Irritants of the Day.
1. Jonathan Lethem's descriptions of art in Fortress of Solitude. Don't know if the Abraham Ebdus character is based on Lethem's father, or if Lethem's father is an artist, but the book feels like an elaborate revenge by a son who essentially hates art against a father wholly dedicated to it. Lethem knows just enough about his subjects to be dangerous. He can imitate the style of an Artforum review, describe an avant garde film screening, or string together a narrative of what is happening in an abstract painting or film well enough to make these things sound completely pointless and ridiculous. The book is filled with fake reviews, of art, music, etc--no one can respond to these because they are pure fiction, straw men for the writer's contempt. Lethem has a vicious wit--one wishes it could be turned on people and things that deserve it (Republican politicians, Judith Miller, etc)
2. Minus Space. If Lethem's imagined world of form-only art existed it might be found on this space. A website devoted to "reductive art"? Surely "reduction" is just one technique or strategy an artist might use to get at some significant content--not an end in itself. One might as well create a blog called Blue and only blog blue things. Yet in fact a longstanding cult persists around this "reduction," which has little to do with minimal art practices as described by Robert Smithson or Sol LeWitt (or even Peter Halley) but instead provides a safe haven for late Greenberg disciples proudly entrenched in painting's own greatest area of competence--itself--while the world changes all around them. Not everything on Minus Space is that simplistic, they've added a fair amount of "painting as architectural critique" since the site's inception, but one yearns to pluck the better things one sees there out of the limited context. Many pieces are succulent but the photos are too small; half the time you're not sure what you're looking at and the pleasures you could get from staring at monochrome and shaped canvases are stanched.
Afterthought: Minus Space has changed in the last year or so. It added a blog [wrong--see here] but no longer hosts a deep archive of its past online exhibits. Instead it features links to artists' websites (some of which are Flash--yech.) A link I made to a show they put up online last year (Daniel Gottin) is now dead. Also, the site says it is no longer taking submissions. Perhaps "reductive art" as an organizing principle is petering out. Or Petering to the extent Halley is a mentor for any of these artists.
Update: This quote from Salon's Laura Miller, writing about Don DeLillo, also applies to Lethem: "The weaknesses of Falling Man are DeLillo's long-standing ones. Most of them spring from the fact that he is an essayist at heart, who presumably chose the novel because it is the most exalted and revered literary form of our time -- and DeLillo is not the sort of writer willing to risk being insufficiently exalted and revered." It's so stupid. But it does work. Lethem's Fortress was lauded as the Great American Novel because we need such novels and young writers to write them. Whether or not the form is outmoded or the best vehicle there is a myth machine, an industry, behind it. The art world equivalent is painting, which you have to do, no matter how bad or irrelevant, to be a playa.
Ah, Tom reduced art is not petering out. In fact it is the other way round. Boo hoo
Reduced art is getting larger?
Ha, Ha, Ha! Almost Funny! More applies to one of your recent gifs, no [?] which are nice, if we could do something with the square frame/border.
Gottin has a residency here where I am, not in NY, and also a group show that opened this week with some of the artists up at Minus, so they have reached the land of the rising sun, where I'll be taking a stroll this weekend.
Also I noticed that the dead link redirects to a page that when you scroll down you can find Gottin and can head on over to his homepage. It's pretty convenient, I guess: Even eternity needs some fresh links, every so often.
Sorry you don't like the borders. I put them in to drive reductive purists crazy. Ha ha ha. As for the Gottin, yes, thanks, I figured all that out before I posted. His home page is Flash so there is no way to post a fresh link to the unavailable art.
Flash is pretty annoying though seems at least one of the trends, this tightening of 'documental transference' and access, the way images flow through cyberspace. I wonder if the web will be just like the ground before long, prestige associate with limited access and visa-versa. Anyway, I liked that Gottin piece too! And can live with your borders.
Artists like Gottin should be setting the standard of easy access to his work instead of going with the dealer model.
I use the borders intermittently. Sometimes they tighten pieces up. It's a judgment call. One pixel is too narrow in my opinion to be ornamentally framelike. Web art is half graphics/comic book panel anyway. At least my web art. It's not the same criteria as what I might do in a gallery.
Yeah, I think so too. Generally the way to present this stuff is via non-elitism, and to make it very accessible. Anyway that's my impression, and the way minusspace wants to go, which I think is a very good way.
I figured you'd deal with the issue of border/edge in a gallery context differently than what is up on the net.
cheers
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Irritants of the Day.
