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True to character, I jotted down a few points of interest during the panel discussions that I’ve been assessing, but no significant lessons or questions to add to my mental card catalog, much less post about on here.

Yesterday morning I read a negative [but completely justified] review on Keep Austin Stylish of work recently shown at a fashion event that provided the foil I was looking for:

Does taking a pair of jeans and cutting part of them out and replacing it with neon lace and then creating a “top” by simply taking a yard of tulle and tying it around your boobs really make you a designer? The sad thing is that in Austin it apparently does. I’m sorry to have to be the one to say this but, adorning an outfit does not make you a designer.

Photo credit: http://keepaustinstylish.blogspot.com/

This “bad review” was heartening to read because she had the balls to write it, and because it was the truth. You gotta respect that, and she did go back to compliment the hair and make-up, which was actually eye-catching and well-executed. I haven’t subscribed to this blog over a long period of time (a matter of months, vs. 3-4 years as I have with other fashion blogs) so I am not sure how many other shows have been negatively reviewed on the site, but in general, I rarely come across panned fashion shows or collections. * I will say after barely delving into review-territory on Tu Scene in late ’09/early ’10 that even throwing the teensiest amount of negativity into a commentary is what definitely gets the conversation going.

Another foil: there’s a whole genre of online venues for and by graphic designers to vent about pain-in-the-ass clients/bosses/salespeople and their dismal creative preferences: Sh*t The Creative Director/CEO/Account Guy/Client/Intern Says, Comic Sans Criminal [I'd love to see a site called Papyrus Perp! why won't that font just DIE?!]. And of course, outlets like Design Observer, Design You Trust, PRINT, Voice, etc. offering industry news and formal analysis. And a ton of other stuff I don’t even seek out because it’d probably push me over the edge. I worry enough about designing and executing projects 40 hours a week, thank you very much, and I’m lucky to have sympathetic co-workers there in the trenches with me and a kindhearted husband who actually listens when I need to blow off steam about all of the above.

Why compare to art writing to fashion and graphic design? For one, I read comparatively more about these subjects than I do art, and because they are both creative, subjective cultural topics, unlike, say, computer programming or neuroscience. Not that one can’t write passionately about computer programming and neuroscience, but a slogging through lot of the empirical information to get to the juicy conclusion would probably be rather dry for most people. And also because both forms cull hugely from visual art — contemporary, historic, folk. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of conversation and second-guessing about pre-reqs in those communities. You’re either with The Establishment [anyone who has a print magazine presence] or you’re a rogue blogger. If anything, blogging has actually helped the fashion machine reach out and grab consumers by the lapels through the web with all kinds of creepy tracking MO’s. The last couple of years have seen the rise of the Superblogger – once fairly regular people who now wield influence* over media and major brands. [On a side note, wouldn't it be cool to see something like IFB for art bloggers? A support network, not so much an information aggregator]. The only pre-reqs I can gather in a general sense for these two sectors are that the writer must have a passion and knowledge about the subject matter. Graphic design bloggers take it one step further, but not a big one: the expectation is that one works in the field, which would require a piece of paper issued by an educational institution. So while it’s true not just anyone can write well about fashion or graphic design, there certainly seem to be less hang-ups in those communities.

When I write on my own site here, I worry about being invalidated because I didn’t go to a prestigious state school with a strong visual art program and don’t aspire to move to NYC or get my MFA [but Marfa, Alpine or heck, even Silver City would be OK]. Maybe because I don’t possess that background I’m more likely to second-guess myself, and it’s just my perception of a snobbish vibe that actually has little to no existence in Austin, because all the kids who went to state schools with fancy art programs seem to be equally doubtful.

So my question is, why are art writers so self-conscious? As Women & Their Work Executive Director Chris Cowden pointed out [via], Texas doesn’t have as many writers as it should considering the amount of work out there. I don’t ask this in a self-congratulatory, “hey, let’s give ourselves some credit” or self-aggrandizing, “hey, let’s not be so hard on ourselves” Oprah-esque self-esteem check. I’m just curious as to why this conversation is happening with visual art and not these other cultural communities I mentioned.

