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madblog1 · 6 years ago

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Essay

Designer Essay: Vivziepop

17th October 2018

Vivienne Medrano, more well known as Vivziepop, is a popular YouTuber, artist and animator based in America who, since graduating SVA (the School of Visual Arts) in New York City, has generated a large fan base using various popular internet pages and apps such as DeviantArt, tumblr and YouTube. Vivienne’s work had been around for many years but didn’t start becoming popular until she began uploading a web comic series she had been working on at the time and becoming more well known upon releasing her short animation to YouTube on the 4th May 2014.

The web comic series that brought attention to Vivienne was the series known as Zoophobia. The comic arose from Vivienne’s experimental faze during her time at university and was published first onto the site known as DeviantArt, around September in 2008. The story follows a girl who winds up getting a job in another universe where all sorts of creatures and animals greet her as their new guidance councillor (VivzMind, 2018). Vivienne later removed the comic in order to focus on other projects but did state that she was going to reform the whole series at a later date (Vivziepop, 2018). This increase in interest was minimal however, when compared to her YouTube channel after releasing the short animation by the name Timber. The animation was a project of her’s that she had been working on as a school project. The video is only 5 and a half minutes long but currently has about 302 thousand likes and over 10 million views on YouTube (Vivziepop, 2018). The animation features a world that is divided by how many eyes a person has, her main character – the only one with two eyes in the animation – goes about her day and saying hello to everyone she meets, when not allowed into a party she starts one of her own and shows the other characters that they can all enjoy themselves.

The use of a simplistic but readable cartoon-like style, is what makes her animations so alluring and popular. Along with Vivienne’s style, her composition throughout her work is well placed and visually pleasing. Vivienne’s style often incorporates shapes into her characters and scenes rather than doing a more realistic style such as comic-book or manga, this allows her to differentiate all of her characters and scenes from one another with ease whist also making them instantly recognisable. Another part of Vivienne’s style is how she uses gradient. When Vivienne adds shading or lighting to her work, rather than using a general gradient from one shade to another, Vivienne will create the gradient and then erase around it making it much more gentle but sharp. This, almost incomplete, gradient from one colour to the next is another reason her work is so recognisable and popular as it has’t been done before in this way or magnitude. Much like her gradient technique, Vivienne’s line-work is one of the most prominent, important, yet subtle features that adds to her artwork. Using colours that complement the fill, she changes the colours of the line-work. It is the last feature she changes on almost all of her speed-paint videos and the use of it changes her artwork drastically into a final piece (Vivziepop, 2018).

The main techniques that Vivienne uses in her work include sketching, inking, animation and digital means. As explained previously, one of Vivienne’s main techniques is the utilisation of gradient and shape – something she does consistently on a digital basis. When creating traditional art pieces however, her main techniques are more variant, though sketching and inking are her main focuses (Drawing Tutorials Online, 2018). Vivienne often uses coloured pencils when she does her sketches as they can be used in different ways from normal pencil. She also uses a variety of media when inking or colouring some of her pieces, her best ones being that of using black ink, biro or felt tip pens. When it comes to Vivienne’s digital pieces, like all those who work digitally, she has her own preference of apps and programs. For her animations, she uses the program TV paint as well as Adobe premiere, After effects, Sai and Photoshop. Sai, in particular, is the main program she uses to do her digital drawing on (Vivziepop, 2018).

Vivienne has had to do many things to arrive where she is, her visit to Paris, France was one of those experiences she went on in order to build inspiration, experimentation and knowledge to further her understandings and artwork. Her Paris trip took place in the Summer of 2016, during which she visited an animation, concept art and design exhibition in one of the museums there, attended an animation and acting class (a summer school/class), went sightseeing to places like the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and Disneyland, tried the local dishes and saw the catacombs underneath Paris before returning to America (Vivziepop, 2018). Vivienne also spent several years prior in New York graduating from the SVA (School of Visual Arts) and is now currently based in Los Angeles working on her latest animation project to be known as the Hazbin Hotel.

Vivienne first showcased her new project as a trailer on YouTube on April 20th 2018 and currently has about 287 thousand likes and over 3.5 million views (Vivziepop, 2018). Stated in the trailer, the project is to be released and/or finished by 2019. Previews and sneak peaks of the animation, characters and storyline have already been published by Vivziepop and show the main character, the princess of Hell, attempting to save her people from extermination by suggesting a new alternative on how to hinder overpopulation there in Hell. The original concept and characters that have been released have created a whole fan base to themselves as her followers eagerly wait for the project’s forthcoming.

In conclusion, Vivienne Medrano (AKA Vivziepop), has quickly risen to the top using style and flare in her works. Her colour schemes, usually bright a colourful, continue to grab more attention and the unique flow in her work is pleases the eye. Though only age 25, her fan base is over 990 thousand subscribers on YouTube and continues to grow across other pages as well (Vivziepop, 2018) (Vivienne Medrano, 2018) (VivzMind, 2018) (VivienneM. @VivziePop, 2018) (vivziepop, 2018). With more projects she will design more characters and with her techniques and uses of basic graphic elements would make a good case study for aspiring designers, animators, writers and artists. Vivienne’s style is likely to become very recognisable in the future and her animation are sure to entertain all.

Bibliography

@Vivziepop, V. (2018) Vivienne M. (@VivziePop) on Twitter, Mobile.twitter.com. Available at: https://mobile.twitter.com/VivziePop (Accessed: 17 October 2018).

Medrano, V. (2018) "MY PARIS ADVENTURE (Vlog Summer 2016)", Vivziepop. Available at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xpaKu93Ycic&t=1929s (Accessed: 15 October 2018).

Medrano, V. (2018) Vivienne Medrano is creating "Hazbin Hotel" as well as artwork, and animation! | Patreon, Patreon. Available at: https://www.patreon.com/VivienneMedrano (Accessed: 17 October 2018).

Medrano, V. (2018) "Vivienne’s Sketchbook". Online - YouTube.

Medrano, V. (2018) "Vivienne’s Sketchbook - For the Love of Animation". Online - YouTube.

Medrano, V. (2018) "Vivienne’s Sketchbook Part II". Online - YouTube.

Medrano, V. (2018) Vivziepop, YouTube. Available at: https://m.youtube.com/user/SpindleHorse/about (Accessed: 17 October 2018).

vivziepop (2018) Chocolate Salmon Milk: Vivz Blog, Tumblr.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/redirect?redir_token=_5zivF4lAfJZ_yXjG7AzF76EAaR8MTUzOTgyMjc1MUAxNTM5NzM2MzUx&q=http%3A%2F%2Fvivziepop.tumblr.com&event=channel_description (Accessed: 17 October 2018).

Vivziepop (2018) HAZBIN HOTEL (Official Trailer). Online: YouTube.

Vivziepop (2018) Messy Zoophobia Ramble. Online: YouTube.

Vivziepop (2018) TIMBER- SVA Thesis Film -VivziePop. Online: YouTube.

Vivziepop (2018) VivziePop's SPEED WORKS. Online: YouTube.

VivzMind (2018) VivzMind on DeviantArt, DeviantArt. Available at: https://www.deviantart.com/vivzmind (Accessed: 17 October 2018).

VivzMind (2018) Zoophobia by VivzMind on DeviantArt, DeviantArt. Available at: https://www.deviantart.com/vivzmind/gallery/428885/Zoophobia?coffset=50 (Accessed: 17 October 2018).

#essay #vivziepop #vivienne #medrano #vivienne medrano

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annabelle-abts2030-uq · 4 years ago

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Annotated Bibliography:

Bell, R. (2002). Bell's Theorem: Aboriginal Art-It's a White Thing. The Koori History Website Project. This paper was a highly important document for its role in introducing ideas of commodification of Aboriginal art, the role of galleries and dealers, and Bell’s dismay that the domain of Aboriginal Art is controlled by non- Indigenous people. This source was crucial to my research and provides an invaluable perspective of an Aboriginal artist in this topic area. Bell successfully outlines his areas of discussion in a comprehensive way and provides an insight onto an Indigenous perspective on a range of issues concerning authenticity and appropriation, my key research focus.

Bell, R. (2003). Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem) [acrylic on canvas]. This artwork consisting of several misshaped blocks of colour with the text Aboriginal Art is a White Thing and swirls of white, black and red paint is a crucial reference to my focus area and was what inspired me to focus on this topic. This piece gives visual representation to Bell’s Theorem and reflects Bell’s understanding of a white- controlled Aboriginal art industry that focused towards acquiring “more authentic” pieces from remote areas rather than urban areas. In 2006, Bell responded back to his own work with the piece Australian Art – it’s an Aboriginal Thing, which adopts a very similar style. I chose to focus on this piece as it is one of the most well-known works by Bell and it gives a representation to Bell’s theorem, drawing together all of the concepts I have focused on throughout my research.

