Form & Content

What if Vladimir Tatlin had been able to build his Monument to the Third International? Its spiraling steel skeleton reaching a third higher than the Eiffel tower and enclosing three massive glass volumes, each rotating at their own rate as the days, months, and years passed. As a sculptural and architectural form Tatlin’s tower has always made an impression on me, its angled strut supporting that twisting transparent spiral as it spins towards the sky. While the tower has always been formally striking it is the marriage of form and content that makes the tower a significant piece for me. The spiral embodies Tatlin’s politics and extends Lenin’s idea of monumental propaganda. It visually communicates his attitude towards government and his proclamation of “real space and real materials.” The visual structure cannot be detached from these ideas, it is a wholly symbiotic relationship. The spiral itself carries much of this potency, wide at its base–a metaphor for a beginning and maybe even the masses–and slowly twisting upward, elevating towards the cosmos with each turn. A socialist Utopian metaphor if I’ve ever seen one; the embodiment of a revolutionary political moment whose form beckons that it is only as a group that we can succeed and transcend our current state to something better. Form and content in perfect concert, and that’s to say nothing of the transparent glass volumes and girders of the overall structure. Intended to house legislative bodies and information centers these rotating glass rooms were about experiencing real time. A transparent government building that reminded legislators of their duty to the people and of their mortality!!?? A real contrast to our opaque classical fortresses in Washington D.C.

While the corkscrew form itself is certainly beautiful, it is only when you add the towers historical context and Tatlin’s ideas and intentions that it gains its real power. The Monument to the Third International then becomes more than an intriguing formal structure and gains the power and dimension that makes it a truly potent work of art and speculative architecture.

Images: Vladimir Tatlin, The Monument to the Third International, 1920. From the A. V. Shchusev State Research Museum of Architecture; Moscow.

Internet Ping-Pong (art & theory)

When i re-started this blogging thing i set down a couple of ground rules for myself. One was that i would not respond on this blog to something on another blog which was a response to something else on another blog and on and on into hyperspatial ping-pong oblivion. With that said i am making an exception and breaking my rule. Chris Jagers recently posted on Glasstire on the relationship between theory and art, and i just can’t resist.

Really though, i am not sure how crucial of an argument this is to have. Robert Storr’s comment that most theory has little bearing on art might very well be true; in one instance. But in another it could be utterly false. Either way, rigid definitions and categories ignore the field of possibilities in which art takes place and the many forms it can take. Is it any wonder why manifestos are out of style? Much like the dust pile that used to be a horse that was the conceptual vs. formal, or abstraction vs. figuration arguments, this one seems destined to the same waste basket. Why? Its essentially the same argument only with the different terms. Each are dogmatic, black and white categories that may be tenable on paper but when put into the gray world of contemporary art practice cannot avoid interacting and drifting away from their rigid origins. While i believe strongly in having a solid theoretical, philosophical, and historical base of knowledge i also believe that you have to know how to use your hands. The latter is a form of knowledge just like the ideas on the pages of books. Providing myself with as much diverse knowledge as i can seems like common sense, denouncing one for the other, completely counterproductive.

Bricks & Mortar

Lets talk studio space. Austin is hard up and its one of the key ingredients for keeping artists in a city. You can renovate all of the art spaces in the entire city but without studio space what artist wants to stick around? Good studio space is essential for obvious reasons, the least of which are practical. Studios establish small communities, little hives where ideas are exchanged, and a place for visitors to conduct studio visits and fairly or not, measure the level of seriousness of our artists. Like it or not doing a studio visit from your kitchen table has serious drawbacks. Studio’s don’t need to have a gallery, don’t have to organize events, or provide a community service. They need to work for their tenants. They need to have temperature control, lights, locks, and need to be affordable. Its that simple. Now with Austin’s occupancy rate hovering around 96% there isn’t much space to go around, and without any sort of industrial past and a penchant for knocking old things down for new retail-lifestyle condo monstrosities, even if someone wanted to get a studio building going, there’s not exactly a lot of available space.

