I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Mine

The following essay was written to accompany artist Sean Ripple’s recent project Artificial Scarcity. More info and images from the projects tri-city installation can be found here.

“Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me? Answer simply, someone answer simply.” [i]

I am many people online, and each one of these people is telling the truth. I have no fewer than seven websites that archive such information as my listening habits, daily thoughts, taste in books, cycling miles, and even a list of people I know better virtually than I ever did in person. I am not an exception in the virtual world. Sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Last.FM, map my intersection with all other users, reminding me that I am not the only one listening to Black Metal, or tagging photos “art”. With little in the way of a blueprint I, along with many others, participate in this collective construction project on a daily basis.

Cyberspace today pulls at our inner-most psychology and desires. It draws us nearer as it becomes mobile and accessible even in the most remote physical places on the globe. Our thirst for technology is unquenchable because it offers itself to each one of us equally. Every Facebook user has access to the same set of templates, applications, and settings. As much as we tend to anthropomorphize it through customization, technology doesn’t care about us—how we look, what we eat, the clothes we wear—and it never will. It is a container into which we invest the warmth of ourselves. Uploading billions of photographs and videos, manipulating profiles, avatars, and blogs, we saturate the information sea with the minutia of our lives for those we know—and don’t—–to swim in, manipulate, tag, and re-author.

Philosopher Pierre Levy suggests that: “The established difference between author and reader, performer and spectator, creator and interpreter become blurred and give way to a reading-writing continuum that extends from the designers of technology and networks to the final recipient, each one contributing to the activity of the other (disappearance of the signature).”[ii] Traditional roles of producer and consumer are fuzzy apparitions of what they once were. Has the dying author finally gasped his final breath? Perhaps this is the draw of technology and the string it strikes most within our fleshy bodies.  Technological neutrality allows anyone to be an author and everyone an expert. There is the sense that cyberspace is limitless, both in the opportunities it provides and the realities it returns.

The desire to be noticed, to control perceptions of you, and to mark your place in the world is nothing new, humans have been doing this since we started walking upright and maybe even before. Technology however, provides us a new space and opportunity to flex our instinctual muscles; only now the visibility of these performances has increased exponentially, peppered with the trappings of anonymity.

Effectively we are all the authors of cyberspace. (Without ever making the choice we are actually co-authors from the very start.) Each of our contributions weaves the fabric—a rhizomatic sea of tiny threads—with no beginning or end, particles of information authoring other particles, in a constantly expanding no-mans land. Levy suggests that this form of collective intellect continually brings the social contract into play and keeps the group in a state of constant renewal.[iii] We build, we purge, and we re-build again. Out of the pieces of one another and ourselves, we form multiple pictures that exist in simultaneity with one another. What is the result of these ever-evolving collective pictures? Do we find solace and camaraderie in their patchwork, or are we lonely, adrift in a sea of information whose tireless multiplication offers little comfort? Technology can’t respond, that answer will have to come from us.

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[i] Samuel Beckett, Texts For Nothing: 4, (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1958). P. 91.

[ii] Pierre Levy, “The Art Of Hyperspace” in Electronic Culture, Technology and Representation, (New York: Aperature, 1996). P. 366.

[iii] Ibid. P. 367.

Hit The Books: Pt. 3

If we were able to design an undergraduate art program what would it look like? There would be disciplines in this academic utopia, within which technical skills were taught and foundations built. Students would, gasp!, have to read and learn to verbally articulate their opinion and ideas, which like it or not, is a critical skill in today’s art world. Group critiques that transcend discipline and develop critical thinking would also be a must. Its ignorant to think that just because someone is in the ceramics department means they cannot have a conversation about ideas and visual form within a painting. Seminar courses would form the backbone off of which students would be free to pursue disciplines of interest as well as those governed by the program. These seminars would link these courses and students together through discussion, reading, film, gallery visits, etc. and could be team taught by faculty from a wide array of fields; art, art history, philosophy, etc. They would allow students to see that while schools often drive wedges between mediums there is a larger conversation out there that is less interested in the provincial distinctions between them. After all, its not about the medium, its about what you do with it.

Bear with my lofty idealism just a little bit longer. As students progressed through the program of seminars and foundations, making their way closer to completion, a focus would have to be chosen. Sculpture, painting, fibers, whatever. This choice would not, however, limit students to that medium and its facilities. They would be free to move fluidly between areas as dictated by their work all the while being continuously anchored by department wide critiques and team taught seminars. Students would be taught the importance of developing and maintaining practice while not forsaking specific skills. These are most likely not new ideas, but i cannot keep tabs on every university program around the globe, so you’ll have to excuse any repetition. So whats the biggest hurdle? Well, oddly enough it seems to be the faculty. All the entrenched interests, prejudices, insecurities, laziness, entitlement, arrogance, politicking, and bitterness that exists in University systems are like toxic fly paper to the best ideas and youngest energies. It is that energy, along with the thoughtful, engaged, and exciting faculty of all ages around which we should build any type of academic program.

With that said it should come as no surprise that i think Universities need to reassess and make some serious changes to the tenure system.  Abolishing it isn’t effective, but imposing some mandatory performance reviews and breaking the impenetrable protective shield encasing tenured faculty would serve students best. That, after all, is what its all about. How do we serve and educate students in the best possible way? How do we provide them with faculty that is engaged and thoughtful in each and every course they take, without exception? How do we best prepare them to enter the world and practice the thing that they love? If our goals are these things, and designing a program around them is a priority, then a path seems crystal clear.

