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.

I am a painter who rarely makes any money directly from my work. Recently a design firm approached me about a project that involves artists painting on small refrigerators from which energy drinks will be sold. There will be a gallery exhibition of these fridges before they are distributed to various retail outlets in major cities around the country. The pay is pretty good, though not what I would ideally get for a painting of that size, and the designer assured me that there would be a lot of exposure for my work as each artist’s name and website will be on their fridge. I don’t buy this particular energy drink so I’m a little uncomfortable with the implication that I endorse the product, but I would really like to get some money for my painting and I like the idea of national exposure for my work. I’m also afraid that I will be “selling out” and this will cause me to be judged negatively by my peers. Will I be committing an ethical transgression if I participate in this promotion? Will I be judged harshly? Is there some thing I am missing that makes this project qualitatively different from the old Absolut Vodka ads that featured fine artists?

Installation view: Tony Conrad. Two Degrees of Separation, Kunsthalle Wien, 2014, Photo: Stephan Wyckoff: Grommet Horn, ca. 1970, Replik 2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Buchholz.

Let me start by saying that notions of selling out or being judged harshly should have no bearing on your decision. Instead, let’s ask a different question, one that’s lurking under the surface of the ones you’ve written: What kind of artist do you want to be? Because the answer to this question is also the answer to every other opportunity that will ever come your way, whether it’s pitched to you by an ad man hawking sports drinks or the Guggenheim Bilbao.

And you can answer the question—What kind of artist do you want to be?—by asking yourself some other questions: What’s most important to you? What do you think art is for? Who are your art heroes? Do you want to paint because it frees your soul and keeps you sane? Do you want to make work in service of other agendas? Imagine your paintings on a fridge or a T-shirt or a cellphone cover—how would that make you feel?

Whatever the answers to these questions are, you must own them. Don’t worry about what anyone else might think. If you decide that artistic freedom is really important to you, then you probably won’t feel comfortable working within the confines of an advertising campaign. If you decide that it would be fun to collaborate with designers and advertisers, then do it. When your peers judge you—and I guarantee they will, because their answers to these questions would be different, and because the art world is, at every level, filled with snobs—you can just chuckle gently to yourself while strolling to the bank to deposit another check. There is no right or wrong way to go about being an artist, and no matter which path you choose, someone will undoubtedly have the opinion that you chose poorly. Screw ’em.

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Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Hana Metzger reviews Synecdoche at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. 

Tony Lewis. Automatic, 2015; Pencil, graphite powder, and tape on paper; 83 3/4 x 71 1/2 in. Courtesy of the Artist; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Massimo De Carlo, London/Milan; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

Synecdoche, an exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery featuring twelve works by five artists, borrows its title from rhetoric, with each work to be read as a smaller piece of a larger narrative or theme. A trope that is easily defined verbally (examples include “all hands on deck” or “the meeting was full of suits”), synecdoche is more cerebral when applied to visual art.

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From our friends at Canadian Art, today we bring you a feature on the Toronto-based artist Lorna Mills. Author Simon Lewsen (@SimonLewsen) notes, “The intensity of Mills’ art is rooted not just in the proliferation of images but also in their strange choreography.” This article was originally published on July 1, 2015.

Lorna Mills. Abrupt Diplomat (still from GIF), 2015. Courtesy of Transfer Gallery.

In the fall of 2014, Lorna Mills, the Toronto-based net artist, was exhibiting at Dubai’s Zayed University and struggling to appease the censors. She couldn’t show work with images of masturbation, women humping blowup dolphins, or men sticking their dicks into trumpet bells—hefty restrictions for an artist like Mills. One of her pieces featured an image of John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their 1969 bed-in. The official at Zayed hemmed and hawed—“They’re fully dressed, but they are in bed”—and eventually accepted the work on the grounds that the characters are married.

