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oracles, culture, graphic design
Passing the Buck
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Downloaded clip art from Microsoft Office.

I feel the world financial depression (which started in the U.S.) was caused by an ethical crisis more than anything else. We all say it at work: “not my problem.” But imagine millions of people saying it, over and over. And if everyone’s saying it, eventually it’s going to be everyone’s problem. The optimistic feel of clip art covers up the real complacency and haste of working in the. It’s not that people are inept or wasteful or ridiculous as portrayed on the TV show, The Office. Example: I worked as an in-house designer at a title company during the Exuberance, and the mortgage/loan officers were constantly pressuring the escrow officers and assistants to closethedeal, closethedeal, closethedeal, as fast as possible. And in truth, the problem wasn’t theirs, at the time. Now I work for a printing company, and it’s much more black and white. You either get the job done on time, or you don’t. Eventually I’d like to turn this into a massive piece, several feet wide/tall.
oracles, culture, style, critique, observations
Velvet Rebellion
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Prologue

1. Sametová Revoluce. The Velvet Revolution (Czech: sametová revoluce) (November 16- December 29, 1989) refers to a non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of the Communist government. On November 17, 1989, riot police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration in Prague. That event sparked a series of popular demonstrations from November 19 to late December. By November 20 the number of peaceful protesters assembled in Prague had swelled from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated half-million. A two-hour general strike, involving all citizens of Czechoslovakia, was held on November 27.

2. Tucson, Arizona. We drove past a couple wearing 6″ black platform boots, some sort of zippered pants-like skirt or skirt-like pants, black trenchcoats, flowing black tresses and inked-out eyes, lurching to the bus stop or corner store in the blazing summer sun. The sidewalk was otherwise desolate and treeless: a mundane concrete desert. It didn’t matter which one was male or female. I asked my husband, “What’s up with all the goth-y people here?”

I.
A Big-small City

Tucson is a mid-size city, not affluent. A little too big and not “cultured” enough to be called a college town. Like any other big-small American city, I would imagine artistically-inclined kids growing up here feel trapped in an unsophisticated society. Goth, a lifestyle that elevates music, art and fashion, offers a mode of connection with a larger artistic/cultural movement. And, one hopes, a sense of belonging. A sense of understanding and validation.

II.
Social Posturing

Trends are self-perpetuating. We are social creatures, even the goths who appear to wallow in misery and loneliness. Here, they are seen as the “cool,” artistic people, much like hipsters are in Austin. This starts in the adolescent years: say there’s a 6th or 7th grade kid who’s discovering he or she doesn’t fit in. Then, after summer, they come back to school all blacked-out and with a new, stronger sense of self. This happens every day in Austin, except the changelings are about 5-10 years older: young people arrive from across the country wearing American Apparel t-shirts and All-Stars; three months later they’ve latched on to giant sunglasses and neon.

In all trends/styles/communities, there is room for creativity and distinctions within the group, when you are part of it. But from an outsider’s perspective, everyone looks the same, the music sounds the same. I wonder if an outsider wrote this post on the Austin craigslist missed connections awhile back (paraphrased from memory):

m4w (Beauty Bar): You looked so hot in your skinny jeans, vintage shirt, pointy shoes and unusual haircut.

The description was lengthier and a bit more elaborate, but the tone was just as cutting. In Tucson, go to the craigslist musician category. Everyone wants to start a death metal/grindcore/punk band. To me, it all sounds the same. But then again, I can point out the subtleties between German trance and nu acid house, and why one is boring and the other is cool. For example, today I found a remix of Mondotek’s Alive (related to the TEPR remix of Yelle’s “A Cause des Garçons”) on an mp3 blog that primarily posted the type of *yawn* house played after 12am in Top 40 clubs.

