Changing gears pretty hard now I want to quickly address the Fraiser and Kaprow article. I really like the Kaprow, and have encountered this writing before as an undergraduate. His no rules, try everything new, down with art/long live art spirit was really inspiring to me as a photo student in Rochester and was the cause of me bringing in a sculpture/puzzle/doohicky Tylenol PM Bottle I made into a photo class. The photo class hated the admittedly not very good piece I brought in but I have to say Kaprows writing holds up for me. Even though it verges on nihilisticly hippied out in some ways for me because of its kind of “everything is good no matter what if you try hard believe” subtext I love the idea of thinking of how to push boundaries in all directions. Especially in the graduate school environment where safety is highly over valued I appreciate Kaprow’s spirit. I do wonder about the legacy of this kind of work. Aside from the work of Sehgal, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Asher and a few others this legacy of the happening or the environment doesn’t seem to have the radical formlessness that Kaprow imagined. Installation art has become pretty mainstream, with its own sets of rules and conventions that I am kind of awed by the art world ability to integrate the radical into the mainstream.

In the Fraiser article I was most interested in the idea of artistic autonomy and how in some ways this is really impossible. After all, how many artists are really in the service of only themselves? Most want recognition and for this they sacrifice some autonomy in order to make their work more palatable to galleries, museums, grant givers etc. In more subtle ways I think even considering audience at all can undermine autonomy, for example I like one thing but I worry about how my class will see it in critique so I change it a bit. I wonder if an artist can consider audience and reception and still remain autonomous or if these things are really purely at odds.