• Is it because there are formal conventions [or perhaps "trends" is a better word] to graphic and fashion design one can delineate and analyze?
• Is it because unlike fashion and graphic design, art is not completely consumer-driven, thus making its value harder to quantify?
• Are we afraid of hurting relationships with readers and other artists in our locale?**
• Is it a self-image problem? Do we have to be the first at everything, bucking trends unless we’re the ones who establish them?

On a side note, personally, when it comes to trends I just try to give myself a break. I dislike a lot of trendy work, but usually only for that reason — because it’s popular, and when something is popular, the quality and technique and be better manipulated to have a market and influence. But ubiquitousness is not a real reason to be so harsh about it, because I’ve come to realize it’s kind of inhumane. 95% of trendy art won’t even matter in a couple of years anyways, and the 5% of artists that do evolve deserve success because they progressed, and I think if one progresses in any endeavor, it’s a show of real dedication. Another quality to respect. So why get so upset about it? Just take a look at Facehunter and you’ll see fashion conventions are flimsy, transparent and easy to puncture as a layer of cellophane. Graphic design styles, on the other hand, shift slowly from decade to decade, with relatively little hand-wringing over the past, present and future.

Probably the most common trait I can chalk this self-consciousness up to is that most artists who can write decently are people who are caught up in thought about how they’re communicating on several levels, which affects what they produce in their visual art, all through to the way they speak and write. I’m not that surprised when I read something by an artist friend that shows they have a real gift for language as well. These are the people who should be encouraged to write, start a blog. To give whatever they think they might be capable of a try. Honestly, the only other group of cultural contributors I hear stressing more about writing than artists are actual writers!

If you’ve made it this far, you might’ve judged I’m probably not cut out to be in the aforesaid artist-writer group. I guess this is more of a stream-of-consciousness journal entry than a critical essay. In fact, as I was writing this, I kept imagining how I’d discuss this through a Margi Kimball-style brainmapping illustration!

Going back to my sparse written notes, I see a couple of other thoughts I’d like to elaborate upon, but not to nearly this extent. Lucky you!

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* See Mr. Boyd’s wonderfully comprehensive summary of the Summit for further illustration about cheerleading and much more on his Houston-based art blog, The Great God Pan Is Dead.

** Earlier this week, the dazzling WendyB brought up an important caveat about this perception: Famous ≠ Rich. Still, I would love it if designers sent me free shit and all I needed to do in return was snap a few self-modeling photos and post them on my broke-ass but famous blog!

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.

Some of this questioning also comes from being honest with myself about my sphere of influence. I’m an emerging artist and don’t necessarily aspire or expect to be famous (at least, not in my what is currently the last year of my 20′s, or into my 30′s). Establishing myself on a local scale is a main goal, so that is what I look for in my regular reading about nearly anything. I do keep in touch with several Texas sources, since that’s where I’m from and have many friends, but that’s about it. I haven’t lived here long enough to even touch Phoenix, or anywhere else in Arizona for that matter. Since I’m still peeling back the onion that is Tucson, I don’t feel I’m ready to approach those areas.

There’s a real tension between honesty and growth. Being honest with oneself and accepting limitations and inclinations, and growth through nurturing technique and expanding one’s realm of thought. Growing isn’t easy, it’s just plain annoying/frustrating and potentially painful. Here’s an example: for me, asking questions seems more important than finding concrete answers. Yet, if I don’t push myself to really think about possible answers, have internal debates and tête-à-têtes with friends, I’ll never know myself. And acquiring self-knowledge is a form of honesty.

Blogging confounds this even more. Not as a blogger myself, but as a reader, in reading a piece and then following the thread of comments therafter. It gets so tangled! You could say this about a lot of literature and journalism, actually. Two books I read this year, Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory and Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, are broken up to the point that you wonder what the hell is going on a lot of the time. But in the case of blogs and reading articles on the web, the private conversation between the writer and you is disrupted. I take this to heart because reading inspires me so much as a visual artist. I don’t mean I create things that interpret what I read, but I like to read things I attempt to express through art, yet only seem to come out properly in words. (I admit, I’m pretty insecure, although I’m not fishing for praise here).