Hit The Books: Pt. 2

In his 2002 essay “Design and Crime” Hal Foster argues for the notion of recouping a sense of disciplinarity. This is far from a whole sale embrace of re-instating old divisions and distinctions, but of essentially putting this notion of discipline and its contestation into historical context, reevaluating it, and understanding what led us to now in order to ‘provide culture with running room.’ For Foster this running room is seen as a way out of the consumer loop, or, at least the pervasive influence of design on every aspect of out lives, from our faces to our DNA.  The essay talks more broadly about the disciplines of design, art, and architecture, but i wonder if we couldn’t use his ideas as a spring board for thinking about distinctions between mediums within art departments.

Most art schools break down into areas first, Fine Art, Applied Art, Craft, New Media, etc. Each medium is then dropped unceremoniously into one of these areas taking with it a whole complex web of associations, practices, and prejudices. The stereotypes are beyond cliche. Watch any movie about art school and you’ll get a full dose of them. Painters are sensitive and wear v-necks, ceramicists are sandal wearing hippies, designers jocks, and all professors are apparently bitter, disinterested,  and sleeping with multiple students. Spend any actual time in an art school and you will discover some of these things are true, and others couldn’t be further from it. So what do we gain from these hard and fast distinctions between disciplines? Are we sealing ourselves and students off in a hermetic bubble, or are we giving them a clear and focused set of skills for a specific career and artistic practice?

If distinctions provide us with running room, shouldn’t we seek to preserve some of the current divisions? Sure, but what should be thrown out are the prejudices and assumptions that come along with these divisions. What good does it do students who want a broader sense of what it means to make art within contemporary culture? Zero. What good does it do students who don’t hold the same medium specific prejudices and insecurities of their professors? None. This is why neither strict distinctions and boundary-less melting pots work. Too many restrictions and you risk preventing students from following their own curiosities without flack, too few and they get lost at sea, their attention being pulled in too many directions to learn. There are exceptions of course, but we should be very skeptical about hard and fast arguments for either model as they ignore the needs of students for that of the faculty. If anything we don’t need to be creating more distinctions between mediums. Applying the old model for art education to contemporary practices strikes me as wholly misguided and ignores the very context out of which these practices emerged.

Hit The Books: Pt. 1

University management systems are set up to be notoriously burdensome and slow. They’re mirrors of our national government, where changes happen at a snails pace, special interests rule the roost, and playing politics often trumps the common good. Disillusioned Obama supporters would do well to remember this. It’s our system, always has been. The same bureaucratic political sludge that prevents the waves of Utopian change from washing over our shores also prevented his predecessors from making drastic changes too quickly. But should Universities be more nimble in their ability to respond and change to shifting cultural conditions and the realities of the world in which their students will one day enter? Or should Universities simply be guardians of hallowed academic traditions and disciplines, not concerning themselves with adopting to the trendy shifts in culture?

Art departments are a good case study. Mediums are often strictly defined based on traditional notions of what making art and learning skills means. Any interest in exploration outside of a discipline is frequently met with skepticism by faculty unwilling to cede any hard fought ground to another medium, or unwilling to forgo their own insecurity with the changing landscape of the contemporary art world.  Does this do a disservice to students who might, upon graduation, wish to attend graduate school, or enter the art world? Or do singular, rigorously defined practices help students develop technical skills and focus that will help them when they are no longer students? These and the related questions boil down to a question of how a given University defines its responsibility to its students. Do they espouse traditional models of learning, believing in the power of stalwart traditions, or do they believe that students need to be in touch with the current moment and structure their experience accordingly?

But maybe there is a third option. Lets take a hard look at what traditional models and skills work best for students and plug them into a flexible and contemporary program. This program would acknowledge the critical role that certain traditional skills play while being honest about the fact that its no longer 1785. It would also remind us that just because we’ve been doing something for five years doesn’t mean its time to slash and burn all that came before it. Five years may as well be a blink. Pliability in the program would ensure each individual student was able to decide for themselves which path of study suites them best. Technical skills, check. Theory, check. Painter, sure. Performance guru, yep. Implementation, hmmm…

Knuckle Down

I was reminded a few weeks ago that Austin’s art communities have been having the same conversations for 60 years. Yep, nothing special about our current list of wants, needs, belly-aches, and urgings, its been a part of our history for awhile and most likely will continue to be. But why doesn’t anything substantial ever come of these conversations? Are the constituencies too diverse? Are people overly sensitive to any tiny criticism? Is Austin just too young a place to appreciate and support diverse types of work? Who really knows, we could dissect any number of reasons for a decade and still not find an answer, and the more i think about it frankly the less i care.

Here’s the thing, if you want some aspect of the community to change than get to it. Want your work to be seen outside of the state? That’s nobody’s responsibility but your own. Wish more artists interacted with one another? Set up a reading group or some studio visits. Want artist group A to mix with artist group B? Good luck, but try organizing a potluck. Want more arts writing? Grab the style guide and get busy, there are plenty of outlets that would love to help you be heard, this is one of them.  Wish more galleries could open and stay in business? Buy something. Want there to be better work in town? Make some. Unhappy? For god sakes bitch about it, the more critical voices and opportunities for conversation the better. Now i am not saying this is going to cure all of our ailments, i am simply saying that its a place to start. Austin is good because on the whole it leaves you alone and lets you do.

The word D.I.Y gets used and abused around this town like a child’s favorite blanket, sometimes justly and sometimes as an excuse for not stepping it up a notch, but ultimately its how things get done. Call it whatever you want but its time to knuckle down and move the conversation forward. Make, write, bitch, organize, participate, stay home, whatever, just do something.