03.14.00
from steve dietz guest editor: sarah cook
gallery 9, walker art center, the internet, and digital culture
ART ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK
|
issue #15 03.14.00 |
|
WebWalker DAILY 02_11_00-04_30_00 from steve dietz guest editor: sarah cook gallery 9, walker art center, the internet, and digital culture ART ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK |
|
editor's note a kitsch discussion next week's guests links |
EAT: ENTERTAINMENT, ART, TECHNOLOGY http://www.walkerart.org/salons/eat/ eat digest no. 4 ENGAGEMENT March 5 through March 11 contents: 1. editor's note. 2. A discussions about kitsch between Dike Blair, Midori Matsui and Josephine Bosma 3. introducing next week's guests ________________________________________ |
||
|
editor's note |
*** Sarah Cook |
||
|
a kitsch discussion |
From lilyvac@thing.net Wed, 08 Mar 2000 11:35:49 -0500 Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2000 11:35:49 -0500 From: Dike Blair lilyvac@thing.net Subject: [Eat-raw] Re: Eat-raw digest, Vol 1 #21 - 4 msgs Midori's unanswered question: "Which would you prefer, as audience, the exhibition whose substantial visuality can satisfy your aesthetic expectations and intellectual interest in the historical relevance of contemporary art's critically incorporating entertainment elements, or the exhibition that constantly asks you to participate in it, not to just look, but to do something in the museum?" My answer: neither. I try to defeat my own aesthetic expectations when visiting any exhibition, otherwise I don't learn anything new from the artist. As far as curatorial practices, especially exhibition design, I find they're getting extremely manipulative in order to keep up with the publics' appetite for entertainment. There is an extraordinary show of Hiroshige prints at the Brooklyn Museum at the moment but the graphics and installation moves designed to create "atmosphere" are annoying. A similar attempt at coloring the environment of a recent Martin Johnson Heade show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston - glorious work - was a chintzy failure. I'm also very suspicious of physically interactive playpen art - but good art of any kind is hard to come by. But I'm inclined and trained to be a "floating eyeball" and that's how I like my experience - with tactility coming by way of the retina. Isn't it time we ditch the word "kitsch?" I'm not sure it applies, at least in America, anymore. If the dominant culture is popular culture, how does kitsch relate? You mention a tradition of Greenbergian formalism - modernism - which is really a European import. It seems to me that it's been decades since serious artists have employed kitsch in any effective way. (But maybe this is a problem of defining "kitsch.") When they do overtly employ it (like recent Koons), it usually falls flat or only appeals to the haute bourgeois who feel they've been included in a joke. It seems to me that the best artists that employ multi media or forms that relate to technology do so with some envy and humility and competitive drive (I'd put Barney in that category). The best kind of "critique" happens obliquely and, in my opinion, when the artist doesn't consciously engage in a kind of dialectic with history. The tradition of the decorative and commercial arts in Japan, the blurrier distinctions between art, craft, and culture has always struck me as a positive thing. I may be mistaken (especially when addressing someone else's culture), but it feels like the urge is use American or Western art world models would be a mistake. Post-Modern "critique" didn't work that well in Mariko Mori's earlier work. She really cut loose when she ditched that Western art/culture schizophrenic approach and began a more celebratory approach - although I realize some of her android girl stuff maintains a feminist edge, especially in Japan. It strikes me that the strength of younger Japanese artists has come from the realization that manga, anime, and technology are not kitsch - they're legitimate and powerful forms to be employed for their virtues. The kind of legitimation that the market bestows on Western artists is good for putting some money in artists' pockets. The kind of legitimation that institutions lend is trickier. The artist gets stuck biting the hands that feed him or her. This leads to the kind of "critical" work that gets caught in a feedback loop with the institution. The world gets small or forgotten. *** From matsui@ta2.so-net.ne.jp Thu, 09 Mar 2000 09:25:11 +0900 Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2000 09:25:11 +0900 From: MidoriMatsui matsui@ta2.so-net.ne.jp Subject: [Eat-raw] Re: Eat-raw digest, Vol 1 #22 - 2 msgs What Greenberg considered as "kitsch" certainly meant what we now call "popular culture, " including jazz, Hollywood films, popular illustration, among others. The word "kitsch" may no longer apply even to Japanese comics and animations. Still, I think some art historians still use the word kitsch to mean the visual language of popular culture, in order to specify it as Modernism's Other, as Thomas Crow does in Modern Art in the Common Culture. I should have first explained in the beginning my own strategic use of the word "kitsch" to mean the popular or "Pop" realms that have been excluded from the Japanese systems of cultural legitimation (whose criteria have frequently been arbitrary adaptations of contemporary Western artistic models). I don't use the word kitsch in derogatory senses. I use it to indicate the things and expressions that contain the power of the popular, or the cultural unconscious. I should also justify my use of the word "critical." It's frequently misunderstood that being "critical" means to "criticize," or attack something. I don't mean that, when I say "critically employ" kitsch, etc. To me, being critical is being conscious , rational and analytical in your approach to something. It's a way of engaging something with detached estimation of its (sociocultural/ psychological) functions, especially in a given moment of its application. Because of your detachment, the popular image you are using become something reflective of its own popularity, as in Barney's use of cowboy or fairy tale images. That's