After conducting an online keyword search and sifting through photo sharing sites, Swiss/French artist Corinne Vionnet carefully layers 200 to 300 photos on top of one another until she gets her desired result.

We are looking at a monument that we somehow already know. As a part of knowing that we have also been there, we need the photograph to fix the memory of our visit. By pressing the shutter button, time becomes event, a unique moment. The significance of the representation of the subject is shifted to the presence of the photographers themselves.

The images made by tourists are picture imitations. They demonstrate the desire to produce a photograph of an image that already exists, one like those we have already seen. It is in fact a style of manipulating the viewer. Why do we always take the same picture, if not to interact with what already exists? The photograph proves our presence. And to be true, the picture will be perfectly consistent with the pictures in our collective memory.”They demonstrate the desire to produce a photograph of an image that already exists, one like those we have already seen. It is in fact a style of manipulating the viewer. Why do we always take the same picture, if not to interact with what already exists? The photograph proves our presence. And to be true, the picture will be perfectly consistent with the pictures in our collective memory.”

[Interview with Welmer Keesmaat in YVI #2 Consumption, 2008]

It’s not so much the sheer quantity of photos available on the Internet, appropriated through total strangers without their knowledge, as well as examining photography simply as a record, or the gee-ain’t-that-neat technical meme of digitally “creating an Impressionist painting” but the similarity of the resulting images that is truly startling because it confronts our ideals about expectations and memory. How do we envision a place, person or event to look, in terms of appearance, in anticipation (before it happens), or reflection (after it happens) of the subject? I think it would look something like these photographs. Hundreds of pictures of the thing from slightly different angles, but not an exact representation of the thing itself. Plato’s cave. What is real? The shadows on the wall? The objects creating the shadows? Or the light behind them? …What is more important in human consciousness in imagined and expressed visual and verbal expectations and memories of a person or thing? The Eiffel Tower the Object? Or capturing/narrating Eiffel-Towerness?

Re-posting a few questions I posed on Tu Scene earlier today because I was kind of ready to ask them in terms of my own personal artistic practice lately (see the TuScene comment further down), although I felt given the conversation with my friends about local Tucson art, it was a good idea to start with TuScene, as I am trying to put forth more deeper-level questions and incisive comments on the blog. Quality, not quantity. But much like Mr. Leviton says in the comments, I feel these things take me, personally, some time to process, which is why I have such a difficult time articulating my thoughts in writing. Yet initially in talking to people, no problem — no problem at all! I can nerd out and rant for hours. But I don’t think the conversation really carries the weight and legitimacy of the topic. As I say below, it took several days of reflection to even ask what I felt were appropriate questions to respectfully ask the readers, and it will probably take me much longer to arrive at some answers for myself. Nonetheless, I’m quite pleased a nice little conversation got going right away with other Tucson artists and gallery proprietors I truly admire.

A few days ago, some artist-friends and I got into some post-game commentary over beers at Congress about a show we’d seen earlier in the evening. We’d all seen about half of the work before other other venues around town within the last year. In the heat of the discussion, I agreed with them that seeing replays was kind of a turn-off and just brought down the presentation as a whole. Now I’m not so sure how much it really matters. We’re hardcore art nerds and go to nearly every show that we can so we probably see, and I mean really look at and remember a lot more art than most people.  I think this cross-pollination exists only in our little unofficial ivory tower, since we’ve strayed so far from the casual art appreciator who may visit one gallery that caters to the tastes of their particular social scene, but not another. With this in mind, I’d like to pose a few questions to artists, gallerists, academics, and art professionals:

• Do you let your work “leak” on the web (your personal site or Facebook, Flickr, etc.) before putting it in a show? Or do you reveal it publicly in an exhibit, then put it up on the web?
• Do you prepare a body of work, then share it online? Or do you post images as you complete each piece?
• Are there (loose) professional standards for any of these practices, or are they still developing as technology expands?
• To what extent does revealing your work depend on context? For example, if you have work in a major show, do you keep everything secret until the opening? If it’s a less-important show or a short-run, do you recycle old work?

This is where the written word has the advantage over visual art. One can choose to revel in, explore, partially accept cafeteria-style, be indifferent to, ignorant of, or reject the parameters of the four-dimensional experience set by the artist, but short of putting down the book, or trying to read a book in a language one doesn’t understand, one cannot escape the immutable structure of words set forth by the writer. I use the term structure loosely, maybe I should say construct of words. Words written on a page provide a defined space for experience, a four-dimensional experience that takes place in the mind. Now, what one sees in the mind’s eye is open to the reader’s interpretation, but the paramaters are the same: the words provided by the writer, the rectangular shape of the page, reading from left to right, turning pages from left to right. Art does not come with inherent directions for interaction. And if there are, they are usually given in words in the form of statements, descriptions.

Conceptual art is an inadequate term because it emphasizes concept over response, and if one doesn’t understand or even see the concept, it’s not perceived as art, or it is somehow belitting on the behalf of the executor. Maybe it should be called experiential art (or situational art? sit-art?) because regardless of whether or not one “gets” it, one has undeniably still experienced it. The mode of entering the situation is therefore established, like the pages of a book; the point is not so much to understand, but to undergo.