Bennett, G. (1991). Possession Island [oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas]. This piece combines dot-painting with Pollock’s swirls over Calver’s etching and was highly useful for my research. I think that the NGA put it aptly when they said that: “Bennett intentionally fuses this iconic style of ‘Western’ painting with the famous Aboriginal white dot painting of the Western Desert, reproducing the mix in Possession Island. Thousands of dots fill the canvas. The effect is that they dissolve into a mass of colour, dots and slashes of paint. The viewer is made to step back and allow the eyes to form the images. This is similar to the way a Pointillist painting can only be seen effectively from a distance to bring the image into focus. Looking at the image from different viewpoints helps us to discover different perspectives.” I wish that there was more publicly available information that detailed Bennett’s own reasoning behind some of his work, as many sources/commentaries on his work are by non-Indigenous people.

Bennett, G. (2000). Notes to Basquiat: Poet and Muse [synthetic polymer paint on canvas]. 152.5cm x 182.8cm. National Art Gallery of Victoria. Quote from NGA: The Notes to Basquiat series takes appropriation to yet another level within Bennett’s art practice. Bennett not only used Basquiat images, but begins to paint in his style. Jean–Michel Basquiat, crowned a ‘black urban’ artist, was well known for his spontaneous and gestural paintings, which reflect the artist’s involvement in the graffiti culture of the United States. In a letter written to Basquiat after his death, Bennett writes: “To some, writing a letter to a person post humously may seem tacky and an attempt to gain some kind of attention, even ‘steal’ your ‘crown’. That is not my intention, I have my own experiences of being crowned in Australia, as an ‘Urban Aboriginal’ artist – underscored as that title is by racism and ‘primitivism’ – and I do not wear it well. My intention is in keeping with the integrity of my work in which appropriation and citation, sampling and remixing are an integral part, as are attempts to communicate a basic underlying humanity to the perception of ‘blackness’ in its philosophical and historical production within western cultural contexts. The works I have produced are ‘notes’, nothing more, to you and your work.”

Quoted from NGA: “Bennett, G. (2001). Notes to Basquiat (Jackson Pollock and his other). National Gallery of Victoria. Bennett confronts and questions the appropriateness of this borrowing. Physically, the kitsch Aboriginal motifs copied from Preston are trapped. The representation of Aborigines has been reduced to caricature. Bennett layered these two distinctly different artists with his own work – work previously appropriated from yet another context. Mondrian cages the figures; Preston objectifies the figures; Bennett accommodates both to grasp the intangible and dissect these limited interpretations and stereotypes.” As one of Bennett’s more well-known pieces, this artwork explores the central issues of appropriation by Pollock and Margaret Preston, a non-Indigenous Australian artist. Prior to reading about this source in my research, I did not really know much about the history of Preston and her relationship with Indigenous art as she incorporated Aboriginal symbols and imagery into her work. I would like to focus more on this piece within my future research and to explore how other Indigenous artists have responded to her artworks that are considered to be a Eurocentric appropriation and an extension of appropriating Indigenous art without understanding the spiritual and cultural significance behind it.

Fisher, L. (2012). The art/ethnography binary: post-colonial tensions within the field of Australian Aboriginal art. Cultural Sociology, 6(2), 251-270. This source was highly useful for conducting background research into this topic and was insightful for my anthropological background. As outlined in the title of the work, it explores ideas of urban vs remote artists, the ongoing tensions between the art/ethnography binary and the different views of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, actors and filmmakers on this issue. This was particularly poignant for understanding some of the motivations behind Richard Bell’s work, especially the duplicated ethnography that features in the video.

Mac, B. (2018). Standing Committee on Indigenous Affairs. House of Representatives. Canberra, ACT. This interview between Bec Mac, a representative of the Fake Art Harms Culture initiative and Richard Bell was a great resource for further understanding Bell’s perspective on fake art and what is considered ‘authentic art’. Bell demonstrated his apprehensions towards the Fake Art Harms Culture Initiative and the proposed Bill in Parliament, noting that “I don't know whether it can be legislated, you know. I think what we have to do is respect each other and see where we're each coming from” and using his own work as a vehicle for conveying the importance of changes to the art industry.

MCA Australia. (2016). Richard Bell on his MCA Collection work 'Worth Exploring' [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf8WS9fshNo&ab_channel=MCAAustralia. As quoted in the description of the video: “The four panels of Richard Bell’s work 'Worth Exploring?' challenge the position of Aboriginal art and artists inside the western art system, linking it to the historical legal status of European colonisation. With his trademark directness and humour, Bell uses a combination of paintings and legal documents to raise complex questions about artistic authenticity, appropriation and reception as part of a broad debate on Australian race relations. This interview, recorded in 2006, goes into depth on the issues and ideas explored in the work.”

Middleton, D. R. J. (2019). Culture as a commodity? The cultural dynamics of Indigenous tourism in the Far North East of Queensland, Australia. University of Queensland. This thesis was similar to the Ryan and Aicken reading, however it provided a much more comprehensive and focused understanding within a North Queensland context. This source spoke explicitly about the commodification of Indigenous art and the mass-produced products on display across Northern Queensland and broader Australia. Likewise, her analysis on the politics that Indigenous artists navigate within art galleries was crucial to my understanding and really helped to understand more behind Richard Bell’s Theorem and the broader context of the a binary between Aboriginal/Western art.

Ryan, C., & Aicken, M. (Eds.). (2005). Indigenous tourism: The commodification and management of culture. Elsevier.This source served as an important background reading into how Indigenous culture has been commodified within this country. This reading gave a broad overview in analysing perspectives from North America, Australia and parts of Asia. While it did not comment extensively on Australian Indigenous art, it was a useful overview for developing an understanding of how Indigenous cultures can be utilised as a marketing and monetary strategy to demonstrate an atmosphere of inclusivity in order to promote tourism, while in actuality, these governments are actively oppressing Indigenous people, an idea reflected within both Bell and Bennett’s works.

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neohanaa · 7 years ago

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When art college/university professors become assholes instead of guides.

WARNING. THIS IS A LONG POST.

Look, I don’t want my blog to be about this anymore than it should. We all have them and I’m no different. I’m in University for art. I’m a senior/4th year student in a thesis class. Very briefly, I don’t go to a school dedicated to simply art. Art at my school is one of the many departments (there’s science, psychology, math, literature, language, etc) and it is VERY conceptual and gallery based. I have absolutely ZERO problems with that. Any character drawings I do are put to the side to really work on school projects and sometimes I sneak in some of my preferences, such as doll related things, into my work. I have trouble thinking conceptually, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t think conceptually at all.

To be fair, my goal is to be a children book illustrator. So I’m not really aiming to be a gallery artist. It’s nice to know and understand how to make artwork that’s based on conceptual ideas. However, I’m choosing a different route for my skills to be put to use. Although this might be shallow of me to say this, but drawing and sculpture are my concentrations, with sculpture being more of a supplement than it is a major concentration like drawing. I can’t do photography to save my life and video making, while I liked doing that when I was younger (where’s my 2010 Vegas Pro community at), I can’t see myself doing that sort of thing professionally. I can paint, sure, but I don’t exactly particularly enjoy it unless it’s for a sculpture or a painting for fun. Where I truly want to hone my skills are with drawing, primarily with colored pencil. With sculpture, I want to make dolls.

So, where to actually start with this...

When art college/university professors become assholes instead of guides.

You heard me right. Not saying this for all art professors. The ones I have are all practicing artists and I’ve met some really good ones that push you harder than ever. As for the one I’m talking about right now, here’s the problem:

Instead of helping me push my skills in the medium I want to push myself in, this teacher tosses the idea of my drawing concentration out the window and wants me to perform my piece instead.

My project is simple: create short stories and create an illustration that embodies each one. Choice and consequence are my themes.

I mentioned earlier that I am in a thesis class. This project is for said thesis class. Generally, a thesis refers to a paper/essay/presentation of facts and arguments for some majors such as political science that span over about 60+ pages. For art at my school, thesis is a class where each student works on a project or multiple projects and at the end of the school year, they present it in a show all together and then we all critique each other later. I have 2 professors this semester for the class. One is OK in help and the other is just... demotivating. They’ll be switched out for different professors for next semester, but in the end it just... whatever.

Going back to my project. Besides the idea itself and deeper meaning at hand, it’s still got a long way to go. I presented some of the stories and to be fair, the teachers were delighted. OK professor says for my drawings to not be direct illustrations as it would take away from how the writing is presented (confusing in a good way). She told me to not outlaw performance or sculpture, but to also not rely too heavily on drawings. I agree with OK professor, so my idea is to work around the drawings and possibly incorporate a sculptural element. She was also supportive of me in my decision to make the drawings a decently large scale.

HOWEVER.

The other professor, DEMOTIVATE (for short, DEEMOH), tells me to throw drawing completely out the window and just present the writings as my artwork by practically doing a performance. I have DEEMOH as a teacher in a sculpture class. He actually got me from wanting to have people involved with my work to having me perform. And let me tell you, it isn’t fun to see that pattern I assure you.

Look, I don’t know if I sound super stubborn about wanting to draw but I really don’t think that’s how a person in a teaching position is actually aiding you to push your work. It’s one thing to give options to guide you, listening to you. It’s another do the opposite, ignoring your input, not providing any steps to take to jumpstart your idea and put it on paper.