The point is, here in Tucson, goth is a mainstream alternative lifestyle, like hipsterism is in Austin. For further analysis on this subject, I suggest Josh Aiello and Matthew Shultz’s brilliant A Field Guide To The Urban Hipster. It’s a bit dated (2003), certain groups have evolved, but it begs the question “How weird do you wanna be?” Are suburban soccer moms the Truly Weird? Are Nascar dads the Truly Weird? Are white male capitalist entreprenurs the Truly Weird? What about factory workers? How do they see themselves as a group? How do they see us? Today, the true artist (my definition: dedicated, driven, underground) no longer labors away in a decrepit urban warehouse or in the rustic elegance of a country barn, (s)he works out of his garage in a tract housing development or out of a corner of their living room in a nondescript apartment complex. Maybe the quality of their work isn’t that great, but that depends on what your definition of “good” and “quality” are.

III.
The Twilight Zone

I wish more research would be done on why, particularly in Mexican-American border regions, goth is the mainstream alternative, when in many other areas of the U.S., it died at the turn of the 21st century along with candy ravers. A few months ago, I watched a documentary about Latino hardcore Morrissey fans in the Los Angeles area called Is It Really So Strange? What could’ve been a great story shed little light on the reasons behind the obsession from this unexpected demographic because the narrator/producer was, like, the whitest, dryest most monotone guy. Ever. He just couldn’t connect with the people he was interviewing and not so much because he was not a part of their culture, but because he was just a walking social disaster. Naturally, his interview subjects were reticent about their fandom, which made for a total disappointment of a film.

I’ve asked my goth-leaning brother- and cousin-in-law about why they’re all into vampires and ornate silver crosses and black clothes. They grin and say, “I’m just in touch with the (or did they say my?)… Dark Side.” I’ve prodded further on one or two occasions: why? What’s so cool about the dark side? “Life is dark and pointless,” they intone. Nihlism. Emptiness. A daily drudgery between the next party or fuck, and even suffering and pain is a part of those experiences as you commiserate with your goth-y buddies.

But why Mexican-Americans? Is it a rebellion against the Old School ways of their families and elders? Is it a depressive facet of the ultra-complex experience of being bi-cultural (e.g. the Sad Clown)? Or, is it a rebellion against others of their own generation: the urban gangsters or the straight-edge traditional kids?

My husband and I say after we get south of San Antonio on IH-37 that we are entering The Twilight Zone. It’s a gradient that runs all the way to The Valley, growing stronger when we veer onto Hwy. 77 in Robstown, on through Raymondville and Harlingen, and finally coming to a delta in his family’s home of Brownsville, at the southernmost tip of Texas, the Mexican border; nothing beyond it but the mouth of the Rio Grande, endless flatlands, coastal marshes, and then the open Gulf. Everything “American” is tinged with Mexican culture and perspective. The clerks working in the chain stores in Sunrise Mall (warning: don’t go the the homepage, some really blaring Broadway-style music turns on) give you your total in Spanish before switching to English. The hot food focus in convenience stores is tacos and tamales, not hot dogs and fried chicken. And everything Mexican is infused with the crass commercialism of American society, creating a veneer of quaintness over the commercialism, or the crushing thumb of consumerism blunting what is unique and traditional.

IV.
Drug of Choice

César posed the goth question to his Tucson host when he came out to take a look around prior to our move. His tour guide said, “It’s because there’s a lot of meth around here.”

Let’s think about this. I’ve seen plenty of bleary-eyed redneck meth heads driving beat-up old pick-up trucks back in Texas, particularly in impoverished rural Colorado County where my mom commutes to teach middle school. The town’s water tower proclaims it’s “The White-Tailed Deer Capital of Texas” (read: hunting). My dad jokes that it should really say, “The White Trash Capital of Texas.”

So what does a style of dress have to do with a drug of choice? Not all hippies are potheads; not all potheads are hippies. Not all hipsters are cokeheads; not all cokeheads are hipsters. Not all crackwhores are urban; not urban females are crackwhores. Etc., etc.

Drugs are most certainly not a reason.

V.
Relative to… What?

This has inadvertently gone from a cultural sketch and self-analysis of my mild annoyance with goths. I personally thought they were more silly than anything else, like on Chris Kattan and Molly Shannon’s sketch “Goth Talk” on Saturday Night Live in the 1990’s.

