Chris Hadfield, be my friend.

Add this to my list of life goals: befriend Chris Hadfield.  Have him over for dinner.

White Cube

Writing about your past writing is the clsoest you get to coming back from the dead. You assume a fasle superiority over your previous self, who did all the work. [109]

A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church.  The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off.  Walls are painted white.  The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically, or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as the saying used to go, ‘to take on its own life.’… Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial—the space is devoted to the technology of esthetics.  Works of art are mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes.  Art exists in a kind of eternity of display, an dthough there is lots of ‘period’ (late modern), there is no time.  The eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died already to be there. Indeed the presence of that odd piece of furtniture, your own body, seems superfluous, and intrusion.  The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are not—or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannequins for further study…Here at last the spectator, oneself, is eliminated. You are there without being there. [15]

Regarding 19^th century salons, hung cheek-to-jowl: “What perceptual law could justify (to our eyes) such barbarity? One and only one: Each picture was seen as a self-contained entity, totally isolated from its slum-close neighbor by a heavy frame around and a complete perspective system within.  Space was discontinuous and categorizable, just as the houses in which these pictures hung had different rooms for different functions.  The nineteenth century mind was taxonomic, and the nineteenth century eye recognized hierarchies of genre and the authority of the frame. [16]

Progress can be defined as what happens when you eliminate the opposition. [27]

Couldn’t modernism be taught to children as a series of Aesop’s fables?  It would be more memorable than art appreciation.  Think of such fables as “Who Killed Illusion” or “How the Edge Revolted Against the Center.”  “The Man Who Violated the Canvas” could follow “Where Did the Frame Go?” It would be easy to draw morals: think of “The Vanishing Impasto That Soaked Away – and Then Came Back and Got Fat.”  And how would we tell the story of the little Picture Plane that grew up and got so mean? How it evicted everybody, including Father Perspective and Mother Space, who had raised such nice real children, and left behind only this horrid result of an incestuous affair called Abstraction, who looked down on everybody, including – eventually – its buddies, Metaphor and Ambiguity; and how Abstraction and the Picture Plane, thick as thieves, kept booting out a persistent guttersnipe named Collage, awho just wouldn’t give up. Fables give you more latitude than art history. [35]

The content of the empty canvas increased as Modernism went on. Imagine a museum of such potencies, a temporal corridor hung with blank canvasses—from 1850, 1880, 1910, 1950, 1970.  Each contains, ebfore ab rush is laid on it, assumptions implicit in the art of its era.  As the series approaches the present, each member accumulates a more complex latent content.  Modernism’s classic void ends up stuffed  with ideas all ready to jump on the first brushstroke. [36]

Who is this Spectator, also called the Viewer, sometimes called the Observer, occasionally the Perceiver? It has no face, is mostly a back.  It stoops and peers, is slightly clumsy. Its attitude is inquiring, its puzzlement discreet.  He – I’m sure it is more male than female – arrived with modernism, with the disappearance of perspective. He seems born  out of the picture and, like some perceptual Adam, is drawn back repeatedly to contemplate it.  The Spectator seems a little dumb; he is not you or me. Always on call, he staggers into place before every new work that requires his presence.  This obliging stand-in is ready to enact our fanciest spectualtions. He tests them patiently and does not resent that we provide him with directions and responses: ‘The viewer feels…’; ‘the observer notices…’; ‘the spectator moves….’ He is sensitive to effects: ‘The effect on the spectator is….’ He smells out ambiguities like a bloodhound: ‘caught between these ambiguities, the spectator….’ HE not only stands and sits on command; he lies down and even crawls as modernism presses on him its final indignities.  Plunged into darkness, deprived of perceptual cues, blasted by strobes, he frequently watches his own image chopped up and recycled by a variety of media.  Art conjugates him, and he is a sluggish verb, eager to carry the wight of meaning but not always up to it.  He balances; he tests; he is mystified, demystified.  In time, the Spectator stumbles around between confusing roles: he is a cluster of motor reflexes, a dark-adapted wanderer, the vivant in a tableau, an actor manqué, even a trigger of sound and light in a space land-mined with art.  He may even be told that he himself is an artist and be persuaded that his contribution to what he observes or trips over is its authenticating signature. [39-41]