OK was pretty okay in helping me. Not as helpful as I would like, but still better than DEEMOH, who just shuts out your whole entire art concentration. There is just no constructive input from DEEMOH about drawing. It was all perform-perform-perform. I’m not saying I don’t want to perform. In fact, I want to consider it because of the writing. But when only one agenda is pushed, it legitimately shuts me down. At one point, he told me I should make a video of the performance. I know this is probably me being dramatic, but that honestly sounded like an insult to my skills.

FOR 2 MONTHS I ACTUALLY PRODUCED NOTHING BECAUSE OF THIS.

All I had the ability was to write more stories. No drawings. Just stories. I was at a creative standstill and I got severely conflicted about what to do. I felt like crap all the time and whenever I entered class my heart sank, terrified about what we’re gonna do.

“But your writings are drawings!”

He told me that. I’m down with anything being called art, drawing, or whatever. But when it is said in such a way to get me to simply perform an act, it’s demeaning to the actual skills and labor and work I want to put out as an artist. I’m not saying that performance is easy; I think it’s super difficult and I get stage fright. What I’m saying is that instead of aiding me in trying to push my skills, this professor is simply rejecting it. How would you feel if your teacher told you the same thing?

“But what if he said that because you’re too comfortable with drawing!”

There’s a difference between getting too comfortable with the drawing and wanting to push your drawing skills. I chose drawing, not only because I am good at it and am comfortable with it, but because I want to be able to push myself with the medium in order to get the highest quality work out of it possible. I do sculpture, but my skill within sculpture is really just making dolls and figurines and I have so much to learn when it comes to that. There’s such a thing as knowing how to do draw with colored pencil, with ink, with pencil, with graphite, with charcoal, and even with pastel. There’s also such a thing to know to draw and paint, but in painting you have watercolor, acrylic, oil. You can know how to use these mediums, but it doesn’t mean you know how to push all these mediums to their utmost potential without years and years of using them.

Like a lot of people out there, I was, predominantly, a self-taught artist. It took me 5-6 years (aged 13-18 or 19) to learn how to draw a decently proportional figure with graphite. Even then it might not be perfect. It took me 4 years to learn colored pencil (Aged 16-20) and I STILL have to teach myself on it and test it on other things. I can do charcoal albeit it isn’t on the level of professionals. I know how to paint well with acrylic and I know how to use oils and render an image with detail. I can use ink for outlining better than painting with it. In the end, I chose drawing with colored pencil because it’s the medium I want to master for the work I want to get into. I know digital swooped in to take the pedestal of traditional drawing in many areas, especially in the line of work I want to get into, but it doesn’t mean I’ll be getting into digital straight away and this is another argument for another time.

In the end, I strayed away from my original rant about a useless teacher. In the end I’m complaining about something that will be temporary. In the end, I just lost precious time because I was lost. In the end, I hope this will all work out.

And in the end, I hope all of you do not have to deal with the same bullshit I have to go through in my thesis class.

#art #art school #college #art college #art university #art bullshit #bullshit teachers #bullshit #im done with this #thesis #bfa #bfa work #university #senior thesis

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fantasticfourtyfour · 6 years ago

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Week 4

In class, we talked about the organizational model that we as a group think would be a good way to organize our expo. Each group then took turns explaining why their chosen organization model would be best to work in. My group chose a Flatarchy as we believed that this model would allow everyone to work in their own groups as well as working and communicating with everyone else. This model would allow a sense of order and consistency and allow little confusion as everyone would still communicate with other groups and the lecturers. As a class, we decided on a model. I can’t remember what the model was called but basically, at the start and end of each class we will have a group representative (this doesn’t have to be the same person every week) and they will feedback on their own groups such as ideas, issues, suggestions and feedback. They will then report back to their group what was talked about. This also happens at the end in case something new comes up during class. We ended class with a representative and the representatives got into a group and started finalizing the whole collective’s idea which is now ‘Escapism: Experiences of the Abandoned.’ We talked about what needed to be done by the next class, where the expo space is going to be (next week we will be walking through the space to allocate spaces). I took notes from the meeting –

Later in the week, my group got together to talk about what was talked about during the meeting and developed our idea. We talked about the initial idea which was to have large clothes racks with costumes that people could work through to relive the idea of being lost while in stores whether it was because you weren’t paying attention, your imagination was wild, or you were off exploring as a child. The users would then be able to grab an item of clothing that would represent what they wanted to be as a child and then go and take photos. We decided there were a few holes in this idea sadly, such as providing enough clothes, where we were going to get it all from how we would make it big enough, when then thought maybe material would do the same things with props and costumes they could still use but then when we thought about it we had the same issues. We started to explore more into our idea. We still wanted something that was related to abandoning dreams that you had as a child. We started focusing more on reliving/experiencing their dreams from when they were a child. The idea started developing from maybe having photo cutouts of popular jobs of children with holes for the faces so that people could stick their faces in and take photos. To maybe having a screen where a person walks out in front a screen and the screen changes to a shape of a person which could be a shape of what they wanted to be as a kid, however, we weren’t sure how this would work but we did find some inspiration for it –

Following this idea, we thought we could use a green screen and have people come into the space and stand and pose with a green screen and have a screen we where are able to see live a background of the user’s choice that corresponds with a childhood dream. I created a storyboard which explains this idea and goes towards our idea pitch. We think this would be best in the gallery.

“Our idea is that the users/guests will be able to walk into a space and onto a green screen where the user will be able to choose an image for their background that will allow them to be able to experience and pose in front of the green screen which digitally we will be able to alter to make it look like they are in their childhood dream. We are hoping to be able to view the user and have the background live and a photo will be taken and uploaded somewhere such as Instagram or Facebook.”

Potential Dangers -

- Possible wires which people may trip over

- Possible bright flash of light from the camera

My Skills/ What I can bring to the team -

- I study design

My thought is that so that we are efficient on the day, we have a selection of images already chosen so that we don’t have to spend ages finding an image for people to chose from.

To get an idea of what we may need I did some research into what people may wanted to be when they were kids/growing up. According to https://www.thebalancecareers.com/top-kids-dream-jobs-2062280, the top jobs for kids were –

- Dancer/Choreographer e.g. ballerinas

- Actor

- Musician

- Teacher

- Scientist

- Athlete

- Firefighter

- Detective

- Writer

- Police Officer

- Astronaut

- Pilot

- Veterinarians

- Lawyer

- Doctor/ Nurse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrBmifzYfNg

The got kids to describe what they wanted to be when they grew to an illustrator. The kids wanted to be –

“This is what I want to be when I grow up”

- Pokemon trainer and catch potatoes

- Nurse (turned into a princess nurse)

- Carpenter (turned into a scuba diving carpenter)

- Artist

- Rapper

(I highly recommend watching this video it is very cute and funny).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7NSec5NOYc

Dream explanation according to kids –

- Something that happens to everyone at least once unless you are a newborn baby

- They happen at night, they are a good way to fill up time - You feel that it is actually happening

- Kinda like sleepwalking but you’re awake and make stories in your head

- Boys probably have more violent dreams whereas girls probably have ballerina dreams

- Adults dream about the next day

- It is something you are thinking about

- Some a good and some are bad

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/663xs5/what_was_your_dream_job_when_you_were_a_child_and/

According to Reddit people as kids wanted to be –

- Garbageman (but as an adult became Forensics Scientist)

- Doctor (but as an adult graduated from medical school)

- Doctor too (but as an adult went to law school)

- Mechanic (as an adult has been a mechanic for over 10 years like his grandfather)

- Race car driver (but as an adult became an accountant) - Accountant (as an adult became an accountant)

- Actor (is unemployed so he guesses he got to be what he wanted)

- A truck and a seagull (not sure what they ended up becoming…)

- Pizza guy (but as an adult became a design engineer but was a pizza guy as a teen)

- Astronaut ((but as an adult did a PhD thesis in astronomy)

- Princess (but as an adult became an Economic Development)

- Princess as well (his explanation was - I wanted to be a princess too as a kid. I'm a dude and it wasn't a gender identity thing, just seemed like an easy life. Live in an enchanted forest with animals and dancing, followed by living in an expensive luxury castle with more dancing).

Dream Definition -

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dream

noun

1.a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep."I had a recurrent dream about falling from great heights" synonyms: fantasy, nightmare

2.a cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal."I fulfilled a childhood dream when I became champion" synonyms: ambition, aspiration, hope

verb

1.experience dreams during sleep."I dreamed about her last night"

2.indulge in daydreams or fantasies about something greatly desired." she had dreamed of a trip to America" synonyms: fantasize about, daydream about

Greenscreen Research -

https://www.breezesys.com/DSLRRemotePro/help/index.html?green_screen_shooting.htm

http://www.greenscreenuk.co.uk/portfolio/meerkat-cinema/

http://redframeblog.com/tag/live-green-screen-video/

Tutorials –

- https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-broadcast-live-with-a-green-screen/

- https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-do-green-screen-video-in-imovie-and-adobe-premiere/

- http://telestreamblog.telestream.net/2018/02/live-green-screen-work-ideal-world-vs-real-world/

Inspiration -

- http://www.greenscreenuk.co.uk/

youtube

- https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16850280/daniel-rozin-interactive-art-interview-video-nespresso-last-chance-to-shine

- https://www.facebook.com/mashable/videos/this-artwork-responds-to-movement/10156318848544705/

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darkartandcraft · 7 years ago

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Philadelphia, Fungus, and Feminism: A Conversation with Fred Grabowsky

It's been years since we last had the chance to talk to Fred Grabosky, the Philadelphia based artist and illustrator. As part of our latest collaboration, we caught up with him in his Pennsylvania studio to discuss album covers, art supplies, and how to stay grounded in the Instagram age.