Mills’ art is exuberantly raunchy, but so is much of the internet. Her medium—the graphic interchange format, or GIF, a lightweight digital motion-picture technology—is about as old as the World Wide Web itself. She sources the footage for her hyperactive collages from user-moderated forums like Reddit, troll caves like 4chan, humor sites featuring bloopers from porn films (called pornfails), and oddball Russian domains that are teeming with nasty internet detritus. “Russian sites are really bad, by which I mean really good,” says Mills. Her collages feature grainy images of humans and animals, all of them moving (read: breathing, gesticulating, fucking) in jerky, repetitive motions. She disseminates her work mostly through electronic platforms, including Google Plus, social-networking application Ello, and Digital Media Tree, an eclectic blog operated by New York programmer Jim Bassett.

Read the full article here.

The very idea that the plastic arts could provide a surface for human expression stands on the belief that an artist’s physical actions include elements both conscious and unconscious, and therefore expressive. On a paper or canvas, or in any matter able to preserve a human trace, the psychic interior of a person could be made visible through marks animated by thought and spirit and communicated through the artist’s hand.

Pat O’Connor. Savant, 2015; gouache, acrylic, and pen on paper, framed; 23 x 21 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Arcade Fine Arts, London.

Even before the swell of artistic innovation powered by this notion had run its course, postmodern artists had already begun to aggressively destabilize this concept. By foregrounding processes that used chance marks, algorithms, appropriation, reproduction, grids, mechanical means, and hired labor—among a thousand other pointed demonstrations—artists in the latter half of the 20th century showed the notion of the artist’s hand as the most vulnerable conceptual foundation of modernism’s brave myth. Much of the variety in contemporary art came about as a result, as the distancing of the artist through process evolved beyond a backward-facing tool for breaking modernism into a wider range of ways to make a piece of art—and a wider definition of what, and how, that art can mean. Yet, nearly fifty years after Sol Lewitt’s first wall drawings, and in the current diffused moment in art’s simultaneous histories, one of the few patterns firm enough for recognition has been the reemergence of the artist’s hand, with its underlying assumptions about the trace of subjectivity safeguarded.

By way of Philip Guston, whose smart and sober blend of graphic imagery and expressive marks have preserved him as modernism’s unlikely contemporary hero, we arrive at Paw, the current summer exhibition at Arcade Fine Arts in London. Borrowing the title from Guston’s 1968 painting, in which a clunky left hand pushes a black line across the dull pink canvas, Paw brings together ten artists, each with work relating to the motif of the hand.

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The majesty of our planet—its sublime beauty, biological diversity, and ability to instigate powerful modes of metaphysical reflection within its human inhabitants—remains a constant motif in the history of Western art. The paintings of Claude Lorrain, Rembrandt, Caspar David Friedrich, and George Inness are enduring reminders of the aesthetic richness of the genre. The sensual pleasures that the natural world incites and the darker forces undulating beneath the lush meditations of flora and fauna reveal humankind’s primitive desire for mastery over the natural world. In the 21st century—an era irrevocably marked by the catastrophic effects of human-driven climate change and environmental devastation—many contemporary artists have reclaimed certain Romantic traditions and descriptions of nature as a way to make sense of the violence enacted by industrial interference with the natural world.[1] Curator David J. Wagner’s exhibition Environmental Impact, currently on display at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana, gathers a diverse selection of artists who confront the urgent threat of climate change. By inspiring new forms of aesthetic contemplation that weigh the consequences of environmental violence, Environmental Impact works to intensify and activate a dialogue between viewer and image in order to render ambiguous society’s passive consumption of images of environmental destruction.[2]

Edward Burtynsky. Oxford Tire Pile #2, Westley, California, 1999; chromogenic color print; 40 x 50 in. Courtesy of Tom Thomsen Art Gallery, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada.

In order to sustain a high pitch of awareness, the vast majority of the works present a more literal understanding of environmental exploitation and damage, with photography and styles of realism forming the core of this exhibition; it is a reminder of the crucial role documentary processes have in bearing witness to the devastating consequences of ecological destruction. Edward Burtynsky’s photographic oeuvre of landscapes devastated by the industrial waste of capitalism is represented most powerfully by Oxford Tire Pile #2, Westley, California (1999)—an ominous example of toxic waste and scorched earth hidden in plain sight in small towns across the United States. The claustrophobic pilings deconstruct the language of minimalism and its foundation in repetition into disturbing visual reminders of the expanse and physical reality of human waste. And yet the dramatic scale and overwhelming visual richness of the image still captures something of the terrifying sublime at work in nature and industry. The image is lyrical and seductive despite its proximity to more disturbing works that proclaim the ruinous effects and fatal consequences of human progress. Burtynsky constructs a world in which an uncountable field of discarded tires might have a rightful place in the world, aestheticized and purposeful, asking us as viewers to think hard about the role of art in addressing societal problems. Does aesthetic mediation null the painful truths and harsh realities of environmental issues, and if so, does this speak to art’s powerlessness or the deflation of our ability to be politicized through images?