If the house is the house of modernism, what knocks can you expect? The house itself, built on ideal foundations, is imposing, even though the neighborhood is changing. It has a Dada kitchen, a fine Surrealist attic, a utopian playroom, a critics’ mess, clean, well-lighted galleries for what is current, votive lights to various saints, a suicide closet, vast storage rooms, and a basement flophouse where failed histories lie around mumbling like bums.  We hear the Expressionist’s thunderous knock, the Surrealist’s coded knock, the Realist at the tradesman’s entrance, the Dadas sawing through the back door. Very typical is the Abstractionist’s single, unrepeated knock. And unmistakable is the peremptory knock of historical inevitability, which sets the whole house scurrying. [65]

If the white wall cannot be summarily dismissed, it can be understood. This knowledge changes the white wall, since tis content is composed of mental projections based on unexposed assumptions. The wall is our assumptions.  It is imperative for every artists to know this content and what it does to his/her work…..Was the white cube nurtured by an interneal logic similar to that of its art? Was its obsession with enclosure an organice response, encysting tart that would not otherwise survive? Was it an economic oconstruct formed by capitalist models of scarcity and demand?....What keeps it stable is the lack of alternatives. [80]

For avant-garde gestures have two audiences: one which as there and one – most of us – which wasn’t.  The original audience is often restless and bored by its forced tenanc of a moment it cannot fully perceive – and that often uses boredom as a kind of temporal moat around the work.  Memory (so disregarded by modernism which frequently tries to remember the future by forgetting the past) compeltes the work years later.  The original audience is, then, in advance of itself. We from a distance know better. [88]

Visual art does not progress by having a good memory. And New York is the locus of some radical forgetting. You can reinvent the past, suitably disguised, if no one remembers it. Thus is originality, that patented fetish of the self, defined. [109]

The economic model in place for a hundred eyars in Europe and the Americas is product, filtered through galleries, offered to collectors and public institutions, written about in magazines partially supported by the galleries, and drifting towards the academic apparatus that stabilizes ‘history’ – certifying, much as banks do, the holding of its major repository, the museum.  History in art is, ultimately, worth money. Thus do we get not the art we deserve but the art we pay for.  This comfortably system went virtually unquestioned by the key figure it is based upon: the artist. [109]

David Foster Wallace: This Is Water

Worth watching more than once.  Reminds me of my brief stay at the box factory.

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true.  The only thing that is capital T 'True' is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.  This, I submit, is the freedom of real education. Of learning how to be 'well-adjusted.' You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.

Must we all circulate the same three articles that come across our feeds? Must we all share and re-share the same Huffington Posts articles and TED Talks?

Yes. Absolutely yes. (So long as it's David Foster Wallace).
Why? Because the modern condition is one of perpetual forgetting.

Leo Steinberg: Other Criteria

 Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public

Steinberg, Leo.  Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. 1975.  Read

Leo Steinberg voices his complex experience of approaching art (Neo Dada) that he, great critic that he was, did not immediately understand.  His reaction is an important lesson in humility and learning.

Leo Steinberg (36) “My own first reaction was normal.  I disliked the show, and would galdy have thought it a bore.  Yet it depressed me and I wasn’t sure why.  Then I began to recognize in myself all the classical symptoms of a philistines reaction to modern art.  I was angry at the artist, as if her had invited me to a meal, only to serve something uneatable…I was irritated at some of my friends for pretending to like it—but with an uneasy suspicion that perhaps they did like it, so that I was really mad at myself for being so dull, and at the whole situation for showing me up.”

Leo Steinberg 38-39

“I am alone with this thing, and it is up to me to evaluate it in the absence of all available standards.  The value which I will put on this painting tests my authenticity as an individual.  Here I can discover whether I am man enough to sustain an encounter with a completely original experience.  Am I escaping it by being overly clever?  There things that I see—are they really me, or have I been eavesdropping on conversations?  I have been trying to formulate certain meanings seen in this art; are they designed to demonstrate something about myself, or are they really an inward experience? Do the things I have just written seem very good to me? This threat of vanity is more serious than the mere rise of nonsense; and yet I wonder—ten years from now, I will I look silly if It should become universally obvious that all this was junk?  Or have I failed myself already in asking these questions, being overly conscious about myself, instead of surrendering to the experience which is reaching out to me?

"Alfred Barr, of hte mOuseum of Modern Art, has said that if one out of ten piantings that the Museum of Modenr Art has acquired should remain valid in retrospect, they will ahve scored very well.  I take this to be, not a confession of inadequate judgment, but an assertion about the nature of contemporary art."