Are you a native of Philly?

I moved to Philly when I was around 18 and started going to school at University of the Arts, but then I moved back to Jersey. I wanted to change my studies so I jumped out of school for a while, but then I came back for illustration. The first time around I did video, but it didn't speak to me the way it seemed to speak to the other people that were there for it. The first time around, I just didn't know what I was doing yet, you know?

Philadelphia is one of America's oldest cities and it has a somewhat gothic and macabre history. Has that influenced your work at all?

I would say yeah. It has definitely influenced the work around me and that in turn has influenced my artwork. There is a lot of enthusiasm for dark art out here. I'm just a walk down the street from The Convent gallery and I've always loved Jeremy Hush's work, so it's cool to be a part of his gallery shows. As far as the music scene goes, there's been a really good metal scene out here for years now. I'm very influenced by the metal that I listen to when I make the art that I do.

Did music lead you to art, or was it vice versa?

Yeah, music is a big part of me being interested in the kind of art that I make. It took me a while to bridge the gap between the punk music that I listened to and the album covers on that stuff. I just started to study who all these different artists were and where they came from. Like Pushead and even going as far back as Virgil Finlay, who was a scratchboard artist doing a lot of pulp stuff. Music was a huge push in the right direction.

Which album covers do you really love?

When I really started to do illustration work for bands, one album cover that was a huge influence on me - and this sounds like a very kid thing to say now - but when I saw the cover for Baroness' Red Album, it just made me really excited. It made me think about what I could do with ink if I started to take it seriously. I was also listening to Kylesa around then and diving into weird Southern sludge metal. Seeing (Shaun) Beaudry's work on those covers made a connection because I realized he was probably pulling from Pushead, and Art Nouveau, and Alphonse Mucha. That was a good jumping off point for me.

Can you tell us about Decay is a Womb and the inspiration behind it? Yeah, I started making that piece because of my fascination with the parasitic fungus that takes over an ant's brain (Ophiocordyceps). It's a whole cycle; it takes over the brain, tells it where to go, eats away at it, spores new life, and that new life takes over and destroys more ants. I related it to things that happened to me, not necessarily other people trying to control you, but how depression can become a controlling force in your life. There is a lot of fear and insecurity that can start to eat away at you. So that is the idea for the body of work that I'm creating now, which will have a solo show in July. It also ties into what I'm doing with my band God Root, we're writing an album right now. We're doing a split with some other bands and one of the title tracks is called Decay is a Womb, so I'm really fixated on this theme right now and it ties into my art as a whole. What are some of your favorite art supplies that you use and recommend? Definitely Ampersand, they're the scratchboard paper that I use and I'm also going to be using their boards. Always the Pigma Microns from Sakura, I'm always using those. A friend out in South Carolina that goes under Dark Heart Tattoo, she works at Indigo Rose, her name is Chelsea Owen; she showed me Canson Mixed Media paper and I've been swearing by it for 3 or 4 years now. This paper has always been good too because you can ink on it, you can make finished pieces on it. Speedball ink too, their screen printing ink, I love their metallic gold and their metallic silver.

Is your process very regimented or do you just work when the inspiration strikes?

So lately, I just sit the fuck down and say I'm going to make something and it is going to be great. Back when I was doing ink, it was whenever I had the time and I had to force myself to do it, even when I wasn't feeling it, because you have to try to stick to your deadlines. It really becomes a destructive thing because you start to devalue what you are doing and beat yourself up for not working harder. But the process has changed since I started doing scratchboard. Now, I just take the time that I need and don't worry about much else. It feels good because when it's done, it's done, but with ink, you never know when to stop. Like, if I want a black background but it's white paper, you have to plan out all the weird techniques you could use to make that background black. You could scan it in and make the outline, but that can look cartoonish and cheesy. You could go all around the perimeter making dissipating black dots but that takes an incredible amount of time and it's a huge process for something that might not turn out right. With scratchboard, I'm starting with a black background and I'm making white lines and that is it. That's a much more exciting and freeing thing.

Is scratchboard your preferred medium?

Right now, it really is. Scratchboard has made a huge difference in my turnaround time. When it was ink, it could take months to complete a piece because you have to know for sure where you want to make every line and every dot. It was frustrating and I was just like, fuck it! I can't sit here and look at the same piece for months. Scratchboard is really freeing because you just sketch it out. It's more my style, more of a punk rock style, you just go for it and see how it comes out. You can go with how you're feeling in that moment because it only takes an hour or two to complete.

With a more time-consuming medium like ink, did you ever run out of inspiration before you could finish the piece?

Yes, sometimes I would really just hit a wall. There are a lot of ink artists out there in the dark art scene and I don't want to do the same thing everyone else does. It was a good starting point because a lot of ink artists inspired me, but I'm doing something different because I can embrace scratchboard and translate it in weird ways, like in stained glass.

The last time we talked, you were working in a stained glass studio. Do you still work there?

I probably just started that job when I did the first interview with you guys. I've been there for almost three years now and I really love it! It's very interesting, I get to work with beautiful pieces from the 1800's and 1900's. There are not many places that have on-site painters. I feel very fortunate to be a part of that.

Do you work with a lot of iconography or religious stained glass?

Yeah, I work with a lot of iconography pieces. I don't have any religious ties myself, but I appreciate it for what it is. Some of it has had a bit of influence on my work, but I try not to copy it because I feel like it's been done a million times.

You mean that ironic mix of Judeo-Christian images and Pagan themes?

Yeah, there are a lot of people who just do renditions of religious art and make it grim or evil or Satanic.

There is a lot of non-western spiritual imagery in your work. Do you consider yourself to be a spiritual person?

A lot of that imagery came from research I was doing for the thesis I did in 2013, the Sacred Geometry and Symbolism series. I was just fascinated by the idea that the universe shares a connective tissue with mathematics. At the time I thought, if I'm not going to believe in a god, sacred geometry is the closest thing I can hold to a higher power. It's just really powerful imagery and it makes sense that it's in everything; logos that you see every day to religions that all share these same symbols.

We've talked a bit about the artists that you look up to. How would you define artistic success?

There are a lot of artists that I would look at as a textbook example of success, but if you asked them, they would probably say that they've had successes in the past, but don't consider themselves to be successful. They are their own worst enemy and they beat themselves up. I definitely do that too. You have to make sure that you aren't comparing yourself to other artists because everyone has their own story. Little triumphs are something that should be appreciated more. You have to show some self-love and be happy with what you've accomplished.

Do you think social media has made it easier to share and celebrate those little triumphs? Or are people crippled by constantly comparing themselves to other artists?

It's hard to feel like you can be successful without integrating social media into your process. There's just so much content flooding the internet and you have to fight for space with other artists who are trying to make a name for themselves. It's daunting and we have to really try to not let it become that. But even as I sit here feeling good about what I just said, in the back of my head I hear those fears and insecurities, "You know you don't really think that because everyone wants that big online following." But that's just me comparing myself to other artists. It's very overwhelming if you don't know how to put the phone down and tell yourself to just keep making your artwork and keep going. People are always crushing it out there and you just have to see what they've got and use it as inspiration to push yourself forward, but know that your story might be different.

Speaking of online perils, you've spoken very passionately about the struggle women face and how that inspired Strength and Divinity. Would you consider this to be a feminist piece?

I actually wanted to put the word "FEMINIST" on the bottom of it, but I put it out there to my friends and I had a lot of women say that could be misunderstood. That I could be speaking for women and that takes their voice away. So, I decided not to put any text on it. But I'm pretty fucking pissed off about all the things that women have to go through. It took me a while to understand why I didn't see it before. I think as a society, we adhere to these social norms. There are so many male power-hungry norms that have been out there a long time, so you just don't think about it right away. You just think, ok, that's how life works. The man does this and the woman does that. You don't even realize that you're assigning them these roles. You don't think you are doing it because you aren't consciously thinking anything negative about women, but it's still damaging. I started to realize that I have a lot of things that I want to work on. I'll fess up that this piece was originally created just as a commission for The Midnight Collective. I didn't plan it out and think, "I'm going to do a piece about the power of women." I just felt it, and made it, and came to the realization afterward that subconsciously that is where my thoughts were. I think it's important to address just how many things are fucked up about the way that women are treated and people need to recognize those little unfair things that women deal with every day. Like catcalling, or saying those weird aggressive pickup lines, or touching women when they don't want to be touched, or paying them less than men... There's just so many different things that people don't realize, or at least I didn't. I feel like I can speak for a lot of men when I say that we didn't realize it until it was shoved to the forefront and it sucks. It sucks that it took that much for people to realize just how many crazy things happen to women, and they don't even mention it. Why would they mention it when someone is just going to tell you that you're wrong, or misinterpreting it, or that you're just making it all up? It's fucked up. It was a starting point for me to become more involved in feminism, but I can't say that piece was intentionally made for feminism. Sorry, I went on a tangent there. What do you think about that?