A few weeks ago, I went to a dance party night at one of the cooler bars here in hopes of hearing something comforting, something familiar, something that reminded me of home: hipster blog music. But many people used it as an excuse to showcase their full-on fetishwear (and I use the term “on” loosely). I could barely stop staring as a girl in a light pink bikini top, matching hot pants, feather boa and Christmas pageant angel wings danced by herself till her friends got there: a dude sporting a kilt and mohawk and his girlfriend, fully stockinged and corseted. And they were, shall we say, not attractive in a conventional sense that would’ve made this display, um, nice to look at.

Now I find myself questioning my own style in clothes, taste in music, art and home décor, diction, inflection and body language as an outsider to the mainstream alternative lifestyle here. I wonder, what to non-hipsters think of hipsters in Austin? Do they look at our equally outlandish 80’s outfits with the same mild annoyance? The wrinkled nose? The curled lip?

One of the reasons I was not too keen on moving away from Austin was that I felt I’d found my place there. A place where many a nerdy, artsy, goofy-looking middle school pariahs could find community, a sense of belonging. A place to love and be loved. Maybe I would’ve grown tired of belonging eventually. “Once a rebel…” Or perhaps it was too late; I was sucked in. On the other hand, my husband had been rebelling against what he considers to be an oppressive atmosphere for a number of years, and I think his reasoning is the catalyst: our generation is not rebelling against the older generation like our parents did when they were young. That tie has already been broken. Our rebellion is against one another, our peers; but it is a Velvet Rebellion, an oxymoron. “Rebellion” implies hostility, anger, violence. Yet we do it through our clothes. It is soft, expressive, joyful - Velvet. Why? Are our differences with each other so negligible that they’re not worth fighting for? Have we grown so distant that we don’t know any other way to communicate? Do we not know how to fight? Are we afraid? Are we too selfish to abandon the system we are products of?

Epilogue

A newish writer-friend mused over drinks the other night, “I wonder when people are just going to rise up and say, ‘Fuck the system.’ ” I wondered to myself what he meant by “people.”
oracles, culture, advertising, style, critique
Vogueing Out
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A couple of things caught my eye as I cracked open the March 2008 issue of VOGUE yesterday.

1) Is high fashion trying to angle itself with high art? Art has been what I would call “street hip” for a couple of years now, but for me, the deer heads, power lines and raindrops are all blurring together. D&G, Prada and Nordstrom ads (and that’s just in the first 20 pages) showed models posed in completely painted scenes or art studios, taking a more high art direction. The merit of the art itself isn’t the issue and a critical person could say it’s insipid to hijack art to sell clothes, but it seems to me that the message is that art is still elevated above the clothes. Art is absolute, fashion is mutable, both are visual cousins and the weaker, more changeable entity aligning itself with the stronger can only serve to build its brand. If you see fashion as fantasy, these ads could be a prediction of our fantasies to come. While 99% of people probably won’t wear anything from a runway in their lifetime, the culture of fashion can serve as a compass to where larger popular culture might go.

On a side note, it’s always interesting to me how fashion ads rely almost exclusively on photography, and what little effort is made towards incorporating graphic design is often badly handled. I usually don’t care for the photography in Marc Jacobs ads, it is one of the exceptions where the design is well-executed and not overbearing. And I don’t think there should be more graphic design in fashion branding necessarily, when you have outstanding photography, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, it’s just interesting to not to see it used more often, especially with younger designers up against the grand old fashion houses.

2) Older celebrities trying to look 19, growing old very un-gracefully. Highly disturbing.
oracles, culture, critique
Corporate Art takes on a new form
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I packed in with scores of my closest fellow hipster doofi at the opening of the Scion Installation 4: It’s A Beautiful World at Gallery Lombardi on Saturday. The whole event rubbed me horribly wrong (not the gallery’s fault).

1. Why have an opening in an 18′ x 30′ gallery where hundreds of people are expected to come out? Surely Scion has enough money to rent or create a venue that will accommodate an crowd that size. It was the main reason I left after 15 minutes. It wasn’t quaint or charming, as can sometimes happen when a certain magic in the air brings a lot of people to a show. It was a logistical nightmare.

2. The message wasn’t “Hey, Scion is sponsoring this show to help inspire the community that art is an important part of our culture.” It was, “Hey, Scion just wants to affirm that you are indeed hip and cool by coming to this event, and giving away lots of logoed schwag telling you that our cars will make you look hip and cool.”