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Though failure has an unfavorable definition, interpretations of the word fluctuate dramatically between negative and positive connotations, depending on whom you ask. While some people may consider failure as something to avoid at all costs, others recognize—and even welcome—the possibilities that arise when something does not go exactly as planned. The seventeen artists in I Dropped the Lemon Tart at Lisa Cooley examine the many faces of failure, resulting in works that range from cheeky to cynical.

Jenny Holzer. SURVIVAL SERIES: IF YOU AREN’T POLITICAL YOUR PERSONAL LIFE SHOULD BE EXEMPLARY, 1998; cast bronze; 5.1 x 10 in. © Jenny Holzer. Courtesy ofArtist Rights Society (ARS), Cheim & Read, New York, and Lisa Cooley, New York.

The title of the show comes from an anecdote about the Italian chef Massimo Bottura and his sous-chef Takahiko Kondo, who, in one fateful moment, dropped a lemon tart as it was leaving the kitchen to be served. While the terrified Kondo recalls wanting to end his life then and there, Bottura saw in the wrecked dessert a chance for innovation. The tart inspired Bottura to create the now-famous dish (named “Oops, I Dropped the Lemon Tart”), in which the components are scattered across a plate, intentionally disarrayed. In an interview about the event, Kondo reflects that, “in life, to move forward, you learn from mistakes.”[1]

The lessons we are supposed to learn from our mistakes are not always as recognizable as Kondo’s, and the failures in this exhibition aren’t always easily spotted. The press release explains that the show is not meant to celebrate failure but rather to highlight the ways in which it permeates all aspects of being. Taking this statement as a directive, I found myself determining each work a failure or not based on what I would like to believe was informed judgment but was probably more intuition. My examination quickly became tangled, with contradictory trains of thought: If I deem a work a failure, then is it a success within the parameters of the exhibition? Conversely, if a work did not seem enough of a failure, then would it be a success? Can an artwork ever be an absolute failure or success? Needless to say, instead of defining the works on a scale ranging from failure to success, considering the show in this way revealed the arbitrary characteristics by which we qualify something as a failure or not.

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Now on view at Hammer Museum, Mary Reid Kelley’s videos are a collision of drawing, performance, and wordplay that clatter against Greek mythology to produce a visually spare, lexically rich cycle. Working with videographer Patrick Kelley, the artist has produced three black-and-white videos that follow the story of the half-woman, half-bull Minotaur, her lust-crazed mother Pasiphae, and her helpless sister Ariadne through boldly drawn landscapes. A complex weave of alienation and irreverence burlesques the original stories to create a spectacle that is equal parts tragedy and farce.

Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley. Priapus Agonistes, 2013 (video still); single-channel HD video, black and white, sound; 15:09. Courtesy of the Artists; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York; and Pilar Corrias, London.

The ancient tales are spiked with contemporary elements, and crisis is contrasted with absurd humor. The first video, Priapus Agonistes (2013), sets the drama in a small-town gymnasium, where the outcome of a volleyball game will determine the next sacrifice to the Minotaur. The cocksure Priapus (“the one-eyed Prince of Athens”) swaggers onto the court and wins handily, but as he mocks Ariadne and Pasiphae, the camera pans down to the labyrinth underneath, where the Minotaur paces—hunting not for victims, but for a bathroom. With her hands pressed to her crotch, she trots along the gray cinderblock corridors covered in graffiti left by her victims. “I hate Crete!” reads one missive; another foreshadows her fate: “Murderer! Your end is near, bitch.”

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