* I spent late last year and early this year composing an essay in my head about why erotica is not art. It’s unpublished on here because as I started to write it out longhand, I could see all the holes in the argument. I knew then that I would be headed back towards this acceptance of a wider range of visual expression as art, I just wasn’t ready to take that position yet.

I saw Easy Rider (one of my favorite movies for tragicomedy, fashion, weirdo characters, editing, music) in a movie theater last week. This scene stuck with me, I think because of the friends I saw the movie with. I started thinking about relationships, and how it’s not about who are what you are, it’s about what you represent to the other person in any sort of relationship. It always goes back to the Self. Ultimately, we cannot interpret each other, no matter how strong the connection, because it’s impossible to know what is going on in someone else’s head, looking through their eyes. We can only wonder why a person responds a certain way. It is because of what one represents to the other individual, categorized, referenced in their own personal semiotic taxonomy.

Memory is the same way. It’s not about what a memory is, or who was in it, or re-living what transpired. It’s about what those things signify/represent to you about yourself, classified, providing a map to navigate your inner and outer world.

Lately I’ve been thinking that artists need to re-consider the way they present themselves to the public in dress and unfortunately, in some cases, basic hygiene. As governmental entities and charitable organizations run lower and lower on funds, public outcry grows against their financial footing of non-essential projects that support lazy artists. Now is the time for us to combat that crank stereotype. I’ve seen artists who go all-out on the presentation/installation of their work to near-perfection yet viewer-ly accessible as possible, and arrive at their own opening in blown-out khaki shorts, birkenstocks with nasty cracked toenails hanging out (in the over 35-ish crowd) or stanky All-Stars, pit-stained t-shirt and oily hair (if they’re under about 35).

Same goes for interaction with non-artists. By the word interaction, I mean interpersonal relations beyond things like manners, etiquette, sense of humor. Throwing our visionary weirdness in in the face of squares who will never “get it” doesn’t help to win respect and will continue to put us on the fringes of public opinion in emphasizing the vital role the arts play in everyday life and education. Rather than being militant eccentrics in our dealings with average Joes, let’s shift that energy to doing really, really awesome work and producing mind-blowing public shows with the best of the money, time and energy we have. This will take a lot of honesty with ourselves: honesty about our own apperance and actions, honesty about how the other half really lives and thinks, honesty about our own expectations vs expectations of others. It takes a great deal of consideration, maybe not quite courtesy or “dumbing-down,” but consideration nonetheless.

It’s OK to be who we are, knowing that we can let ourselves go with other creative types, but I’ve found it’s effective to meet people halfway upon similarities, rather than getting them to come “up” to your level. For me, this is not an easy thing to do; it takes a lot of energy. Sometimes the most open-mindedness you can sneak into a stoic viewer is a nod of acknowledgment; other times, a little consideration in your interactions with a person opens doors and windows in them that they didn’t even know they had.

If you are going to ask for public or private financial charity, take extra care in how you present yourself. While the mystique of the bizarre worked for 20th century artists shaking the centuries-old system of academies, salons and commissioned funding by patrons, we’re now on the threshold of the post-fame era. Luck is running out, being in the right place at the right time is a four dimensional gamble in which the odds are against you a kajillion to 1. Now, anything, happening anyplace and anytime can be self-promoted online, yet needs to be well-presented to get the attention. I’ve noticed that art and fashion blogs (and bloggers, as they choose to reveal their appearance) whose photos/graphics/writing are well-realized, hitting the ideal nail on the head, get the attention, while others slightly less than masterful in those forms — however inspired — fall more or less to the wayside.

Presentation isn’t about marketing — I think that conversation is being phased out, slowly, as laypeople’s web and photography skills increase, and also simply because marketing lacks what is at the core of art: grabbing someone by the lapels out of the Everyday and teleporting them through a psychic pneumatic tube into the hyper-temporal, spiritual Whatever. And not always on an “elevated” or “higher” plane, just a different, and important one. Making them honorary shamans.

Maybe this “etiquette” I speak of is the backlash away from the self-centered focus concerning embrace or rejection, sobered into the austerity of simply being respected.

- There is no measurement or finite definition of “beauty.” There’s beautiful, ugly-beautiful, beautiful-ugly. Yet it’s more than just a matter of taste. The commonality between these two so-called extremes are something that excites and engages the mind and the heart.

- Presentation is the vehicle of beauty. How effectively it is transmitted from the mind/heart of the person making the work to depends on presentation. Presentation requires the creator to place themselves on the receiving end to determine how best to transmit the concept. There are some things you have to experience first hand to be felt as beautiful, other things you can be as, or even more gratifying as second hand experiences in writing, in photographic/video reproduction, etc.