1. Jonathan Lethem's descriptions of art in Fortress of Solitude. Don't know if the Abraham Ebdus character is based on Lethem's father, or if Lethem's father is an artist, but the book feels like an elaborate revenge by a son who essentially hates art against a father wholly dedicated to it. Lethem knows just enough about his subjects to be dangerous. He can imitate the style of an Artforum review, describe an avant garde film screening, or string together a narrative of what is happening in an abstract painting or film well enough to make these things sound completely pointless and ridiculous. The book is filled with fake reviews, of art, music, etc--no one can respond to these because they are pure fiction, straw men for the writer's contempt. Lethem has a vicious wit--one wishes it could be turned on people and things that deserve it (Republican politicians, Judith Miller, etc)
2. Minus Space. If Lethem's imagined world of form-only art existed it might be found on this space. A website devoted to "reductive art"? Surely "reduction" is just one technique or strategy an artist might use to get at some significant content--not an end in itself. One might as well create a blog called Blue and only blog blue things. Yet in fact a longstanding cult persists around this "reduction," which has little to do with minimal art practices as described by Robert Smithson or Sol LeWitt (or even Peter Halley) but instead provides a safe haven for late Greenberg disciples proudly entrenched in painting's own greatest area of competence--itself--while the world changes all around them. Not everything on Minus Space is that simplistic, they've added a fair amount of "painting as architectural critique" since the site's inception, but one yearns to pluck the better things one sees there out of the limited context. Many pieces are succulent but the photos are too small; half the time you're not sure what you're looking at and the pleasures you could get from staring at monochrome and shaped canvases are stanched.
Afterthought: Minus Space has changed in the last year or so. It added a blog [wrong--see here] but no longer hosts a deep archive of its past online exhibits. Instead it features links to artists' websites (some of which are Flash--yech.) A link I made to a show they put up online last year (Daniel Gottin) is now dead. Also, the site says it is no longer taking submissions. Perhaps "reductive art" as an organizing principle is petering out. Or Petering to the extent Halley is a mentor for any of these artists.
Update: This quote from Salon's Laura Miller, writing about Don DeLillo, also applies to Lethem: "The weaknesses of Falling Man are DeLillo's long-standing ones. Most of them spring from the fact that he is an essayist at heart, who presumably chose the novel because it is the most exalted and revered literary form of our time -- and DeLillo is not the sort of writer willing to risk being insufficiently exalted and revered." It's so stupid. But it does work. Lethem's Fortress was lauded as the Great American Novel because we need such novels and young writers to write them. Whether or not the form is outmoded or the best vehicle there is a myth machine, an industry, behind it. The art world equivalent is painting, which you have to do, no matter how bad or irrelevant, to be a playa.
- tom moody 5-11-2007 12:43 am
Ah, Tom reduced art is not petering out. In fact it is the other way round. Boo hoo
- anonymous (guest) 5-11-2007 5:00 am
Reduced art is getting larger?
- tom moody 5-11-2007 5:02 am
Ha, Ha, Ha! Almost Funny! More applies to one of your recent gifs, no [?] which are nice, if we could do something with the square frame/border.
Gottin has a residency here where I am, not in NY, and also a group show that opened this week with some of the artists up at Minus, so they have reached the land of the rising sun, where I'll be taking a stroll this weekend.
Also I noticed that the dead link redirects to a page that when you scroll down you can find Gottin and can head on over to his homepage. It's pretty convenient, I guess: Even eternity needs some fresh links, every so often.
- anonymous (guest) 5-11-2007 5:20 am
Sorry you don't like the borders. I put them in to drive reductive purists crazy. Ha ha ha. As for the Gottin, yes, thanks, I figured all that out before I posted. His home page is Flash so there is no way to post a fresh link to the unavailable art.
- tom moody 5-11-2007 5:34 am
Flash is pretty annoying though seems at least one of the trends, this tightening of 'documental transference' and access, the way images flow through cyberspace. I wonder if the web will be just like the ground before long, prestige associate with limited access and visa-versa. Anyway, I liked that Gottin piece too! And can live with your borders.
- anonymous (guest) 5-11-2007 6:20 am
Artists like Gottin should be setting the standard of easy access to his work instead of going with the dealer model.
I use the borders intermittently. Sometimes they tighten pieces up. It's a judgment call. One pixel is too narrow in my opinion to be ornamentally framelike. Web art is half graphics/comic book panel anyway. At least my web art. It's not the same criteria as what I might do in a gallery.
- tom moody 5-11-2007 6:30 am
Yeah, I think so too. Generally the way to present this stuff is via non-elitism, and to make it very accessible. Anyway that's my impression, and the way minusspace wants to go, which I think is a very good way.
I figured you'd deal with the issue of border/edge in a gallery context differently than what is up on the net.
cheers
- anonymous (guest) 5-11-2007 7:04 am