"[Modern Art] demands a decision in which you discover yourself, your own quality as a man; and this decision is always a 'leap of faith' to use Kierkegaard's famous term."

Comparing Modern art to Exodus 16.  "When I read this much, I stopped and thought how like contemporary art this manna was; not only in that it was a God-send, or in that it was a desert food, or in that no one could quite understantd it--for "they wist not what it was." Nor even because a part of it was immediately put away in a museum--"to be kept for your generations"; nor yet because the taste of it has remained a mystery, since the phrase here translated as "wafers made with honey," is in fact, a blind guess; the Hebrew word i sone that occurs nowhere else in ancienct literature, and no one knows what it really means.  Whence the legend that manna tasted to every man as he wished; though it came from without, it's taste in the mouth was his own making."


  =Art always makes its public feel othered—great new art always makes us uncomfortable, makes

anxieties of the modern moment felt and real.

            +This has been true since at least Cezanne.

=Leo Stein’s example: hated Matisse but went again and again to see the paintings and after a few weeks decided he loved them and bought them up.  This is necessary humility when approaching new great art.

=”Contemporary art is constantly inviting us to applaud the destruction of values which we still cherish.” …. “It seems to me a function of modern art to transmit this anxiety to the spectator.”

=Steinberg laments his anxiety of “not getting it” with Neo Dada, particularly J. Johns, but sticks with it.

=”If I dislike these things, why not ignore them?” – well most people do, but the heroicism of the art critic is his humility and doggedness to stick with things he doesn’t like and persevere, to understand precisely why or why not, to not simply give a glib kneejerk reaction.

=Art as analogous to god-sent mana (a hapax legnomenon, no one knows what it is) – manna tastes to everyoy man as he wished; the gathering of manna and art must be done as a leap of faith.

Steinberg, Leo “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art”

Steinberg notes the wide range of critical responses to Johns, many of them wrong (this is the mark of great art)

            =Then he hones on in the 8 basic attributes of Johns paintings (p.26)

                        +Most critical is the flatness, the unification of signifier and signified.

1.      All man-made objects.  Man-made assuresthat they are makeable; non man-made things can only be simulated (skies, trees, space)

2.      All objects are commonplace – but Johns doesn’t give us the commonplace in a painting, he gives us the commonplace as a painting. What Johns loves about the commonplace is that they are nobody’s preference, not even his own (this is the paradox).

3.      All respected ritual or conventional shapes.  Using conventional things so he can worry about deeper issues.  Did you pick these letter types because you like them or because theats hwo the setencils come?  JJ: But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way.

a.       He likes things that are, in their quotidian state, seem not to be art yet.

4.      Johns subjects are wholeentities or complete systems; full objects, whole primary colors, can be looked at from any angle or side.. meh okay. He is playing with the limits of meaning making.

5.      Johns objects/systems predetmine the pictures shape and dimensions. Naturally. 1:1; ratio.

6.      Flatness – you can’t smoke Magritte’s pipe, but you can throw darts at Johns targt.

7.      Non-heirarchic – maintaining “alloverness” democrartic equality to all parts fo the painting.

a.       “Moral: Nothing in art is so true that its opposite cannot be made even truer.”

8.      Johns objects associate with sufferance, not action. They are receptive things; they let things happen.

What is painting? ß central question of Johns.

Johns advances many hypotheses.  What is the surface of a painting? Not a window, nor an uprighted tray, noran object with projections into actual space…. He want spictures to be objects alone.

In conclusion: Johns puts two flinty thingsotgether in a picure and makes them work against one another so hard tha the mind is sparked.

“The elements of Johns’s picture lie side by side like flint pebbles.  Rubbed together they could spark a flame, and that istheir meaning perhaps.  But johns does not claim to have ever heard othe invention of ifre. He merely locates the pebbles.”

“Becoming a painter is like groping one’s way out of a cluttered room in the dark.  Beginning to walk, he tubmbles over another man’s couch, changes course to colloide with someone’s commode, then buttsagainst a work table that can’t be disturbed.”

“It is in the character of the critic to say no more in his best moment sthan whay everyone in the following season epeats; he is the generator of the cliché.”

To achieve Pollock’s effect through absolute banality, without the pretension of heroism and hypermasculinity.