Popcorn

I can't believe I'd ever address this question again but,

Why Paint?

Raymond Uhlir, Verdant Valley Hara-Kiri, Oil Enamel on Canvas, 48 x 78", 2006

Nancy Baker and Raymond Uhlir both paint scenes that follow a "traditional" model, referencing early Christian painting (early Medieval, Romanesque, Gothic, etc.). Baker's work more overtly follows this model, using a flatter perspective, and Uhlirs work more obtusely, using the ever prominent format of characters in a landscape composing a narrative. (Below, Nancy Baker, Work in Progress, Oil on Wood Panel, 36 x 36", 2006). Both artists are clearly speaking to public subject matters of western history, myths and culture, but via specific colors, samplings and arrangements, they each display unique and personal attitudes. There's a nice resonance between the shared cultural experience and the subjective perspective on such in these works that is interesting to me.

Using a traditional format such as painting on canvas or panel today requires justification. I do believe this, and I thank the teachers (Jim Rieck) that grilled any art student (including myself) for painting. To make a painting is truly to enter into a rich lineage. It is to acknowledge the, at least, two-thousand years of painting that has occurred before. Artists of any medium should be working in their medium because it is the best vehicle for their expression, and should be aware of what has proceeded, but painting in particular positions itself for scrutiny in the age of advanced screens and virtual realities.

The artist Michael Somoroff recently said that art was never about the object. This got me thinking since I have of late followed Joseph Kosuth's assertion that all art after Duchamp is conceptual. It's profound to consider art as always conceptual more than physical because this would mean that a dichotomy has always been present between the thought, catalyst and process of a work and the physical result. Though the object serves the crucial role of signifying this thought, catalyst and process, to take the stance that the conception vanquishes the object, would seem to mean a diminishing of the attachment to the object. This is an interesting tension.

In the context of these two painters, the conception is to express ideas of how narratives and myths have shaped Western culture. To use a historical format therefore makes sense, because we're talking about a format of communication that has been around for thousands of years. A style of representational painting that is without the acknowledgment of the challenged figure/ground relationship of the 20th Century.

Further, both of the artists explicitly discuss this historicity by including religious themes, which were of course of the first and most important conceptual bases for art. Art seemed to serve this purpose well at the time, conveying something and providing an experience spiritual that written and spoken language could not. Art has continued to serve this purpose. At its best, it paves the way for new thoughts and juxtapositions, not able to be expressed or created other ways, at its most neutral it is a release or outlet, and there's no need to discuss what art is at its worst. As well, narratives and myths still rule our culture, in new ways (advances screens?). These two artists are effectively discussing how both of these themes have prevailed, for better or worse.

To consider the lineage that artists enter, and to consider art as never really about the object, gives contemporary work the huge responsibility of always being site specific, site in the sense of everything from the immediate location to the institution of exhibition to the artist's entire socio-economic environment. (See Miwon Kwon's One Place After Another: Notes of Site Specificity, 1997). This is a huge responsibility. Painters are speaking about their place in the site of history and all artists should be aware of all of the fields and sites they are working within. Otherwise, why?

Nancy Baker

Nancy Baker, Backstroke, Oil on Wood Panel, 2006

Nancy Baker's work centers around the myths and legends of both humanity's history and of contemporary culture. More on her work soon to come.

More Useless Press by Mark Jenkins

The Force

Cedric Delsaux, R2D2, Archival Digital Print, 2007

Delsaux's show opens September 14! I plan on having many long sets of Star Wars marathons between now and then at my apartment.

Also, Jessica Dawson reviews Useless in the WP this past Saturday.

Recess!

Taking a break, I'll be back Wednesday.

Useless Press

People discussing Useless:

Going Out Gurus

Washington City Paper - notice Kriston Capp's correction

And more to come...

The Discovery Channel

Nina Katchadourian, Parasite, Sited Installation, rocks and 200 resin-cast rock climbing holds, 2003

Private "telematics": each person sees himself at the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty, at an infinite distance from his universe of origin. Which is to say, in the exact position of an astronaut in his capsule, in a state of weightlessness that necessitates a perpetual orbital flight and a speed sufficient to keep him from crashing back to his planet of origin.

- John Baudrillard, from "The Ecstasy of Communication"

Having traversed the era of statements and then of non-statements, the discursive path of contemporary culture's thought now lends itself to exposing the tiny details and defects that hide within or just outside the "orbit" of hyper-reality, simulation and the ultimate accessibility ("transparency") of modern communication.

It is often the observations of small quirky phenomena and inconsistencies that are emotionally charged and stand out perceptually in this society of gigantic digital networks and transitory sleek design which continuously disposes of the excess in exchange for the miniaturized, the essential.

The conversation, the collaboration and the collective have become significant in the artworld today for obvious reasons, following suit with the dominance of the technological state (the network) of the developed world. And so conversely, the quiet, the personal experience and the delicate hold a certain weight, set apart from "the matrix".

The airy installations of Michelle Kong (Drop, Microfilament, 2003, above; detail, below, right) take advantage of this opportunity, existing as affecting works using personal and meditative forms. Some of her works are barely perceptible before getting close.

Nina Katchadourian, whose work is written about by Carly Berwick in the current ARTnews (Summer 2007), works in a project based manner, drawing attention to, or creating, idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies that use both the rules of nature and of technology. But works like Parasite (shown) and The Mended Spiderweb Series reflect the artist's personal experience with the work, isolated in remote, lush woodsy areas. The works use the systems within "the orbit" to have an experience outside of it.