I think that's pretty accurate. It's easy to address overt sexism because it's more objective, most people can agree that it's wrong even if it does have to be shoved in their face first. It's the subtle things that aren't so easy to address because, you're right, women are told that they're misinterpreting what happened or exaggerating or just making it up.

That sucks.

The process you're describing is how a lot of artists work. I think most artists work at a subconscious level and it's only in hindsight that you're able to reflect on how it was representative of where you were at that time.

It's hard, I feel like I'm a more scatterbrained individual because I don't think it is all there waiting for me to pull from it. It started because I wanted to create something with the face of a woman because I haven't done many pieces featuring women in them. That was the start but then I wanted to tie in something strong like the skull of a warthog. I always try to represent power and nature in my pieces because I hold nature in high regard. It's what I choose to be spiritual about. I mean, I'm not out in the woods praying to trees, but I can appreciate nature while I'm still struggling to understand what human nature is. ...I'm already thinking of all the ways I could have said all this stuff better.

You'll drive yourself nuts doing that. I drive myself nuts every day.

You can find limited edition prints of Fred Grabowsky's work in the Dark Art & Craft store. For more of Fred's work, visit his website and follow him on Instagram. Events and Exhibits: 07/13 - Grindcore House in Philadelphia, PA. This solo show will run for 2 months. 07/14 - Gristle Art Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. A Phobos & Deimos group exhibition. 09/21 - Shadow Woods Metal Fest in Whitehall, MD. God Root will be performing. 10/04 - Portside Parlor in Philadelphia, PA. Month-long Halloween themed exhibit.

#Fred Grabowsky #FTG Illustration

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archiveofprolbems · 7 years ago

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International Art English: On the rise—and the space—of the art-world press release by Alix Rule & David Levine

Of this English upper-middle class speech we may note (a)that it is not localised in any one place, (b) that though the people who use this speech are not all acquainted with one another, they can easily recognise each other’s status by this index alone, (c) that this elite speech form tends to be imitated by those who are not of the elite, so that other dialect forms are gradually eliminated, (d) that the elite, recognising this imitation, is constantly creating new linguistic elaborations to mark itself off from the common herd.

—E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure, 1954

The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for this language—what ultimately makes it a language—is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated.

In what follows, we examine some of the curious lexical, grammatical, and stylistic features of what we call International Art English. We consider IAE’s origins, and speculate about the future of this language through which contemporary art is created, promoted, sold, and understood. Some will read our argument as an overelaborate joke. But there’s nothing funny about this language to its users. And the scale of its use testifies to the stakes involved. We are quite serious.

Hypothesis

IAE, like all languages, has a community of users that it both sorts and unifies. That community is the art world, by which we mean the network of people who collaborate professionally to make the objects and nonobjects that go public as contemporary art: not just artists and curators, but gallery owners and directors, bloggers, magazine editors and writers, publicists, collectors, advisers, interns, art-history professors, and so on. Art world is of course a disputed term, but the common alternative��art industry—doesn’t reflect the reality of IAE. If IAE were simply the set of expressions required to address a professional subject matter, we would hardly be justified in calling it a language. IAE would be at best a technical vocabulary, a sort of specialized English no different than the language a car mechanic uses when he discusses harmonic balancers or popper valves. But by referring to an obscure car part, a mechanic probably isn’t interpellating you as a member of a common world—as a fellow citizen, or as the case may be, a fellow traveler. He isn't identifying you as someone who does or does not get it.

When the art world talks about its transformations over recent decades, it talks about the spread of

biennials. Those who have tried to account for contemporary art’s peculiar nonlocal language tend to see it as the Esperanto of this fantastically mobile and glamorous world, as a rational consensus arrived at for the sake of better coordination. But that is not quite right. Of course, if you’re curating an exhibition that brings art made in twenty countries to Dakar or Sharjah, it’s helpful for the artists, interns, gallerists, and publicists to be communicating in a common language. But convenience can’t account for IAE. Our guess is that people all over the world have adopted this language because the distributive capacities of the Internet now allow them to believe—or to hope—that their writing will reach an international audience. We can reasonably assume that most communication about art today still involves people who share a first language: artists and fabricators, local journalists and readers. But when an art student in Skopje announces her thesis show, chances are she’ll email out the invite in IAE. Because, hey—you never know.

To appreciate this impulse and understand its implications, we need only consider e-flux, the art world’s flagship digital institution. When it comes to communication about contemporary art, e-flux is

the most powerful instrument and its metonym. Anton Vidokle, one of its founders, characterizes the project as an artwork.1 Essentially, e-flux is a listserv that sends out roughly three announcements per day about contemporary-art events worldwide. Because of the volume of email, Vidokle has suggested that e-flux is really only for people who are “actively involved” in contemporary art.

There are other ways of exchanging this kind of information online. A service like Craigslist could separate events by locality and language. Contemporary Art Daily sends out illustrated mailings featuring exhibitions from around the world. But e-flux channels the art world’s aspirations so perfectly: You must pay to send out an announcement, and not every submission is accepted. Like everything the art world values, e-flux is curated. For-profit galleries are not eligible for e-flux’s core announcement service, so it is also plausibly not commercial. And one can presume—or at very least imagine—that everyone in the art world reads it. (The listserv has twice as many subscribers as the highest-circulation contemporary-art publication, Artforum—nevermind the forwards!) Like so much of the writing about contemporary art that circulates online, e-flux press releases are implicitly addressed to the art world’s most important figures—which is to say that they are written exclusively in IAE.We’ve assembled all thirteen years of e-flux press announcements, a collection of texts large enough to represent patterns of linguistic usage. Many observations in this essay are based on an analysis of that corpus.

Vocabulary

The language we use for writing about art is oddly pornographic: We know it when we see it. No one would deny its distinctiveness. Yet efforts to define it inevitably produce squeamishness, as if describing the object too precisely might reveal one’s particular, perhaps peculiar, investments in it. Let us now break that unspoken rule and describe the linguistic features of IAE in some detail.

IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy. An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visualbecomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes … experiencability.

Space is an especially important word in IAE and can refer to a raft of entities not traditionally thought of as spatial (the space of humanity) as well as ones that are in most circumstances quite obviously spatial (the space of the gallery). An announcement for the 2010 exhibition “Jimmie Durham and His

Metonymic Banquet,” at Proyecto de Arte Contemporáneo Murcia in Spain, had the artist “questioning the division between inside and outside in the Western sacred space”—the venue was a former church—“to highlight what is excluded in order to invest the sanctum with its spatial purity. Pieces of cement, wire, refrigerators, barrels, bits of glass and residues of ‘the sacred,’ speak of the space of the exhibition hall … transforming it into a kind of ‘temple of confusion.’”

Spatial and nonspatial space are interchangeable in IAE. The critic John Kelsey, for instance, writes that artist Rachel Harrison “causes an immediate confusion between the space of retail and the space of subjective construction.” The rules for space in this regard also apply to field, as in “the field of the real”—which is where, according to art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “the parafictional has one foot.” (Prefixes like para-, proto-, post-, and hyper- expand the lexicon exponentially and Germanly, which is to say without adding any new words.) It’s not just that IAE is rife with spacey terms like intersection, parallel, parallelism, void, enfold, involution, and platform. IAE’s literary conventions actually favor the hard-to-picture spatial metaphor: A practice “spans” from drawing all the way to

artist’s books; Matthew Ritchie’s works, in the words of Artforum, “elegantly bridge a rift in the art-science continuum”; Saâdane Afif “will unfold his ideas beyond the specific and anecdotal limits of his Paris experience to encompass a more general scope, a new and broader dimension of meaning.”

And so many ordinary words take on nonspecific alien functions. “Reality,” writes artist Tania Bruguera, in a recent issue of Artforum, “functions as my field of action.” Indeed: Reality occurs four times more frequently in the e-flux corpus than in the British National Corpus (BNC), which represents British English usage in the second half of the twentieth century.2 The real appears 2,148 times per million units in the e-flux corpus versus a mere 12 times per million in the BNC–about 179 times more often. One exhibit invites “the public to experience the perception of colour, spatial orientation and other forms of engagement with reality”; another “collects models of contemporary realities and sites of conflict”; a show called “Reality Survival Strategies” teaches us that the "sub real is … formed of the leftovers of reality.”

Syntax

Let us turn to a press release for Kim Beom’s “Animalia,” exhibited at REDCAT last spring: “Through an expansive practice that spans drawing, sculpture, video, and artist books, Kim contemplates a world in which perception is radically questioned. His visual language is characterized by deadpan humor and absurdist propositions that playfully and subversively invert expectations. By suggesting that what you see may not be what you see, Kim reveals the tension between internal psychology and external reality, and relates observation and knowledge as states of mind.”

Here we find some of IAE’s essential grammatical characteristics: the frequency of adverbial phrases such as “radically questioned” and double adverbial terms such as “playfully and subversively invert.” The pairing of like terms is also essential to IAE, whether in particular parts of speech (“internal psychology and external reality”) or entire phrases. Note also the reliance on dependent clauses, one of the most distinctive features of art-related writing. IAE prescribes not only that you open with a dependent clause, but that you follow it up with as many more as possible, embedding the action deep

enlarge image

The structure of a typical IAE sentence.

within the sentence, effecting an uncanny stillness. Better yet: both an uncanny stillness and a deadening balance.

