Richer Responses
Every urban population believes in having its own collective psychology. One can ridicule this belief, but it has produced a lot of poetry, music and cinema that we are accustomed to valuing. The volume of poems about Parisian air or St. Petersburg’s weather is a sufficient justification for their architecture. However, if we don’t speak about art that is stimulated by a city but about art in the public space, then one should be very careful. The chance that any really good artwork can go through all possible channels that evaluate it is minimal. And, in general, art that is exhibited outside of arts institutions has to additionally identify itself as art. That makes art shown in the public space even more conservative than art shown within the framework of institutions.
— Boris Groys, excerpted from “6 Questions for Boris Groys”, Art Lies no. 58, p. 19
It is not important at all to me that you or anyone else should have this or that knowledge of anything written or recorded about my pictures of anyone else’s. It’s about experiencing the pictures, not understanding them. People now tend to think their experience of art is based in understanding the art, whereas in the past people in general understood the art and were maybe more freely able to absorb it intuitively. They understood it because it hadn’t yet separated itself off from the mainstream of culture the way modern art had to do. So I guess it is not surprising that, since that separation has occurred, people try to bridge it through understanding the oddness of the various new art forms. Cinema seems more of less still in the mainstream, as if it never had a ‘secession’ of modern or modernist artists against that mainstream. So people don’t tend to be so emphatic about understanding films, they tend to enjoy them and evaluate them: great, good, not so good, two thumbs up, etc. Although that can be perfunctory and dull, it may be a better form of response. Experience and evaluation — judgment — are richer responses than gestures of understanding or interpretations.
— Jeff Wall, excerpted from ‘An email exchange between Jeff Wall and Mike Figgis’, Contemporary, no. 65, 2005
There’s been plenty of talk lately in the news about the role of public art as Olafur Eliasson’s quartet of waterfalls were turned on last week. Some see the display as a way for the public to newly experience their urban surrounding (Mr. Eliasson has said that his intention was to draw fresh attention to the NYC’s waterways more than to himself or the art). Others questions the price tag: a bit over $15 million of privately-donated funds, although the money generated for the city by the tourism could well exceed that amount according to some sources.
As someone who doesn’t know very much about the critical discourse on public art (heck, I barely claim to understand “institutional” art), I find it useful to gauge the art by how the people who live around it interact with it. My first visit to Chicago coincided with the opening of Millennium Park, and I was engrossed by the sculptures, even if they are more “conservative” than the works shown in the nearby Art Institute. Perhaps not because of any transcendent message or societal insight, but because the crowd that had gathered there both day and night were having such a good time enjoying the works on display. Seeing kids laughing and playing around the Crown Fountain, adults smooshing their faces up against Anish Kapoor’s still partly-under-wraps Cloud Gate, it was all very fun and engaging. Not like other sculpture gardens I had been to! (Check out this relevant 37Signals article to see what I mean…) Another good example is Richard Serra’s Vortex at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: it’s beautiful visually, but step inside and the sculpture takes on a totally different level of interactivity, with museum-goers quickly discovering the loud reverberations they can make by clapping, jumping, shouting, screaming.
Public art seems to draw suspicion from both the citizens that pay for it and live around it as well as the art critics — is that suspicion unfounded? Does public art suffer from those who regard it too highly (the “don’t touch!” signs at the Seattle garden) or from those who feel that art has to be understood rather than experienced? I’m glad that we have the AIPP here in Austin, and it’s good to see their map dotted with “in progress” works, I just hope they don’t turn out like the ill-fated and much-maligned Moments project.
I like this quote from Sports Illustrated writer Peter King that S.C. Squibb brought up on the ArtCal Zine blog:
Saw The Gates… Nice. Unusual. Great to see Central Park so packed with people and transformed into a pretty sight in the middle of a harsh winter. An enjoyable experience. But art? I don’t see it.
Photography, the fogged mirror
Even though the fogged photograph is not in itself pure absence, but rather the eclipsing of an image, we know that what we are seeing is a representation that has been spoilt, a calamity that no technology can ever repair. The image is there, but hidden, ‘fogged’, concealed forever by a curtain of shadow, which no one is capable of raising.
— A Short History of the Shadow by Victor Stoichita, in reference to an 1839 cartoon by Cham (Amédée de Noé) from the book L’Histoire de Monsieur Jobard
Segueing nicely from their book on Gothic literature and art, I’ve been plowing through another great edition from Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series: The Cinematic. The editor has assembled critical essays on photography, its relation to cinema and video, to temporality, to narrative, to contemporary art practices — all with a fluid sense of motion conducive to making connections across the gamut of the 20th Century art world. Many of the essays touch on photography’s nature as a perverse mirror capable only of capturing what was, the inherent implications about death and impermanence corresponding to much of the Western catalog of art from the past couple hundred years. Other essays deal with the conflict and interaction between still photography and the re-playable, less-bounded world arising from Sergei Eisenstein and his early modernist contemporaries. In short, it’s right up my alley, and I hope the library here gets more from this series soon.
With these thoughts in mind, I was pleased last weekend to find the theater series of photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto sitting quietly by themselves on a side wall in the otherwise colorful LEWITT×2 show at the Austin Museum of Art. These photographs, seemingly simple shots of the interiors of old American movie palaces, speak volumes about these issues of time, death, photography, cinema, and reflection. The burning white oblivion central to the frame, created by setting up a large format camera with its shutter open through the duration of a feature film, softly illuminates the space surrounding it, highlighting the emptiness as though time itself has run its course. The blur of human motion on the screen over time adds up to a brilliant nothingness, irretrievable. Somewhere on the boundary between conceptualism and zen meditation, these were easily my favorite pieces in the show.