It seems like every other week there’s something circulating in various media about the death of the newspaper and publishing. What they need to realize is that there’s a new form of reading taking shape on a massive, sweeping scale that I’m trying to grasp, that feels more natural someone 10 years younger than me. The sooner they understand this and try to change instead of forcing/marketing obsolete methods, the better chance they will have to survive. Am I nostalgic? No. I’m sure somewhere down the line, a simulation of consuming printed media will return, not a straightforward fake like the guys hawking handbags on the side of the road, but a sur-reality, the way fashion has been regurgitating the past since the 1970′s, the way suburban shopping centers are designed to look like urban cores, the way “found objects” (both real and reproduced) and crafts in interior design steal the soul of the original. Who knows where this is all going.

All I know is, right now, I feel like I’m looking for some answers. I need some answers. But the questions have slipped my mind so I don’t have much motivation to figure out where to look.

Works in Progress Readings
Friday, October 3
Casa Libre en la Solana
7-9pm
228 N. 4th Avenue
Tucson, AZ 85705

Readings from Michael Sheehan, Lisa Cole, and……………César Díaz!!!!! (my husband)

Casa Libre, a writing center (not afflilated with academia, but working writers) is really a unique and intimate place to hear readings. In an atmospheric old adobe building in downtown Tucson, the Soalrium (Solana) is kind of like a library space with stucco walls, wood-paneled bookshelves and high beamed ceilings. At the first and only reading we’ve been to, we were packed into this room with a few dozen other writers and bookworms, the lights turned down low, ceiling fans whirring and the windows and doors all open. It called to mind some of the Café Libro readings I’d been blessed to attend at Resistencia Bookstore with raúlrsalinas, Dagoberto Gilb, the word/jazz Lowstars, and paying tribute to Gloria Anzaldúa. Definitely some of the sacred moments of life.

I’m 4 generations removed from my Bohemian (literally) ancestors and one generation removed from from speaking Czech as a second language, so I feel a strong interest in Kundera’s writing. It’s not at all a connection – the language, the culture is lost to me, but I believe it’s important to know one’s roots, to know where things came from, and what is happening as a result of that history in the present day. I may be far removed The Old Country, but the fact that they emigrated 125 years ago not only affects my personal history, but the history of a country an ocean away. This is why One After the Other at Arthouse was so engrossing. I was surprised that the person at the front desk gave me an odd, sideways look when, after viewing the 2nd floor, I asked if they had any materials on the history of the building. I was even more surprised when I was handed a dogeared, faded Xerox copy.

I don’t consider myself a writer because it doesn’t come naturally to me. Being an artist is a little different – the ideas have always come through me ever since I could hold a pencil. But I still have my doubts about that because 1) I’m don’t feel educated enough to be sure that my technical execution is up to snuff. Even so (with all the crappy drawings and pop graffiti abounding since 2000), 2) I’m never in the right place at the right time. Life constantly humbles me: my face is forgotten by people I’ve come across several times, I forget people’s names and faces that I’ve met several times, things rarely turn out right in general (which to me means completely, idealistically perfect). Thus it always surprises me when I’m complimented on anything. I think others manifest what’s in between my head, or my 7 grams, better than I could even begin to, which is why I’m sharing this passage from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, among some other fragments forthcoming.

Some time ago, I went across Paris in a taxi with a garrulous driver. He couldn’t sleep nights. He had chronic insomnia. Had it ever since the war. He was a sailor. His ship sank. He swam three days and three nights. Then he was rescued. He spent several months between life and death. He recovered, but he had lost the ability to sleep.
“I’ve had a third more of life than you,” he said.
“And what do you do with that extra third?” I asked him.
“I write.”
I asked him what he was writing.
He was writing his life story…
“Are you writing it for your children? As a family chronicle?”
He chuckled bitterly: “For my children? They’re not interested in that. I’m writing a book. I think it would help a lot of people.”
You might say that the taxi driver is not a writer but a graphomaniac. So we need to be precise about our concepts… Graphomania is not a mania to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In that sense, the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is not a difference in passions but one’s passion’s different results.
Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably take on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:
1) An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life…
But by backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation… In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.

First written in the 1970′s, this passage is ahead of its time. Is this “graphomania” what we’d now call blogging? And re-read it substituting all the writing-oriented words with “photographer” and “artist.” Let me know what you think. It seems this is part of the quandary artists face in the 21st century. The issue of separating art from the design, craft, trade, etc. while still engaging patrons and/or the general public indicates that something fundamental has changed.

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.

2004

Ink on paper