But I suppose the case could be made, therefore, that the private really has subsided and obscenity reigns.

And, Baudrillard is always right:

All functions abolished in a single dimension, that of communication. That's the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scene abolished in a single dimension of information. That's obscenity.

Art has always served as communication (at least once addressed as Art) and so in a way conversation. The difference is that when all becomes obscene or spectacle, there is no more sanctity in the untouched landscape. Nothing is untouched or objective unless it remains unseen and inconceived.

This is a timely subject for me as I just booked my four day vacation to a home in a town on the water with no internet access and spotty phone access. Once again, Baudrillard:

I pick up my telephone receiver and it's all there; the whole marginal network catches and harasses me with the insupportable good faith of everything that wants and claims to communicate.

Also, KittyHawk at the Black Cat tonight!

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Installation by Russell Kelbaugh

Last Wednesday I went to the "Aleatore" art event at the Bobby Fisher Memorial building on North Capital Street.

I think I'll always have a personal connection to Russell Kelbaugh's work. Maybe it's because I once spent the night in a tent he made out of old sheets, pillows and comforters, snuggled up to a wooden toy gun he had constructed.

This particular installation by Kelbaugh consisted of dry-walled and "Twister-fied" walls in the uninhabitable rowhouse being rented by Borf. In the middle of the floor laid a real Twister-board.

On one of the walls, part of the existing wall showed through at points. Based on his work at the most recent Academy show at Conner Contemporary, I wouldn't be surprised if it was another trompe l'oeil technique.

Where this occurs, there is an unnaturally clean break between new wall and "old". Whether this old wall is real or fabricated, the emphasis on this detail, makes this area of the installation about the action of covering up itself. This idea works industrially, psychologically and socially and is a theme carried throughout Kelbaugh's work. This installation contains the voice of a part of DC where everything (including probably the building of it's existence) is soon to be covered up and rebuilt.

The circles are clearly hand painted, albeit neatly. It's always interesting to me, in works like this, how the balance between the exploitation of the handmade and the neatness of the mechanical are so important to the works essence. In this installation, with the subject matter being a child's game, I take again from the work a child-like innocence from the overactive industrialized and digitalized world. But maybe that's because I'm the type who finds security in forts of old pillows and sheets sometimes. And maybe that's because my mother has subjected me to Luddite-praising rants fairly often throughout my life.

But I digress. I was entertained by the piece and for those who still enjoy having fun and "finding" new art in the city, it was a great event. The fate of the building from here I do not know. But I hope to see more events like this in the future.

The Useless opening at Project 4 was very well attended for the time of year and our next exhibition will be a solo show featuring the photographs of Cedric Delsaux.

Rigidity, Playfulness and....Choice?

Benjamin Edwards, Softstream Meadows, Oil on Canvas, 2006

According to Baudrillard, advertising is not really a new syntax but rather a complex entity which encompasses, on the one hand, the organized qualities of technology and economics, and on the other hand the individual needs which are "less consistent." This creates fertile ground for a play between the inconsistencies of human behavior and the rigidity of technology and economics, as well as for the exploration of the complex network of signs, context, needs and desires that make up the fabric of our reality as consumers.

Benjamin Edwards' Automatic City is a playful study of the back and forth between uncontrolled randomization and controlled personalized choice. The voting mechanism in this work speaks to me as a demonstration of Baudrillard's "personalized object," of which the system of consumerism offers individuals the freedom of choice between many, but a freedom that is limited by the constraints of what the system generates.

Matt Siber's photographic series entitled The Untitled Project explores corporate branding and emphasizes the expanding number of ways that public voices, or conglomerate powers, communicate with the individual today. His images are of cityscapes with all text omitted, paired with the omitted text alone.

Christine Gray's paintings (Fruits of Forest Crumble, Oil on Panel, 2007 shown) make cheesy craft materials almost unrecognizable at first glance, due to their beauty. The paintings hold an innocence or beauty untainted by mass production in their abstraction.

Claes Oldenburg's "Statement on Bedroom Ensamble," published by the National Gallery of Canada, asserted that he wanted to abstract a "manufactured object...made by conventional industrial procedure." But as Dan Graham points out in his Art as Design/Design as Art (1986), "the manufactured look he achieved is not solely an objective simulcrum; it is anthropomorphized in the same terms used by the industry to manufacture the collective subjective 'tastes' of the mass-consuming individuals. "

Artists such as Christine Gray use some of "the same terms used by the industry" to create work, not objective, but aside from the industry. The paintings own an anonymous, innocent freedom from the system of branding and logos. Further, her work speaks to the dysfunction of the system of crafters imitating models in craft magazines. Gray's work utilizes "failed geometry, failed architecture, and failed illusionism."

Donald Judd noted in a review of an Oldenburg exhibition for Arts Magazine (September 1964) that "the emotive form [of an Oldenburg] is equated to the man-made object ... Nothing made is completely objective ... changing - as if melting and sliding in time."

Mark Wentzel believes that all works hold the responsibilities of their specific time. Wentzel's XLounge (shown) discusses the ground between American society's endearment for old products (nostalgia) and its obsession with consuming new, transitory products. Wentzel makes a handmade, unique work from the conceptual basis and format of a mass-produced item just as Edwards and Gray do, only Wentzel's ostensibly stays in the same format as the original (the Eames Lounge Chair).

Also, I'm trying to hook up a DVD player to a very old TV Set with just a coaxial cable. I have comcast digital cable. I don't know how to connect the DVD player to the TV. I guess it's just a cord or cable that I need...

suggestions?