See also:
- Edward Hopper’s New York Movie
- Hubbard/Birchler’s Arsenal and Grand Paris Texas
- Christian Metz, Photography and Fetish on JSTOR (may require a login)
Photo above: “Canton Palace, Ohio (1980)” by Hiroshi Sugimoto. From the Hirshhorn Museum collection.
Update:
Flipping through the New York Times the day after I posted this, I was very surprised to see this photo from Fred R. Conrad’s Geometry series. Spooky!
The Power of Horror
I just finished reading through The Gothic, a recent essay collection from the Documents of Contemporary Art series published by MIT Press. The book stitches together a variety of short essays centered on discussion of classic gothic literature and contemporary art, tapping into the thoughts of well-established artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Wall while also reflecting on younger members of the field like Banks Violette, David Altmejd, Aïda Ruilova, and Sue de Beer. Crammed within its scant 230, large-typeset pages you’ll find writing on Edgar Allen Poe (any book on gothic literature and modernity needs to have lots of Poe!), Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Freud and Lacan’s theories of the uncanny (unheimliche), deconstructions of 1980s slasher movies, psychoanalytic musings on duality and transgression, bits of cyberpunk from William Gibson, and more! When I was younger, I was thrilled reading Poe, Shelley, Baudelaire, et al., without realizing until recently how much of an impact their writings had on art and literature, continuing even today as the art world emerges slowly out of post-modernism and back towards theatricality and the sublime. Highly recommended.
Paging Dr. Sbaitso
Some of the best panels and meetups I attended at this year’s SXSW (the famous technology/music/film/designer eyewear festival) were on accessibility and adaptive technology, a good forum to hear what’s stirring in those fields. In particular, it seems like there’s a growing open source movement to provide tools for users with special needs and to help web designers produce accessible content.
Closed source software like JAWS will face a real challenge as open screen readers like the NVDA project become more mature and build on the popularity of other software like Firefox — while NVDA is certainly lacking the features and polish found in the more widely-used commercial products, the price (free vs. $1000) and ease-of-installation certainly make it compelling.
I also learned about the following accessibility-checking programs and Firefox extensions, immediately adding them to my developer’s toolbox:
- Colour Contrast Analyser, a great tool available for Windows and OS X that gives you two color pickers: one to choose a foreground color (probably your main text color) and a second to pick a color from the background to compare it with. It then gives you detailed contrast ratio information for the two colors along with clear indicators as to whether your site or application complies with the suggested contrast needed for visually impaired users and for colorblindness. It’s one of those tools that simply works as advertised.
- Fangs, a screen reader emulator built as a Firefox extension. When run on a page, Fangs displays a mashed-together, color-highlighted, text-only version of your content as a screen reader would read it aloud. If you’re a sighted web developer, this is a handy tool for getting a quick impression of how your page will hold up under JAWS or similar. (Bonus points for having an attractive, accessible website)
- The Firefox Accessibility Extension from the Illinois Center for Information Technology Accessibility. This tool helps you generate reports on various accessibility issues, can display information about your page’s semantics (headings, list items, links), lets you easily switch into various high contrast modes, etc. It’s a great companion to the awesome Web Developer extension.
- You should also check out Color Oracle, the cross-platform color blindness simulator. It’s pretty sobering if you have regular vision like I do, and it will make you appreciate that yes, two different hues can be very, very similar-looking to a good portion of your audience, and yes that’s a big problem.
(It goes without saying that these are useful but imperfect tools, never capable of giving you the full insight that would come from actual user testing. The only real way to know what real frustrations an impaired user will have with your new web app or site? Get one to come in and give it a spin!)
The other good news coming out of the past couple of weeks is the support the major browser makers are giving to the WAI-ARIA suite of standards for making web applications and forms and controls more semantic and accessible. Opera 9.5, Firefox 3, and now even IE8 (imperfectly?) are slated to support ARIA (whither Safari?). The Secrets of JavaScript Libraries panel discussion at SXSW also brought news that jQuery will soon join the Dojo toolkit in supporting ARIA-enabled widgets (I think that’s where I heard the news, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).
These are the kinds of open source projects that I really dig: good for users, good for shaking up the established software licensing model, and good for helping solidify support for web standards. Know of any other good tools?
Odic Force Magazine
A couple of weeks ago I found a new local arts magazine sitting on the freebie shelf at Flightpath, featuring the William Hundley photo taken in front of the Daniel Johnston “Hi How Are You” frog seen above — surely a cover designed to catch my eye! The newly launched magazine is called Odic Force Magazine, evidently named after the founder poked through his thesaurus and came across the Victorian-era term. At first I was worried that it was going to be another slickly-produced-but-light-on-actual-content local “arts and culture” magazine (I’m looking at you, Tribeza and Rare), but there are some good writers involved (Steve Wilson, Rachel Koper of Gallery Lombardi, et al.) and artists profiled (fun to see the workspaces of folks like ceramacist Ryan McKerley and painter Jennifer Chenoweth). It touches on the local art, music, architecture, writing, and fashion scenes without being too unbalanced or terse. It’s not yet ART LIES but it’s an impressive first issue, and it is attempting to cover far more than just the visual arts.
Odic Force’s first issue is generously available online using one of those crazy sorta-works Flash viewers (I couldn’t get it to spit out the PDF so I could read it offline, your mileage may vary).
PS: On a related note, I’m very glad to report that Cantanker’s website is back from the dead. Their domain lapsed, and I worried that they had succumbed to the fate of most good art magazines. Looking forward to their issue #5!