IAE always recommends using more rather than fewer words. Hence a press release for a show called “Investigations” notes that one of the artists “reveals something else about the real, different information.” And when Olafur Eliasson’s Yellow Fog“is shown at dusk—the transition period between day and night—it represents and comments on the subtle changes in the day’s rhythm.” If such redundancies follow from this rule, so too do groupings of ostensibly unrelated items. Catriona Jeffries Gallery writes of Jin-me Yoon: “Like an insect, or the wounded, or even a fugitive, Yoon

moves forward with her signature combination of skill and awkwardness.” The principle of antieconomy also accounts for the dependence on lists in IAE. This is illustrated at inevitable length in the 2010 press release announcing the conference “Cultures of the Curatorial,” which identifies “the curatorial” as “forms of practice, techniques, formats and aesthetics … not dissimilar to the functions of the concepts of the filmic or the literary” that entail “activities such as organization, compilation, display, presentation, mediation or publication … a multitude of different, overlapping and heterogeneously coded tasks and roles.”3

Reading the "Animalia" release may lead to a kind of metaphysical seasickness. It is hard to find a footing in this "space" where Kim "contemplates" and "reveals" an odd "tension," but where in the end nothing ever seems to do anything. And yet to those of us who write about art, these contortions seem to be irresistible, even natural. When we sense ourselves to be in proximity to something serious and art related, we reflexively reach for subordinate clauses. The question is why. How did we end up writing in a way that sounds like inexpertly translated French?

Genealogy

If e-flux is the crucible of today’s IAE, the journal October is a viable candidate for the language’s point of origin. In the pages of October, founded in 1976, an American tradition of formalist art criticism associated with Clement Greenberg collided with continental philosophy. October's editors, among them art historians Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, saw contemporary criticism as essentially slovenly and belle lettristic; they sought more rigorous interpretive criteria, which led them to translate and introduce to an English-speaking audience many French poststructuralist texts.4 The shift in criticism represented by October had an enormous impact on the interpretation and evaluation of art and also changed the way writing about art sounded.

Consider Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” published in 1979: “Their failure is also encoded onto the very surface of these works: the doors having been gouged away and anti-structurally encrusted to the point where they bear their inoperative condition on their face, the Balzachaving been executed with such a degree of subjectivity that not even Rodin believed (as letters by him attest) that the work would be accepted.” Krauss translated Barthes, Baudrillard, and Deleuze for October, and she wrote in a style that seemed forged in those translations. So did many of her colleagues. A number of them were French and German, so presumably translated themselves in real time.Many of IAE’s particular lexical tics come from French, most obviously the suffixes -ion, -ity, -ality, and -ization, so frequently employed over homier alternatives like -ness. The mysterious proliferation of definite and indefinite articles—“the political," “the space of absence,” “the recognizable and the repulsive”—are also French imports. Le vide, for instance, could mean “empty things” in general—evidently the poststructuralists’ translators preferred the monumentality of “The Void.”Le vide occurs 20.9 times per million in the French Web Corpus; the void occurs only 1.3 times per million in the BNC, but 9.8 times per million in the e-flux corpus. (Sketch Engine searches are not case sensitive.) The word multitude, the same in English and French, appears 141 times in e-flux press releases. A lot appears 102 times.French is probably also responsible for the prepositional and adverbial phrases that are socommon in IAE: simultaneously, while also, and, of course, always already. Many tendencies that IAE has inherited are not just specific to French but to the highbrow written French that the poststructuralists appropriated, or in some cases parodied (the distinction was mostly lost in translation). This kind of French features sentences that go on and on and make ample use of adjectival verb forms and past and present participles. These have become art writing’s stylistic signatures.5French is not IAE’s sole non-English source. Germany’s Frankfurt School was also a great influence on the October generation; its legacy can be located in the liberal use of production, negation, and totality. Dialectics abound. (Production is used four times more often in the e-flux corpus than in the BNC, negation three times more often, totalitytwice as often. Dialectics occurs six times more often in the e-flux corpus than in the BNC; at 9.9 instances per million, dialectics is nearly as common to IAE as sunlight to the BNC.) One press release notes that “humanity has aspired to elevation and desired to be free from alienation of and subjugation to gravity. … This physical and existential dialectic, which is in a permanent state of oscillation between height and willful falling, drives us to explore the limits of balance.” Yes, the assertion here is that standing up is a dialectical practice.October’s emulators mimicked both the deliberate and unintentional features of the journal's writing, without discriminating between the two. Krauss and her colleagues aspired to a kind of analytic precision in their use of words, but at several degrees’ remove those same words are used like everyday language: anarchically, expressively. (The word dialectic has a precise, some would say scientific, meaning, but in IAE it is normally used for its affective connotation: It means good.) At the same time, the progeny of October elevated accidents of translation to the level of linguistic norms.IAE channels theoretical influences more or less aesthetically, sedimented in a style that combines their inflections and formulations freely and continually incorporates new ones.6 (Later art writing would trouble, for instance, and queer.) Today the most authoritative writers cheerfully assert that criticism lacks a sense of what it is or does: Unlike in the years following October’s launch, there are no clearly dominant methodologies for interpreting art. And yet, the past methodologies are still with us—not in our substantive interpretations, but in the spirit and letter of the art world’s universally foreign language.7

Authority

We hardly need to point out what was exclusionary about the kind of writing that Anglo art criticism cultivated. Such language asked more than to be understood, it demanded to be recognized. Based on so many idiosyncrasies of translation, the language that art writing developed during the October era was alienating in large part because it was legitimately alien. It alienated the English reader as such, but it distanced you less the more of it you could find familiar. Those who could recognize the standard feints were literate. Those comfortable with the more esoteric contortions likely had prolonged contact with French in translation or, at least, theory that could pass for having been translated. So art writing distinguished readers. And it allowed some writers to sound more authoritative than others.

Authority is relevant here because the art world does not deal in widgets. What it values is fundamentally symbolic, interpretable. Hence the ability to evaluate—the power to deem certain things and ideas significant and critical—is precious. Starting in the 1960s, the university became the privileged route into the rapidly growing American art world. And in October’s wake, that

world systematically rewarded a particular kind of linguistic weirdness. One could use this special language to signal the assimilation of a powerful kind of critical sensibility, one that was rigorous, politically conscious, probably university trained. In a much expanded art world this language had a job to do: consecrate certain artworks as significant, critical, and, indeed, contemporary. IAE developed to describe work that transcended the syntax and terminology used to interpret the art of earlier times.

It did not take long for the mannerisms associated with a rather lofty critical discourse to permeate all kinds of writing about art. October sounded seriously translated from its first issue onward. A decade later, much of the middlebrow Artforumsounded similar. Soon after, so did artists’ statements, exhibition guides, grant proposals, and wall texts. The reasons for this rapid adoption are not so different from those which have lately caused people all over the world to opt for a global language in their writing about art. Whatever the content, the aim is to sound to the art world like someone worth listening to, by adopting an approximation of its elite language.

But not everyone has the same capacity to approximate. It's often a mistake to read art writing

for its literal content; IAE can communicate beautifully without it. Good readers are quite sensitive to the language’s impoverished variants. An exhibition guide for a recent New York City MFA show, written by the school's art-history master's students, reads: "According to [the artist] the act of making objects enables her to control the past and present." IAE of insufficient complexity sounds both better and worse: It can be more lucid, so its assertions risk appearing more obviously ludicrous. On the other hand, we're apt to be intimidated by virtuosic usage, no matter what we think it means. An e-flux release from a leading German art magazine refers to "elucidating the specificity of artistic research practice and the conditions of its possibility, rather than again and again spelling out the dialectics (or synthesis) of 'art' and 'science.'" Here the magazine distinguishes itself by reversing the normal, affirmative valence of dialectic in IAE. It accuses the dialectic of being boring. By doing so the magazine implicitly lays claim to a better understanding of dialectics than the common reader, a claim that is reinforced by the suggestion that this particular dialectic is so tedious as to be interchangeable with an equally tedious synthesis. What dialectic actually denotes is negligible. What matters is the authority it establishes.

Implosion

Say what you will about biennials. Nothing has changed contemporary art more in the past decade than the panoptic effects of the Internet. Before e-flux, what had the Oklahoma City Museum of Art to do with the Pinakothek der Moderne München? And yet once their announcements were sent out on the same day, they became relevant—legible—to one another. The same goes for the artists whose work was featured in them, and for the works themselves. Language in the art world is more powerful than ever. Despite all the biennials, most of the art world’s attention, most of the time, is online. For the modal reader of e-flux, the artwork always arrives already swaddled in IAE.

Because members of today's art world elite have no monopolies on the interpretation of art, they recognize each other mostly through their mobility. Nevertheless, the written language they’ve inherited continues to attract more and more users, who are increasingly diverse in their origins. With the same goals in mind as their Anglophone predecessors, new users can produce this language copiously and anonymously. The press release, appearing as it does mysteriously in God knows whose inboxes, is where attention is concentrated. It’s where IAE is

making its most impressive strides.