what I mean by "critical application of kitsch." But it should be differentiated from camp, which I think is a variation of dandyism and whose major appeal is to Bohemian intellectuals, lacking the accessibility to emotionally move or console the wider audience. If this explanation on my use of the word "kitsch" can be accepted, I can go on to argue that "kitsch" remained a crucial element in the art of the past decade. I don't just mean the works of Koons, Mike Kelly or Paul McCarthy. What fascinates me, rather, is the almost unabashed acceptance of "beauty" in the paintings of Elizabeth Peyton, or the photography of Wolfgang Tillmans or Jack Pierson. I remember that in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, "beauty" was the word you tried not to use in discussing contemporary art. With the emergence of their works, and their surprisingly smooth acceptance by the art world (market?) around 1995, it started to be excusable to talk about "beauty" again, especially in figurative painting (To Greenberg, figurative art itself was in the category of kitsch). The works like Peyton's paintings still disturb me, because their appeal is so much like that of Japanese girls' comics or melodramatic films. That appeal is obviously "outside" of the legitimate categories of the avant-garde art, but still it seems to share with some classical portraits the emotional intensity that immediately engages the general public. While they are sometimes grouped together, I find Peyton's painting fundamentally different from the works of John Currin or Karen Kilimnik, who are closer to Mike Kelly or Matthew Barney in their conscious integration of the vernacular or underground visual elements in their representations. Peyton's portraits--like Tillmans's early photography--are dangerously close to "kitsch" in their ability to immediately please the public (another trait of kitsch, according to Greenberg). Their acceptance by the art world itself may be a result of the ever-increasing influence of mass media on art as part of the cultural industry. But without the partial institutional acceptance of works like hers or Tillmans's, the video works by Doug Aitken may have been criticized as being "merely beautiful." (I think Doug Aitken's work is a beautiful example of setting up an apparently "popular" framework--like that of a National Geographic documentary, to conceptually transform it while providing an amazing visual experience). I also take Walter Benjamin's use of the word "kitsch" to mean the radically emotional layer of popular culture to contain the imagination of the public and transmit to a different age. He states that clearly in "Dream Kitsch," as well as in essays about old toys and many Arcade fragments. I think that what's remarkable about the art of the latter half of the 1990s is that younger artists have been remarkably perceptive to this power of popular, without trying to intellectually sublimate it. In that sense, I entirely agree with Dike's comments that "the strength of younger Japanese artists has come from the realization that manga, anime, and technology are not kitsch - they're legitimate and powerful forms to be employed for their virtues." The comment like this makes me realize that instead of the dummy one, the question I should have asked is: how does the exhibition Let's Entertain respond to the increasing encroachment between the realms of "contemporary art" ( still largely an institutionally legitimated area) and popular entertainment--is it effective in transmitting the energy of such a cultural intercourse between the realms that have been carefully separated for decades after the emergence of Pop Art? *** From jesis@xs4all.nl Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:02:36 +0100 (CET) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:02:36 +0100 (CET) From: Josephine Bosma jesis@xs4all.nl Subject: [Eat-raw] Re: Eat-raw digest, Vol 1 #22 - 2 msgs One definition of kitsch as I have come to understand it (by Greenberg) was also that kitsch is art that is an attempt to copy the style of 'original' artworks. This I find a very interesting definition, as it means more or less that almost all contemporary art is kitsch. In fact, it would mean art is already more part of popular culture then is generally admitted. I have always fought to get certain practices on the net recognized as art (net art), mostly to make sure this term would not be colonized by established multimedia artists copying or feeding on the experiments and works of the 'early generation'. I wanted rewards to go where they should go. A lot of net artists have always (and still do) strongly objected to the term art though. When considering this idea that most contemporary art is kitsch and decoration, I wonder whether one needs to find a new term for original works, or whether this is of no meaning, no importance whatsoever. What do you think? It is not a new question, but it is a question that keeps being more and more painfully unanswered, especially as it deals with selection. There was a very interesting remark from Igor Stromajer (Intima) on Rhizome recently, in which he said that the new art elite, or the net art elite, were those people who actually do look further into a net art work. These would be those people take make the effort to click further into a net artwork and explore it. He made this remark after some webdesigners attacked his latest work for being 'inaccessable' and hard to navigate. *** From lilyvac@thing.net Thu, 09 Mar 2000 17:39:00 -0500 Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2000 17:39:00 -0500 From: Dike Blair lilyvac@thing.net Subject: [Eat-raw] Re: Eat-raw digest, Vol 1 #23 - to Matsui/Bosma/Fisher Midori's question: >How does the exhibition Let's Entertain respond to the increasing encroachment between the realms of "contemporary art" (still largely an institutionally legitimated area) and popular entertainment--is it effective in transmitting the energy of such a cultural intercourse between the realms that have been carefully separated for decades after the emergence of Pop Art? I think artists usually long for the largest possible audience. It hasn't always been in the interest of the "legitimate" art institution to play to a large audience (in terms of contemporary art). You've noted Pierson and Tillmans and Aitken. They all moderate/navigate between the worlds of commerce and institutions. (A friend, Jeff Rian, recently wrote a very good article in Flash Art, Paranoia Soft, about this kind of interplay.) Both those worlds tend to consume artists. It seems to me that the institutional worlds have basically been forced to accept the disintegration of the barrier between entertainment and a more scholastic approach to handling art. Advertising has always been quick (and now almost instantaneous) in grabbing stuff from the art world. And artists either move faster, organize more, or stand dead still--all strategies in the larger game. The more-or-less revival of "beauty" and art seems very complicated to me. All segments of the art world seem to be in the process of defining the word and organizing the work. It does seem to revolve around various mixes of accessibility, prettiness, and power. And those all are related to entertainment. I thought Josephine Bosma's comments were very interesting, the idea that all contemporary art is kitsch. But it seems to me that that definition in itself would negate the term and I think that the element of sentimentality (part of the reason for copying style) which I associate with kitsch is missing. *** From matsui@ta2.so-net.ne.jp Fri, 10 Mar 2000 04:29:02 +0900 Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2000 04:29:02 +0900 From: MidoriMatsui matsui@ta2.so-net.ne.jp Subject: [Eat-raw] A follow up on kitsch (final) I think by pursuing the discussion on "kitsch" I may have gone astray from the panel's more central question--engagement. So this is my final thought on kitsch. It's inspired by Dike's brilliant suggestion that it may be the time we should discard the word "kitsch" to describe the artwork that integrates the appeal of popular culture, or better, we should stop pretending that the distinction between art and kitsch still exists. When the distinction was made by Greenberg, it had a very specific strategic purpose of attacking the Nazi or Fascist manipulation of popular culture, which aimed at giving the public an easy pleasure and retarding their rational judgment. However, he didn't modify his denigrating views of popular culture even after the Second World War. In fact, he required that distinction in order to consolidate the institutionalization of contemporary art in America. Since that is already history, and young artistic practitioners today are finding in popular culture sources of their creative innovations, perhaps the word kitsch, with its derogatory implications, should be replaced by some new term. Dike's response made me wonder if the distinction between "art and kitsch" has already become a kind of false premise; artistic practice runs faster than the academic explanation that finds it functional to set up dichotomies and dialectics. Thinking that, I find something very crucial in Dike's observation of how Mariko Mori's work got more effective when it got released from the discussion of postmodern culture critique to "celebrate" its own wild fun or beauty. Neither commercial entertainment nor "art" in a conventional sense, the work like hers may need an entirely new name. And the word "kitsch" does not certainly suffice there. But I know that there are still many who regard the work like hers with suspicion--because it's too expensive, too fun, too decorative. And we don't yet have the terms to defend the art that's "merely fun." I know, I guess, thanks to Dike, that an expression like "a critical assimilation of kitsch elements into art" still smacks of compromise--sounding somewhat like an old appropriationist apology. What I feel strongly is that a changing attitude toward artistic production, among some artists, as well as a changing habit of appreciation on the part of the audience, is asking for an entirely new set of language to discuss art. ________________________________________ |
||
|
next week's guests
|
Join us in the next two weeks as we discuss COMPETITION and the effects
of a play hard/work hard environment, with our guests Theresa Duncan,
Jon Ippolito and Keith Frank, Jon Winet and Margaret Crane. Let the games begin! Bios: Theresa Duncan is the owner of Valentine Media, a film and television production company based in Manhattan. Theresa spent five years designing and writing video games for girls. Her first title, "Chop Suey," created in collabration with humorist David Sedaris and members of Fugazi, receivedEntertainment Weekly's digital entertianment of the year award. She is currently writing and directing "Closet Cases" a television series for Oxygen Media, and "Left of the Dial" a television series for VH1. Also coming up is her first on-line series "American Dad." Miss Duncan's animated film "The History of Glamour" will appear in the upcoming Whitney Biennial and can be seen in theaters throughout Japan. Jon Ippolito has explored new media from the point of view of an artist, curator, and critic. As a frequent collaborator with Janet Cohen and Keith Frank, he has created online artworks that can be seen at the Walker Art Center's Gallery 9, the Sandra Gering Gallery, and www.three.org. As Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim, he has curated the first major museum exhibition of virtual reality in 1993 and the award-winning online project CyberAtlas (cyberatlas.guggenheim.org). Most recently he co-curated_The Worlds of Nam June Paik_ with John G. Hanhardt, which opened in New York on 11 February. His column "Cross Talk" is a regular feature of _ArtByte_ magazine. The collaboration Margaret Crane/Jon Winet produce work which revolves around the language and images of the information age, focusing on the psycho-social pathology of contemporary urban life. The collaboration is currently in production on "Democracy--The Last Campaign," a year-long project on the 2000 elections. From 1994 through 1998, they were artists in residence at the legendary technology think tank Xerox PARC, exploring the intersection of art and technology and the impact of the Internet and interactive media on public space. |
||
|
links
|
www.three.org http://www.three.org
CyberAtlas
Democracy-The Last Campaign
Previous Projects
EAT
|
