I was really excited by all of the Bourriaud readings this week because they felt liked they related very closely to how I’ve been making work lately, especially his ideas about appropriation vs the readymade and the role of the artist as being someone who is particularly good at surfing the culture or a kind of a semionaught – a term I really love. For me I think the idea of the role of the artist as not being so much someone who generates work or things in general is very apt. I think the project of originality is not so relevant in a culture where the stream of things being generated is already too great. This idea of the semionaught is to me someone who can interpret, make meanings from, and guide through the cultural rain. I really liked all the DJ analogies he made too because this idea of remixing, programming and play listing culture is exactly what I see me role as in my video mash-ups. The possibilities are really exciting and so are the difficulties. For one thing if you consider that the material of the artist is culture itself then you already have too much material and for another an appropriation and readymade practice is tricky in a litigious and copyright obsessed society. The idea of ownership is nebulous, ridiculous, and frustrating for everyone. I’ve also been reading this David Shields book that tackles many of the name issues in an interesting way.

Some questions about the readings over the past semester:

1. Lacan and Jeff Wall. Seriously confused here. I understand the argument Ross is making in theory, I think, about beauty creating desire and this leads to Lacan’s theories about desire as creating subjects etc. But where does Wall fit in here?
2. I was wondering about Crimp’s advocacy of lateral appropriation and distaste for historical appropriation, is this at odds with Rancier’s advocacy for borrowing operations from separate media? This strikes me as a kind of historical operation.
3. Any ideas about where photography’s expanded field will expand to from here? Is there a relationship between technology and the expanding of the photographic field? Digital, networks, etc?
4. Thinking about exuberance and exhaustion and the pressure to perform how are we to incorporate this into our art making. Should we more consciously defying the pressure to perform? Is it too much of a risk?

Perhaps I’m a little distracted lately from my impending graduation/emancipation and all that it entails for me but this Toni Ross article is not really making any sense to me at all. I understand that Wall breaks with notions of the avant-garde in the 1980s by doing realism, and history painting tableaux etc, and he incorporates his insane knowledge of the history of painting into what seems like every inch of every photo. Yet, its still really tough for me to think of him as avant-garde because I’m a baby and he was already old school feeling to me when I started art school. Also everyone in his pictures looks really 80s out too… Ok but I understand his realism project and his history of painting project and I also understand how influential those projects have been for the next 25 years. And I think I understand Jameson’s ideas about how aesthetic theory is not good under post-modernism because everything is just too charmingly aesthetic these days. Right so far so good. And I get the beautiful and the sublime and how they are different, but what do all these things, plus the Lacan stuff have to do with Jeff Wall? I am so lost.

This weeks articles really hit home in practice department for me because two of them I thought really addressed things that pertain to the young artist working in graduate school. The studio and the pressure to perform,

First on the issues of the studio… we don’t have any! If I could change one thing about this school it would be to give everyone individual studios. I agree pretty much with Buren that the studio is a important and special place for a work of art. There will always be a defining relationship between a work and where it was created and each space the work enters afterward will change its meaning and value. I’m not as hostile to the curator as Buren seems to be, I have no problem having my work be at their whim, but I’m young. I suppose part of the problem with this article is that he is writing about such a tiny percentage of artists here: those artists who have their ideal studios and sell work from them. My studio is my apartment. Really just a desk with a computer for editing video. If I had more space I would hang prints, install video projections, maybe a couch would be nice. The studio is important because I think most artists need a comfortable space to think and work in. Buren mentions the importance of having unsuccessful work and half finished sketches laying around. I think its important that work that works and work that fails be near to each other. This is the problem with the none-studio of Columbia, its hard to fail privately which leads to less risk taking. To me the artists studio and the artists career is much more about making due that theorizing what the studio means to maybe 1% of artists.

Then the pressure to perform! I really liked this article because I think for people in the creative economy performance its thesis is exactly right. Also while in graduate school you are under to perform as well as compete. Careerism, grades, reviews and the like can make me forget very quickly that I’m here to actually make art sometimes. This is what is most frustrating that we are always performing and always being judges by standards we have no control over. This is why I love the “I can’t in the key of I can”. It is a way to resist without giving up, to take back some power. To disrupt my judges by giving them what I don’t have and they don’t want. I think this takes the form for me of showing them work that I haven’t figured out yet, that I know they won’t like. This often takes the form of a really early edit of a video piece where I’m still not sure what I’m doing. I’m giving them what I don’t have a (finished piece, a complete thought, an idea of what I’m doing) and what they don’t want, a half baked work. I also love the latency argument, the idea that meaning can grown and change over time. I think there is a lot of pressure to get things all at once, right away and that if something doesn’t reveal itself right away, all at once, easily it is a kind if a failure. I also like the idea of failure as a way to resist performance pressure. Not to fail on purpose but to be open to failure as being valuable, important, and nothing to be ashamed of. Often it feels like the stakes are too high too quickly in performance culture and all failure is a referendum on personal worth.

Lastly I really like how the article talks about the I care. It reminded me of a David Foster Wallace quote I really like:

“If you can think of times in your life you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.”

http://mocp.org/exhibitions/2003/05/the_furtive_gaz.php

While reading this weeks articles I think I still had the quote Allan Sekula used to open Reading the Archive stuck in my head by Godard and Gorin “The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?” Except this week when I started with Laura Mulvey’s essay I thought the gaze for whom? Against whom? Meaning I didn’t really follow her Freudian argument about castration anxiety and the idea of the cinematic gaze being male. I understand the argument (although by that logic it seems castration anxiety could be used to explain really almost anything) and I even agree that the cinematic gaze is mostly masculine (not male) and the cinematic operation she describes used to portray female characters either actively or passively are certainly still prevalent I kept thinking that it was also a very limited view that considered gender and desire in a very binary way I was thinking what about women who enjoy looking at women, men looking at men, etc

… but then I read the Butler article and it sort of turned Mulvey on its head. I’m still trying to parse the relationship between these two articles because I don’t think butler rules out the possibilities of a male or female gaze but she certainly does complicate it. Since gender is preformed a woman could have a male gaze (and also castration anxiety?) a man could be objectified (assaulted by this gaze) etc.

And then! Olin comes in and makes sense of everything for me in her article that was (lets be honest, for this weeks readings, a breath of fresh air where clarity of writing is concerned) most interesting to me in the way that it tried to considered the gaze in a positive and affirming way. To this point it seemed to have such a bad connotation and I think as a photographer I was feeling some serious guilt about my own scopophelia. However I think Olin is right on about the Walker Evans image. The gaze there is an equal exchange, the plea of Thou shalt not kill, etc. But I was also thinking couldn’t a sexualized “male” gaze be an equal exchange? I guess my thought was, is it such a bad thing if people enjoy being visually objectified? If they willingly consent to it? Couldn’t the Kruger text read “Your gaze lovingly caresses the side of my face, and that makes me feel good”? I liked that Olin was arguing for a wider interpretation of the gaze because I think that the experience of looking and being looked at can be everything to terrifying, to thrilling, to boring etc. and it all depends on the context.

I was thinking about the Abromovich performance at MoMA right now “The Artist is Present” where she sits at a table and looks at whomever sits across from her. This idea that looking can be a mutual, artistic, and what seems to me very thrilling experience is interesting. There is no other communication just sitting and looking and yet it seems like such a more embodied experience, it seems to involve much more than just vision. It made me think that the separation between vision and the other sense the Fried seemed to be arguing for is just… wrong. Here is Marina and her long lost lover Ulay. So Cute!