The collective project of IAE has become actively global. Acts of linguistic mimicry and one-upmanship now ricochet across the Web. (Usage of the word speculative spiked unaccountably in 2009; 2011 saw a sudden rage for rupture; transversalnow seems poised to have its best year ever.)8 Their perpetrators have fewer means of recognizing one another’s intentions than ever. We hypothesize that the speed at which analytic terms are transformed into expressive, promotional tokens has increased.

As a language spreads, dialects inevitably emerge. The IAE of the French press release is almost too perfect: It is written, we can only imagine, by French interns imitating American interns imitating American academics imitating French academics.9Scandinavian IAE, on the other hand, tends to be lousy.10 Presumably its writers are hampered by false confidence—with their complacent non-native fluency in English, they have no ear for IAE.

An e-flux release for the 2006 Guangzhou Triennial, aptly titled “Beyond,” reads: “An extraordinary space of experimentation for modernization takes the Pearl River Delta”—the site of a planned forty-million-person megacity—“as one of the typical developing regions to study the contemporary art within the extraordinary modernization framework that is full of possibilities and confusion. Pearl River Delta (PRD) stands for new space strategies, economic patterns and life styles. Regard this extraordinary space as a platform for artistic experimentation and practice. At the same time, this also evokes a unique and inventive experimental sample.” This is fairly symptomatic of a state of affairs in which the unwitting emulators of Bataille in translation might well be interns in the Chinese Ministry of Culture—but then again might not. The essential point is that learning English may now hardly be a prerequisite for writing proficiently in the language of the art world.At first blush this seems to be just another victory over English, promising an increasingly ecstatic semantic unmooring of the art writing we've grown accustomed to. But absent the conditions that motored IAE's rapid development, the language may now be in existential peril. IAE has never had a codified grammar; instead, it has evolved bycontinually incorporating new sources and tactics of sounding foreign, pushing the margins of intelligibility from the standpoint of the English speaker. But one cannot rely on a global readership to feel properly alienated by deviations from the norm.11We are not the first to sense the gravity of the situation. The crisis of criticism, ever ongoing, seemed to reach a fever pitch at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Art historian and critic Sven Lütticken lamented that criticism has become nothing more than “highbrow copywriting.” The idea that serious criticism has somehow been rendered inoperative by the commercial condition of contemporary art has been expressed often enough in recent years, yet no one has convincingly explained how the market squashed criticism’s authority. Lütticken’s formulation is revealing: Is it that highbrow criticism can no longer claim to sound different than copy? Critics, traditionally the elite innovators of IAE, no longer appear in control. Indeed, they seem likely to be beaten at their own game by anonymous antagonists who may or may not even know they’re playing.

Guangzhou again: “The City has been regarded as a newly-formed huge collective body that goes beyond the established concept of city. It is an extraordinary space and experiment field that covers all the issues and is free of time and space limit.” This might strike a confident reader of IAE as a decent piece of work: We have a redundantly and yet vaguely defined phenomenon transcending “the established concept” of its basic definition; we have time and space; we have a superfluous definite article. But the article is in the wrong place; it should be “covers all issues and is free from the time and space limit.” Right? Who wrote this? But wait. Maybe it’s avant-garde.

Can we imagine an art world without IAE? If press releases could not telegraph the seriousness of their subjects, what would they simply say? Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?

If IAE implodes, we probably shouldn’t expect that the globalized art world’s language will become neutral and inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English and the reliable distinctions it imposes.

Maybe in the meantime we should enjoy this decadent period of IAE. We should read e-flux press releases not for their content, not for their technical proficiency in IAE, but for their lyricism, as we believe many people have already begun to do.12Take this release, reformatted as meter:

Peter Rogiers is toiling through the matter

with synthetic resin and cast aluminum

attempting to generate

an oblique and “different” imagery

out of sink with what we recognize

in “our” world.

Therein lies the core

and essence of real artistic production—the desire

to mould into plastic shape

undermining visual recognition

and shunt man onto the track

of imagination.

Peter Rogiers is and remains

one of those sculptors who averse from all

personal interests is stuck

with his art in brave stubbornness

to (certainly) not give into creating

any form of languid art whatsoever.

His new drawing can further be considered

catching thought-moulds

where worlds tilt

and imagination

chases off grimy reality. We have no idea who Peter Rogiers is, what he’s up to, or where he’s from, but we feel as though we would love to meet him.

1 “In its totality, e-flux is a work of art that uses circulation both as form and content,” Vidokle told Dossier in 2009, after an interviewer asked whether e-flux—by that time quite profitable—was art or a business.

2 Using Sketch Engine's parts-per-million calculator, we can measure the frequency of words in IAE relative to their usage in other corpora. For instance, the website of the BNC, which is searchable on Sketch Engine, describes the corpus as “a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources.” Searching for "reality" in the e-flux corpus returns 1,957 hits, which represents 313.7 hits per million; searching for "reality" in the significantly larger BNC returns 7,196 hits, which represents only 64.1 hits per million. In other words, reality plays a much more prominent role in International Art English than in British English.

3 Similarly, White Flag Projects describes Daniel Lefcourt’s 2012 exhibition, “Mockup,” as “a storage room, a stage set, a mausoleum, a trade show, a diagram, a game board, a studio, a retail store, a pictograph, a classroom, a museum display, an architectural model, and a sign-maker's workshop.”

4 IAE is rarely referred to as writing, much less prose, though on occasion art people want to write, or claim to have written, an “essay,” which at least has its etymological roots in the right place. The choice of text—fungible, indifferent, forbidding—says much about how writing has come to be understood in the art world. Texts, of course, are symptomatic on the part of their authors, and readers may glean from them multiple meanings. The richness of a text has everything to do with its shiftiness.

5 The release for Aaron Young's 2012 show at the Company, "No Fucking Way,” reads: “This blurring of real and constructed, only existing in the realm of performance, speculation and judgment, implicates the viewer in its consumption, since our observation of these celebrities will always be mediated.”

6 It’s hard to pinpoint the source of some of IAE’s favorite tics. Who is to blame for the idle inversion? Chiasmus is at least as much Marxist as poststructuralist. We could look to Adorno, for whom “myth is already Enlightenment; and Enlightenment reverts to mythology.” Benjamin, in his famous last line of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” writes about fascism’s aestheticization of politics as opposed to communism’s politicization of art. David Lewis, reviewing a George Condo exhibition in Artforum, writes that the artist’s “subject matter, ranging from whores to orgies and clowns, is banal but never about banality, and Condo does not seem to really ‘play’ with bad taste—it appears instead that bad taste plays with him.”

7 IAE conveys the sense of political tragedy: Everything is straining as hard as it can to be radical in a context where agency is perennially fucked, forever, for everyone. Art must, by lexical design, “interrogate” and “problematize” and “blur boundaries” and even “highlight blurred boundaries.” But the grammatical structures make failure a foregone conclusion. (Thinking of these structures as social structures conjures up a world—borrowed vaguely, and wrongly, from Marx—in which thinkable action is doomed.) Of course, not all art is actually working to make revolution, and neither are art institutions that provide “platforms” for such work. But once artists themselves start making work that is expressed in these terms, such statements do become trivially true: Art does aim to interrogate and so on. Even the most naive attempts at direct action are absorbed by this language. An artist turns his museum residency into a training camp for activists, which the museum’s press release renders as “a site for sustained inquiry into protest strategies and activist discourse” that “attempts to embody the organic, dynamic processes of the protest in action.” The activity dies in language—the museum, on the other hand, “emerge[s] as a contested site.”

8 For how to interpret Sketch Engine histograms, please consult this gallery.

9 We should not suppose that because of their privileged historical relationship to IAE, the French have any better idea of what they’re saying. “[Nico] Dockxs [sic] work continually develops in confrontation with, and in relation to, other actors,” reads an e-flux press release from Centre International d’Art et du Paysage Ile de Vassivière. “On this occasion he has invited [two collaborators] … to accompany him in producing the exhibition, which they intend to enrich with new collaborations and new elements throughout the duration of the show. The project … is a repetition and an evolution, an improvisation on the favourable terrain that is time.”

10 Consider the relatively impoverished IAE of this announcement for the 2006 Helsinki biennial: “Art seeks diverse ways of understanding reality. Kiasmas [sic] international exhibition ARS 06 focuses on meaning of art as part of the reality of our time. The subtitle of the exhibition is Sense of the Real.” The vocabulary is correct if unadventurous, including both “reality” and “the Real.” But the grammar is appalling: The sentences are too short, too direct; the very title of the exhibition surely includes at least one too few articles. The release suggests that its authors are not consummate users of IAE, but popularizers, reductionists, and possibly conservatives who know nothing about "the Real."

11 If IAE is taken to be inclusive precisely because it is not highbrow English, then it is no longer effectively creating the distinctions that have driven its evolution.

12 A nod to Joseph Redwood-Martinez, who, as far as we can make out, was the first to note the poetic possibilities of the IAE press release.