3. The illustration/graphic design/assemblages I could kinda make out over all the nappy heads was not that impressive.

4 . Most of all, it bothered me that Scion was using art as “experience marketing,” but that seems to be the way things are going. I heard somewhere that in the 21st century economy in America will not be the leader in manufacturing goods or even providing services, instead we will lead the globe in designing experiences. That is, creating a comfort world of smoke and mirrors for the individual. As a result, the trend will continue grow for art (creating art, going to an opening, even collecting) to be a po-mo unbalancing act that affirms a sense of self and massages the ego. The problem I have is that it’s detrimental to one’s culture when those choices are presented (and thus controlled) by large corporations. I think we may even see the definition of art get narrower and narrower again. Although I don’t suppose it’s any different from the Post-Renaissance Venetians. The Church and the aristocracy had the market cornered on artistic freedom since they both had a societal agenda to perpetuate, and it seemed to keep everyone in their place for a good long time.
culture, paintings, ideas, critique, observations
Beauty vs Decoration
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Revisiting the bird silhouette that was a major element in my 2004 paintings has made me realize how much my experiences over the past 3-4 years have changed my approach to making art. When I first started using the bird silhouette, it was basically a copy of some hipster pop art I saw on Gallery Lombardi’s website. I say the bird was an “element” or an “image” rather than a “theme” because theme would imply there was some kind of meaning behind it. There wasn’t.

The same goes for a lot of hipster pop art. Art, for this sort, means a cool design with a lot of well-executed elements, but no theme or underlying idea. Which is why I really dug AMOA’s recent exhibit EXTRA-ORDINARY: The Everyday Object in American Art. The docent who gave the tour I went on admitted that a few of the pieces in the show didn’t really have a particular message, their purpose was more about the quintessential postmodern experience: to throw more questions back in the face of the viewer, to unsettle one’s perspective. Was it art or design… or neither? There was something deeply satisfying about hearing this question actually being acknowledged to the public by an art institution.

This question arose again as I re-worked my bird paintings. It was the first time I had fun painting in quite some time. The graphic designer part of my mind took over and went into cruise mode - the side that can easily make very simple things look interesting. Not that I don’t enjoy doing “real” paintings, instead the thought process at work there is a meditation on the execution of the piece.

Since most of my work over the past couple of years grown more in that direction, I embarked on the new-old bird paintings as a lab experiment in beauty vs decoration. Decoration makes people happy. Beauty makes them think. Decoration is cute, superficial. Beauty can appear ugly or pleasing, the beauty itself is in underlying (in the process, the meaning, the mystery).

I don’t think average people want to buy or learn or educate themselves about beautiful things these days. I’ve tried to see how/why one can call something art, and what goes into the making of it. I don’t think the bird paintings are art. They are design, they are decoration. Maybe there’s a little meaning - the bird is such an archetypal metaphor - but not too much. Just enough to make people feel elevated a little without dealing with the guilt of a message or solving a mystery. Art Lite.

On this note, I’m also conducting a marketing experiment during E.A.S.T. I’m not displaying any of my “real” work, only the Art Lite bird paintings. I get a lot of positive feedback about my plates and fabric paintings, whether to my face or whether I mill about my work at a show as a fly on the wall. But I get the impression that people don’t know what to make of it (I’m well-aware that I need to improve my presentation - I think that would help). If these decorative pieces prove to be more popular, I want to see that dynamic in action. Who knows, I might even sell one to a total stranger.

Then I’ll go back to painting on pillowcases.
books, oracles, culture, observations
Historical Correlations
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I finally found what I was looking for in Culture and Society in Venice 1470-1790: the connection between the Postmodern and the Post-Renaissance (may be my own coinage). The Counter-Reformation was a conservative backlash against the Humanists and the Protestants in which the Church machine sought to regain control of the people through art, music and intellectual life. It could be that we are entering a similar phase now after the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s through the 1990s. A bloody time of religious strife (100 Years War, anyone?), a time of ornate insignificance (palazzos:altarpieces; McMansions:myspace pages).

