks. They would perch on our bench and they made it hard to work in the yard with their attacks on us. And in the overhang of the roof, a nest of starlings were installed. Like the siege tunnels of Gibraltar, they were hidden from view with a good vantage point of the yard. Their peeps were constant on the front porch, with a loudness that meant they were protected.

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#Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts. Today #Hashtags kicks off a new series on the institution of the museum, by writer Rob Marks. Stay tuned for Part II, and please send queries and/or ideas for future columns to hashtags@dailyserving.com.

Part I: If the Walls Would Not Speak

The museum is the kindest parent, ushering me to the brink, toward moments of wonder and awe, insight and revelation. But almost at once, it is the cruelest parent, jerking me back, repossessing the very experience it had allowed me to glimpse. Although it is laudable for museums to exalt the goal of “activating” the visitor, of nurturing visitor engagement and visitor choice, the structure of museums turns the visit into a battle for control and unearths a central tension of museum practice. On the one hand is the archeological experience of a cultural object, which claims the object as an illustration within a narrative to tell the visitor something about the context of the object, its meaning for others; on the other hand is the aesthetic experience of an art object, during which the object escapes its historical–cultural context, illustrating nothing except the visitor and telling the visitor something about the self.

It is an old tension, and it would be unreasonable to expect that it might have been resolved by now. It is, simply put, not for resolving. This vigorous state of irresolution, however, has not been matched by an equally unsettled set of museum practices. Although much has been written about exhibition commentary and structure, and new technology has inspired new formats of presenting information, museum methods have remained remarkably fixed in their philosophy: to marshal language toward interpretation. This article is the first in a series of essays, a polemic, a tribute, a sensation: a quest to enter into this churning tranquility. I am not a curator, nor am I a museum director faced with the demands of a dozen constituencies. I am simply a traveler, a visitor, a child of the museum who is beginning to feel cheated out his inheritance, out of the wonder that is—or should be—the legacy of the museum.

With or Without

“We can get along with education, or without it,” the pioneering composer and artist John Cage said nine months before he died in August 1992. Cage was responding to poet and scholar Joan Retallack’s question, “Knowing the extent to which [your work] is a result of chance operations teaches me something about seeing, and about the radical contingency of events in our world. . . . But how would one notice any of this . . . if one knew nothing about how and why you have worked the way you do?”[1] Retallack means how would one know that Cage applied the system of “chance operations” for which he was famous, as a tool to marshal “indeterminacy,” to put “the intention of the mind . . . out of operation”[2] during his creative process? How would one know that the composition of both his musical works and the prints he produced at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press over the last 15 years of his life, by reflecting this “radical contingency,” reveal something about the nature of world? Retallack said of Cage’s Where R=Ryoanji print series (1991):

“I was seeing them as I was trained to see “abstract” drawings, looking for elements of balance and design. Then I remembered that they were tracings of chance comings together. . . . At that moment of remembering, or realization, everything changed. I was no longer seeing “design”—something heavy and portentous; I was seeing the lightness, the grace and fragility of chance—how wonderful that that had come together in that way. But also how close it was to not happening at all. I would not have had this experience without knowing how you work. It was the conceptual context, that I took on, that opened up that way of seeing. And it seems to me that it is that context, of knowing the chance procedures, that keeps those traces from solidifying. . . . Keeps them from losing the motion that’s in them as events that have just grazed this piece of paper. It’s as though at any moment they could glance off again, fly apart.”[3]

In a museum dominated by narrative, “knowing” is often framed as the province of language. For Retallack, and indeed for most museum curators and educators, the context of an exhibit—the recitation that places the work and the artist within the art historical, sociopolitical, psychobiographical and other frameworks—is crucial to the visitor’s experience of the work. The structure of this recitation is not merely the “talk”—the wall plaques and labels that ornament the artworks, the audio guides and brochures that narrate the exhibit, the docent tours that explore it—but also the “walk”—the sequencing that governs the procession, as if on a conveyor belt, from one label—and its artwork—to another, one gallery in order to the next. On the 100th anniversary of Cage’s birthday—September 5, 1912—it makes sense to ask why this tendency is so prevalent and what structures allow it to manifest as such a jekyllhydian parent.

Despite the fact that Retallack is right—Cage’s work does resonate differently when I understand his process—“knowing” also disrupts my engagement. An artwork without label would seem to be if not mute, then at least reticent, but to what extent does the commentary of a label or a wall plaque arrest experience before it has a chance to develop? Just as the silence of Cage’s piano during his iconic composition 4’33” (1952)—nary a note is played—reveals the ambient sound of the world as music, the silence of the absent label—which seems to be an emptiness—reveals the sound of an artwork that words might obscure.

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