“International Art English” was produced by Triple Canopy as part of its Research Work project area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Source: https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english

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caveartfair · 7 years ago

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10 L.A. Artists Whose Work You Probably Don’t Know—But Should

Last year some friends and I made a list of Los Angeles artists who were overdue for local museum acknowledgment—project rooms, mid-career surveys, retrospectives, whatever—and had to quit when we reached 100. It just stopped being fun. For all the talk of L.A. as an international art destination, it still has a doozy of an inferiority complex. East coast and international art stars—and a handful of Angelenos that fit the mold—are afforded the bulk of face time, at the expense of the gazillion graduates pouring out of the dozen local graduate programs every year; the idiosyncratic veterans who didn’t fit into the Ferus Gallery agenda; and the off-the-charts originals who blossomed in the lack of limelight.

Here’s a grab bag of overlooked L.A. artists that should be pulling down the big bucks and gracing biennial pavilions. Peers and enemies will undoubtedly find my selection wanting—but that’s what comments are for.

China Adams

China Adams, from the series A Certain Period of Time, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Porch Gallery Ojai.

China Adams, Official Cannibal Status, 1993. Courtesy of the artist and Porch Gallery Ojai.

Adams first made a splash (or rather a crunch) in the art world while still an undergrad at the University of California, Los Angeles. For her transactional-cannibalistic performance Official Cannibal Status (1993), she had a surgeon remove a tiny bit of a donor’s muscle tissue, which Adams then consumed. (The action was documented only by a notarized affidavit.) Since then, her work has incorporated phone sex, beauty pageantry, decluttering, fashion design, vampirism, and the selling of deeds to bones in her body, collectable on her death. Adams was recently back showing with ACE Gallery, from which she split before the peak of dealer Doug Christmas’s notoriety. Her conceptual art practice is both rigorously analytical and politically incisive—but manifests in an intuitive, formalist elegance rooted in the body. And it’s very funny.

Professor Cantaloupe and Don Bolles

L.A. has nurtured many legendary radio artists who deserve greater recognition—Firesign Theatre and Joe Frank for starters—but the current underground radio broadcast community is in a golden age. Recently, DJ collective dublab and pirate radio station KCHUNG have gotten some love from the art world. But Jesuit-founded Loyola Marymount University’s KXLU-FM remains the hippest, most surprising, most creative radio actually available in your car, with individualistic programming ranging from noise music to global bedroom electronica to vintage latin psychedelia. Every Monday from 6 to 8 p.m., DJs Professor Cantaloupe (Mitchell Brown) and Don Bolles (Jimmy Michael Giorsetti) treat the airwaves as an art medium in their experimental program Glossolalia, which they launched in 1999—shifting from bizarre children’s records to obscure industrial cassettes to wildlife field recordings without blinking, often layering two or three impossible obscurities to create an entirely original sonic collage.

Karen Carson

Karen Carson, Big Friend (New Holland Tractor), 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Carson’s 1971 MFA thesis show at UCLA consisted of a brilliant mash-up of minimalist, feminist, and relational aesthetics: zipper-connected concentric squares of fabric that the viewer was free to rearrange. In subsequent decades, her work has managed to balance a consistently bracing structural interrogation of the language of painting with deeply personal, political, humanistic, and spiritual content. Her explosively shaped paintings studded with mirrors, molding, and decorative clocks remain among the best artworks of the early 1990s, but a habit of radically shifting gears every couple of years has kept her fans on their toes, and resulted in one of the most dazzlingly variegated oeuvres of any contemporary painter anywhere. Around 2012, she was showing actual-size paintings of tractors and various farm equipment; more recently, Carson has been working on a series of wood reliefs.

Tamara Fites

One of the most innovative L.A. artists of the 1990s, Fites assembled elaborate character-driven installations out of carefully curated thrift store detritus, handmade artifacts, and performative leavings. These immersive interactive theaters garnered enormous local buzz, yet are almost entirely forgotten since the artist dropped out of the marketplace, leaving no internet archive behind. Perhaps Fites’s most famous incarnation was as Lambi Kins, a mute, infantile, sexualized sheep-girl occupying a white trash labyrinth, in which she would inappropriately touch unsuspecting gallery-goers. Another persona was as the leader of an anarcho-syndicalist colony of adult babies, who held birthday parties ’round the clock and rescued a litter of baby possums as part of one exhibition.

Daniel Hawkins

Daniel Hawkins, Desert Lighthouse, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

What’s a guy gotta do to get a little attention in Los Angeles? Hawkins—after nearly a decade of preliminary work, including the spectacular museum-scaled 2014–15 solo show, “Desert Lighthouse Ultimatum,” which included models, mock-ups, and faux-promotional material presented at Tyler Stalling’s Culver Center of the Arts at UC Riverside—built a full-size operational lighthouse in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert from 2010 until early 2017. He had virtually no institutional or market support, and coincidentally little attention or recognition. The piece is one of the most complex and coherent translations of 1960s and ’70s Land Art into a 21st-century context. Hawkins’s most recent Desert Lighthouse embodies both the doomed, abject heroics of Robert Smithson and company, and a post-apocalyptic, DIY absurdism that has already made it a populist icon among the survivalist locals.

Dru McKenzie

Dru McKenzie, Untitled, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and the Tierra del Sol Foundation.

Dru McKenzie, Untitled, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and the Tierra del Sol Foundation.

The artist’s radiant, concentrically contoured figurative images communicate the kind of shamanic intensity seen in Paul Klee’s less whimsical works, and for which many other artists—cough cough, Mark Grotjahn—strive with limited success. But McKenzie’s work is unburdened by the suggestion of postmodern pastiche; she’s one of the scores of extremely talented artists working in Los Angeles’s “progressive art studios,” which provide space, supplies, and support to artists with developmental disabilities. McKenzie works with First Street Gallery Art Center in Claremont, alongside Helen Rae—a deaf, 77-year-old colored-pencil virtuoso who just had her New York solo debut at White Columns this past September.

Daniel Mendel-Black

Daniel Mendel-Black, Untitled, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

When people started going on about “zombie abstraction” I thought, “Aren’t you, like, 30 years behind?” I’ve had a filter in place for “pictures of abstract paintings” for at least that long. But one L.A. painter who’s managed to repeatedly breach my defenses is Mendel-Black, whose work is breathtakingly beautiful, conceptually flawless, and relentlessly experimental. This last factor has probably contributed to his undeserved near-anonymity—being a virtuosic colorist while constantly revitalizing the conventions of shape, composition, surface, and structure is fine, but when you radically reinvent your vocabulary every couple of years, it can be confusing to the customers. Especially when it’s the paintings, and not the artist, who are screaming, “Look at me!”

Sickid

Photo by @sickid1, via Instagram.

I’m not a big fan of street art in mainstream galleries and museums. Somehow it just doesn’t have the same transgressive power if it isn’t…y’know…illegal? Thankfully, the L.A. graffiti subculture only seems to be getting stronger, and one of its most talented practitioners remains committed to out-and-out vandalism. Sickid has been defacing property since around 2012, initially using a wheat-paste cut-out of a Rat Fink-esque geezer in a baseball cap, followed by an explosion of painted electrical-box pieces and billboard and storefront throwies (hitting targets like Scientology bus bench ads and famous-for-nothing billboard icon Angelyne). He works mostly around the neighborhoods of Echo Park and Silverlake, but also as far off as New York and Miami. With a grotesque comix style that recalls Rory Hayes, Gary Panter, and the 2007–15 animated series Superjail!—and inspirations including drag queens, pro wrestling, rap videos, and liquor stores—Sickid has staked out a visual territory all his own. Interestingly, his Instagram account has recently included what appear to be spectacular paintings on stretched canvas. Are you listening, Mr. Deitch?

Shirley Tse

Shirley Tse, installation view of Vehicle Series, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

As a female Asian sculptor, Tse has had a lot of ceilings to bash against—glass, bamboo, and Cor-Ten steel. But she’s persisted by continually producing elegant and idiosyncratic artifacts that engage the audience formally, while producing a convincing mash-up of late modernist sculptural concerns and something between identity politics and autobiography. With its overriding obsession with industrial plastics, Tse’s work straddles the ambiguous zone between the handmade and the manufactured, the found and the simulated. Her recent solo show, “Lift Me Up So I Can See Better,” had a ragtag troupe of nominally figurative sculptures enacting Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince (1888) for bleachers full of disembodied heads.

Keith Walsh

Keith Walsh, Black Liberation and Socialism in America, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

Keith Walsh, White Clock Ghetto, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

These days, Walsh is known in the L.A. art community for his regular performances as The Keith Walsh Experience, an entirely unironic one-man-band with hundreds of original compositions (and a dozen self-released albums) rooted in rockabilly, glam, Krautrock, and jazz. But through the early 2000s, Walsh was also producing some of the most interesting sculptures in town—strange high-tech, furniture-like constructions that melded sci-fi futurism with cargo-cult classicism, augmented by masterfully designed collages and paintings. His most recent works, like Black Liberation and Socialism in America (2017), apply these high-modernist design instincts to the history of radical political movements in 20th-century America. He produces faux-ephemera, including flow-charts and diagrams, but mostly posters and magazine pages that look as if Francis Picabia had lived long enough to donate his services to the Black Panthers.

—Doug Harvey

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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