Within this context, read this passage regarding the educational schism in the Post-Renaissance. I feel it strongly correlates to today’s academic environment and art world.

The Counter-Reformation influence did perhaps have the effect of pushing classical studies in the direction of compendious accumulation of knowledge devoid of ultimate philosophical or ethical purpose. Precisely because of this, however, it may hae stimulated the direction of scholarly energies into other fields of enquiry such as antiquarian studies, historiography and even science. At the same time, the climate of intellectual caution which it engendered probably tended to canalise these energies into the patient accumulation of facts; while enquiry was restricted, erudition burgeoned.

It has become common to refer to an “erudite” movement in seventeenth-century scholarship, the roots of which can be seen in Renaissance humanism… Those men of the eighteenth century, especially in France, who rejoiced in the title of philosophes and who believed that their own age was one of “enlightenment,” were to counterpose their own “philosophical history,” which had a strong polemical and didactic purpose, to the “erudite” historiography and antiquarianism of the preceding age, which was essentially concerned with the accumulation of facts…

The ethos of “erudition” can be characterized a belief that facts were in themselves things of value, worthy of being collected, and this did in fact contain certain creative possibilities… Vera historia–”true history”–had a certain literary form, usually based on classical models, it was selective, it dealt essentially with “great events,” which basically meant political and military one, it examined the causes of events… It was distinguished from “annals,” the unadorned record, and again from “antiquities,” the study of “fragments,” whether archaeological remains or isolated documents. The essence of the study of “antiquities” was that it dealt with the fragmentary…

By this time, the intellectual interests of Venetians were, it seems, becoming increasingly encyclopaedic… For instance, there was a tradition of vernacular historiography, basically independent of classical models, which followed annal form or synthesised it with that of vera historia… [B]y the end of the century [1500’s], the passion for accumulating antique sculptures, coins and medals was becoming a veritable mania…

[I]t was the Venetians who…took the lead in raising the claims of the volgare [vernacular] as a literary language… With regard to the visual arts, it was perhaps through interest in antique literature no less than in antique art that the influence of classical scholarship made itself felt in painting in the first instance. By the mid-sixteenth century, the effects of antiquarianism were to be seen with particular clarity in architecture and sculpture…

I think what the Venetians were inspired by is close to the perpetuation of retro imagery in art, design and fashion and the nerding-out about everything old school from comic books to knitting. The acceptance of casual, informal, deeplly first person-based language in everyday use such as email, text messages, and general etiquette as well as in literature does not necessarily stem from the Internet. Rather, the Internet is the vehicle of this language that is educated so it can merely regurgitate, driven away from the philosophical basis of the act of learning as a path to find meaning in life.

But as with any cultural movement, the backlash has already begun from Day 1. Something is bubbling under the surface, we are having the conversations already. I don’t know if I’ll be around to see it, but perhaps a new Enlightenment is coming that will break away from all this.
books, culture, words, critique
The Greater Good and the Lesser Evil
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The more art web- and paper-based publications I read, the less I want to read. Such a polarized landscape. The dumbing-down, super-mass audience camp has been reporting on the same type of subjects over and over for years. Then there are the upper-crust writers that because they self-publish their own blog or magazine feel entitled to say what is good and what isn’t without giving a thorough argument. There is no non-defensive-sounding way to say that; the logic follows that If I’m critical of other writers, it means I’m simply jealous because I can’t bring it. I’m not defending crappy art though. For every snooty artist or critic, there’s a glut of uneducated painters that take their fairy watercolors and abstract acrylics veeerrrrry seriously.

I acknowledge that some art coverage is better than none in the legit and self-published media. But I think the question we should be asking ourselves is, “What does the most good?” Should we in the educated art community enable schoolchildren to draw comics as they please, or should we lead the sliver of the population that really are interested in art in our highbrow ways? Should major newspapers continue writing about dead white guys without a fuss from the local art scene, or should we leave the serious writing to erudite journals with a circulation of 5?

Let’s be honest. We can’t engage everyone. Entertainment is inertia. The acutal learning of information and learning from experiences is a choice (how many times have you told a friend in love to break up with their horrible SO?). I think the key to doing the most good in educating the general public about contemporary art lies in finding means to challenge the hearts and minds of as many people as possible.