- Responsiblity for beauty (inadvertently?) creates power structures: the beautiful thought itself as seen in the mind/heart of the creator, wanting to transmit that beauty to others in a representational manner. The receiver of that thought and their empathy with the creator, as well as their own interpretation of the representation. Being a presenter of beauty, such as a publisher, gallery, venue, production company, even a book reviewer, requires a higher level of responsibility. This, in turn, requires the presenter to hold the artist accountable for their work, the reasoning behind it, and in the presentation of it.

- What part of your body does your voice come from?

In the pamphlet’s introduction, Mr. Mackey writes “Convenience stores are our landmarks, our meeting places, a part of our cultural heritage.” Since my journey moving a houseful of furniture, a husband and a 57 lb. dog 1,000 miles from Austin to here just over two months ago, I strongly concur with the idea of convenience stores as landmarks and cultural sites. But perhaps “meeting places” needs to be qualified. Yes, they are gathering places in the sense that everyone simply goes there because, at some point, you have to. Indeed, they’re convenient but they are really more like fleeing places. Places of shame. Places to starve the body of nutrition with a high fructose carbonated 32 oz. fountain drink and possibly a cheese powder-covered corn-based snack to get me through the next 200 miles, items I’d never purchase in my regular grocery shopping. When traveling in-town, a place to occasionally stop for a 99-cent tall boy to sip covertly in the car en route to a party. For others, to buy candy and porn and beef jerky and skewered hot dogs. Jarring, uncomfortable places with faceless consumers and workers that I want to exit as soon as possible, praying litanies to Our Lady of Clean Restrooms. A place of its own exclusive mood, like a hotel. Just as Koestenbaum identifies the taxonomy of what he calls “hotel women,” surely the shadows of convenience store women exist (subsist?) in a similar twilight realm.

P.S. DRAWN, on display in the gallery, was also pretty cool, for a drawing show (hint: it’s also a fundraiser). I especially liked the glitter on posterboard pieces.

Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, first published in 1973,  consists mostly of hundereds of clips from a small town newspaper in the 1890′s and early 1900′s. Stories of murders, epidemic disease, farmers being hauled off to the nuthouse – catastrophic life events summed up in a few brief sentences. Spliced between the listings from each year are a series archival images by the local studio photographer: individuals standing in front of their homes and businesses, funeral flower arrangements, studio portraits, corpse portraits, horses, candid snapshots. Lesy shows how one’s trained response to history is to experience it in a Big Picture sense, the persepective we were taught in school, separated from intimate individual lives. The reader/viewer zooms sharply in to understand the misery of late 19th century rural life. Yet in the repetition of reports, we are re-detatched, cut off at the pass from feeling sorry for the victims. At the end, we realize there is indeed a distinct line between understanding and empathy.

Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum is rather simplistically described as “two books in one,” like a buy-one-get-one free sale. But really it’s two books side-by-side: a pulp novel set in a non-place, non-time at a Hollywood hotel in one column, and in a second column on each page, a series of documents – dossiers – incoporating literature, music, poetry and visual art describing and analyzing what Koestenbaum calls hotel theory. We all know this mood. My mom calls it “livin’ the Motel Life” (our standard was more Motel 6 than Marriott). It’s both indulgent and grating. You arrive at a hotel. It’s afternoon, it’s evening, you’re tired from being cooped up in the car or plane. You first turn on the air conditioner, go to the ice machine and drink a Coke with ice from plastic cups wrapped in cellophane, or perhaps the paper-covered glass tumblers. The toilet paper is folded into a point. You wonder whether to re-hang your towels or throw them on the floor. Maybe you have some Tom’s peanut butter-cheese crackers or peanut M&M’s from the vending machine – something you’d never eat at home – or go swimming in the pool. You keep vigil watching cable TV, trying to ignore the silence/noise of the faceless strangers staying in identical cells all around you by cranking up the A/C. The streetlight shines through the uncloseable chink in the curtains right onto your pillow. It’s worse when you have to stay more than one night. As you’re reading the book (and the choice is entirely yours on how to read it), you are reading one column only but you know there is something going on simultaneously on the other side of it, you just can’t participate in both. Just like a hotel room or lobby.

Thursday, October 30, MOCA Press in Tucson presents its Multiples & Monographs imprint with Bill Mackey’s Field Guide and Check Lists in a limited edition of 75 copies. According to the email invitation, Mackey playfully analyzes our current patterns of consumption and leisure, appropriating the classic practices of ethnographers and natural scientists. The $10 member/$25 non-member admission includes the Mackey created pamphlet: Field Guide to Tucson Convenience Stores. I’m really curious to get my hands on a copy of this. Ever since I moved to Tucson, I’ve been fascinated by the large number of winged 60′s convenience store throughout the city. I don’t think I’ve seen stores quite like these except for random backstreets in Ft. Worth and what was, in the early 1980′s, the only 24-hour store in New Braunfels. I’ve been waiting till the weather gets cooler (yes, I’m a big pansy, but it’s not the heat that’ll get ya here, it’s the dryness) to spend a day cycling around town and taking documentary photos of all the 60′s stores I can find.