If you have the means and want to help this cities visual art community, impact local visual artists, and build something that gets us somewhere, get a serious block of studios going in a good location for an affordable cost. Give artists who have decided to give it a go here real space to work. Is it glamorous? Nope. Profitable? Ha, that’s funny. Your name is not etched hierarchically on a stone wall, you don’t get a brick, your name on a gallery, and there is little philanthropic glory outside of the local artists communities you are helping. However, if you are really interested in art there are few better ways to support it than providing the space in which it can be made.

Antisocial Behavior

Artistic collaboration and the notion of participation doesn’t strike me as anything all that new. Proliferating on the upward slope since the 90’s, participatory, i.e socially-oriented projects, find their roots in the 1920’s with Dada. Events like The Storming of The Winter Palace (1920) moved out of cabaret halls and into the streets, sometimes on a massive scale. Guy Debord spoke of another kind of participatory practice with his key 1967 text The Society Of The Spectacle wherein he states, “It is not a question of knowing whether this interests you but rather of whether you yourself could become interesting under new conditions of cultural creation.” What strikes me about these early iterations of participatory practice is their critical engagement with social and political conditions as well as their own position within the art, theater, philosophy, or literature worlds. They do not strike me as merely formal collaborations, transposing a visual artist onto a musician, dancer onto architect, etc. for the sake of entertaining an audience. Instead they are ideological collaborations, geared towards influencing peoples thinking and temporarily throwing off the yoke of power, of routine and convention, and engaging the world around them in critical ways that ultimately help them reclaim space within the world.

So what about here in Austin? There is much discussion and lauding of our “public” and “participatory” projects, some collaborative and some not, floating around lately, but it all makes me cringe a little. Take away all of the feel-good rhetoric and what are these projects actually achieving? How do they hold up as pieces of art? I am not suggesting that we adopt Modernist or Postmodernist tactics for participatory practices. Our contemporary definition and strategies are viable, but, here come the questions… is asking for volunteers to build your model of Rome for a fundraiser provide anything more than entertainment and free labor? Does Pablo Vargas Lugo’s Eclipse project work better at empowering and engaging its participants? Are dancing garbage trucks really participatory, or are we simply awed by the sight and sound of municipal vehicles doing atypical things to a beat? What is an audiences role in these projects, are we simply passive viewers in front of a trash truck instead of a painting? Aside from the obvious is there really a difference? Are we interested in critical engagement or cozy reassurance? Do we want to participate or do we just want to be entertained?

| Dispatches # 9 | Art Journalists Are Freaking Out

Art journalists and critics are freaking out. Our panties are all in a twist because we are afraid we’re not going to get paid. As a result, we’re losing touch with reality. We’re scrambling to take advantage of Twitter and Sophie. We’re dying to beat the pack to pioneer as-yet-unheard-of technologies. But if we turn off our iPhones, shut our laptops and breathe, do we still think interactivity and social media are going to save us?

One of the most level-headed comments I heard during the National Summit on Arts Journalism last week came from Glasstire Director Rainey Knudson. Knudson, addressing Glasstire’s simple website design, explained, “In the business world, they always talk about the first-mover advantage: the first company to get a new product out or move an existing product into a new market. With Glasstire, I’ve always used a twentieth-mover advantage. We watch everybody else experiment with new technical innovations, and then we think about trying them.” Knudson is putting a great spin on the website’s old design. But given the frenzied tenor of the conversation about new technology at the Summit, I think she makes a great point.

Technology is not going to save art criticism. Good writing is going to save art criticism. What is a twitter feed without a smart tweeter? I read critics because I like the way they think, because they’re astute observers of culture or because their prose flows like honey (well, maybe not honey). Can I get a witness?

-Claire Ruud is Associate Director of Fluent~Collaborative.

Image By and Courtesy of Claire Ruud.