But intellectual stiumulation will not get us very far. There’s that pesky emotional factor to consider. Connecting. Meaningfulness. Sincerity. To roughly quote Kant, “To persuade people, you have to appeal to their emotions and desires.” The key also lies in encouraging intimidated viewers and reluctant participants. The key lies in reaching out not just to inform but understand ~~(to live with, to respect, to not appropriate)~~ the marginalized. The key lies in inspiring the average and empowering the promising talent.

For the past week, I’ve been winding my way through a meticulous history of the golden age of the Venetian empire. I checked out Culture and Society in Venice 1470-1790 at the library because I noticed as I was browsing through, there were some thick chapters about art collecting, commissioning, and the role of art in education and society. Yes, I’ve been skipping sections because weeding through its densely-written paragraphs of name after name is like reading the Old Testament books of Chronicles: Hathshebaz begat Jethanashat, Jethanashat begat Uzbekiah, and so on). Overall, reading this book has also brought back slideshow memories of all the undulating (as my professor described them over and over and over) Baroque facades, gilded ornamentation, flourishes of all kinds, robust physiques, elegant gestures and profiles that I absorbed in Italy some years ago. It is obviously incredible to think how much technically difficult and thickly decorative art and architcture were constructed in an intense period of about 100 years (1530-1630), but more impressive is how patient patrons were to wait decades for their palazzo or church to be comleted.

I thought I might be able to glean some nuggets of wisdom from these art-related chapters. The previous book I read asserts that while political history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does tend to stay in patterns for centuries. But this theory does not seem to correlate to art history. Although one could consider the West to be in its golden age of development (perhaps one that the sun is setting on), the societal structure and religious system could not be more different than ours, which formed the basis for most artistic commissions. The writer does raise some interesting points though.
- The noble class was expected to know something of art, or at least understand that having good art in one’s home and being a patron was necessary to exemplify and thus maintain their status.
- This art-producing burst occurred in a less prosperous, stable time after a trade bust due to some conflicts and plagues in the mid-1500’s
- Patrons who were educated and/or enthusiastic about art wrote letters to less-knowledgable cronies, educating them about art in a non-condescending tone. They also promoted and encouraged support for certain artists in their sphere of influence.
- Art theory was highly cohesive–and perhaps limiting–and based on representational (as opposed to purely conceptual) stylisic qualities: invenzione (overall direction, as in a work of theatre), disegno (draftsmanship and formal composition), colore (color, brushstrokes, modeling), naturalezza (realism, capturing the unique character of an individual as shown through their physical form in gestures and facial expressions), belleza (ideal beauty that surpasses nature), grazia (intrinsic elegance, gracefulness).
In some roundabout ways, these ideas sheds a shard of light on the questioning the judgement of good and bad, and offer some means to achieve more incorporation of art in everyday public life while supporting artists financially, and challenging all. Art history may not repeat itself, but history does judge societies on their treatment of art.
oracles, culture, critique
Things to Come: Country Escape vs Urban Immersion
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Perhaps in 10 years or less, the artists loci featured in the Texas Biennial will not be the megapolisesesses of Dalls/Houston/San Antonio/Austin, but rather will sound like a litany of nowheres in the show catalog: Quanah, Palacios, Wied, Electric City, Mount Enterprise, Hico, Uvalde, Valentine… Artists will go on an exodus into the countryside for physical, temporal and spiritual space, as well as a fortifying dose of opposition or at least a certain amount of shock from the longtime locals.

In cities, artists and so-called art lovers are either back-pattingly accepting or snobbishly assuming. They are either real or fake, which can create a polarizing, less nuanced environment to make and think about art in. Artists live in a sea of nuances. In the country, outsiders are responded to with an impenetrable mixture of real acceptance and shunning at the same time within the same people. In cities, we perpetuate the myth of simple country folk. This is true and not true: this juxtaposition is the complex sincerity of the Uninitiated. Nuance is irristible to artists, and so we will seek to de-associate ourselves with the fast pace and small space of the city and its intellectual life. People will make their rural homes art destinations, cities will be shells.

The question is, is the country big enough?

The pasture behind my parents’ house.