Sunday, April 25, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
Exhibition Review Criteria
1. The review is honest, open-minded and engaging.
2. The review takes the exhibition in context with past and current exhibitions.
3. The review finds the right balance between looking at the exhibition as a whole and singling out significant works.
4. The review takes into account the audience. The review is easy to read and provides common reference points.
5, The reviewer is able to go outside the art critic mentality and view the work from different vantage points.
6. The review addresses discrepancies in the exhibition without attacking the art itself.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Art & Identity / Art & the Body
1. Art & the Body: "Thus these apertures of ingestion and emission work to constitute the notion of the subject, of the individual body and ultimately the self. What is both inside and outside the body (feces, spittle, urine, menstrual blood, etc.) tends to become taboo because of its ambiguous and anomalous status." (What about babies?!!) Are these substances taboo also because they speak so clearly of our animal nature, that despite years of civilization and culture, nothing can dress up our basic biological functions?
2. Art & Identity: Nikki S. Lee is a Korean woman who remakes herself and then"infiltrates" certain groups of people (i.e. The Tourist Project, The Hip Hop Project, The Ohio Project, etc.). She moves fluidly between social and cultural groups. This provokes the question, how stable is identity? Is it just a social construct? Yet, as good as her disguises are, she can't escape her identification as a Korean woman. By always finding an "in" with a group, is Lee subverting her marginalized identity? Not only is she accepted by these groups, she's also the only one that knows her intentions. It's an empowering position, but does it also constitute a betrayal (especially in The Schoolgirls Project where she is essentially being duplicitous to under-aged girls)? Although interesting as a social experiment, do these one-dimensional representations of identity reinforce stereotypes?
3. Art & Identity: How do we define our identity? Why do we have to? Is Faith Ringgold a black artist or a woman artist or a black woman artist? Does she have to be any of those things? By defining our identity, are we categorizing ourselves to our detriment? Does highlighting identity art, art predominantly created by marginalized individuals, divide us? Or does highlighting our differences bring us together as humans and equals?
4. Art & Identity: Linda Nochlin writes, "Indeed, in our time of instant communication, "problems" are rapidly formulated to rationalize the bad conscience of those with power: the the problem posed by Americans in Vietnam and Cambodia is referred to by Americans as the 'East Asian Problem,' whereas East Asians may view it, more realistically, as the 'American Problem'; the so-called Poverty Problem might more directly be viewed as the 'Wealth Problem' by denizens of urban ghettos or rural wastelands; the same irony twists the White Problem into its opposite, a Black Problem; and the same inverse logic turns up in the formulation of our own present state of affairs as the 'Woman Problem.'" How does this relate to the idea of "otherness"? By using the term "other," are we presupposing an inverse, a "whole"? Is otherness a social construct?
5. Art & Identity: Since Nochlin's article "Why have there been no great women artists" was published in 1971, how have our institutions changed? Is the article still relevant today (Where the Great Women Artists Are Now)? In my personal experience as a printmaker, studio art classes tend to skew more towards women than men. Is this a sign of a shift towards equilibrium? Or will those statistics falter faced with unyielding social institutions?
2. Art & Identity: Nikki S. Lee is a Korean woman who remakes herself and then"infiltrates" certain groups of people (i.e. The Tourist Project, The Hip Hop Project, The Ohio Project, etc.). She moves fluidly between social and cultural groups. This provokes the question, how stable is identity? Is it just a social construct? Yet, as good as her disguises are, she can't escape her identification as a Korean woman. By always finding an "in" with a group, is Lee subverting her marginalized identity? Not only is she accepted by these groups, she's also the only one that knows her intentions. It's an empowering position, but does it also constitute a betrayal (especially in The Schoolgirls Project where she is essentially being duplicitous to under-aged girls)? Although interesting as a social experiment, do these one-dimensional representations of identity reinforce stereotypes?
3. Art & Identity: How do we define our identity? Why do we have to? Is Faith Ringgold a black artist or a woman artist or a black woman artist? Does she have to be any of those things? By defining our identity, are we categorizing ourselves to our detriment? Does highlighting identity art, art predominantly created by marginalized individuals, divide us? Or does highlighting our differences bring us together as humans and equals?
4. Art & Identity: Linda Nochlin writes, "Indeed, in our time of instant communication, "problems" are rapidly formulated to rationalize the bad conscience of those with power: the the problem posed by Americans in Vietnam and Cambodia is referred to by Americans as the 'East Asian Problem,' whereas East Asians may view it, more realistically, as the 'American Problem'; the so-called Poverty Problem might more directly be viewed as the 'Wealth Problem' by denizens of urban ghettos or rural wastelands; the same irony twists the White Problem into its opposite, a Black Problem; and the same inverse logic turns up in the formulation of our own present state of affairs as the 'Woman Problem.'" How does this relate to the idea of "otherness"? By using the term "other," are we presupposing an inverse, a "whole"? Is otherness a social construct?
5. Art & Identity: Since Nochlin's article "Why have there been no great women artists" was published in 1971, how have our institutions changed? Is the article still relevant today (Where the Great Women Artists Are Now)? In my personal experience as a printmaker, studio art classes tend to skew more towards women than men. Is this a sign of a shift towards equilibrium? Or will those statistics falter faced with unyielding social institutions?
Thursday, April 15, 2010
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Sunday, April 11, 2010
Art & Abstraction / Art & Nature and Technology
1. Transhumanism & Posthumanism: "The use of glasses or contact lenses to correct vision is an example of a commonly employed augmentation. Yet this intervention is only correcting a deficiency, returning the individuals function to species-normal levels." What defines "species-normal levels"? Are these levels defined by potential or averages? Do these levels fluctuate as species evolve?
2. Abstract Art Now: "A better model for abstraction is perhaps the hypertext, where the line between A and B goes out in a million possible and ever more complex directions, where artists along the line from A to B find that A' or A" is a window opening onto an entire universe." This is an interesting comparison to the Altermodern Manifesto where Bourriaud uses the same hypertext analogy. He writes: "Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history."
3. Abstract Art Now: "Abstraction has been less a search for the ultimately meaningful, as I have described it, than a recurrent push for the temporarily meaningless: that is, things that are found not often in exotic realms but rather on the edges of banality, familiarity, and the man-made world." What is the "temporarily meaningless"?
4. Transhumanism & Posthumanism: "The first assertion of transhumanist thinking is a rejection of the assumption that human nature is a constant (Bostrom, 1999). There is nothing sacrosanct about nature in general, or about human nature in particular. Criticisms of attempts to modify nature as 'playing God' or as the ultimate human hubris are therefore rejected as inappropriate." If human nature isn't a constant, then what defines human nature? What are its inherent characteristics?
5. Abstract Art Now: "As I cautioned at the outset of these lectures, the less there is to look at, the more you have to look, the more you have to be in the picture." Art isn't purely optical. It's experienced physically, mentally and emotionally.
6. Art & Nature and Technology: What is the line between art and science? What makes Mel Chin's Revival Field art and not science?
6. Art & Nature and Technology: What is the line between art and science? What makes Mel Chin's Revival Field art and not science?
Monday, April 5, 2010
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