Do we have a contemporary art thread?

[fatrick]

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[galactagogue]

also, keep your sticky little "MISOGYNIST" stamp away from me you fucking Thesis

quote of the year.

[all day breakfast]

oh ok, i thought you meant in like a "this is Work, not play" kind of way

[fatrick]

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[vivian darko]

Don't get me wrong I absolutely think paintings should be judged on the geographical location of their potential buyers

[Phil]

...I haven't interpreted anything, I've literally quoted your words back at you.

[galactagogue]

anyways, i'm feeling real david hammons right now so i'm gonna go down the street and buy like six overcoats, cut the inner pockets out and then stuff them with the printed-out posts from this thread

who are you trying to diss with this post tho? david hammons?
i saw that exhibition this weekend and it didn't really have a profound effect on me either, to be totally honest.

[Phil]

In the interest of at least giving us something new to complain about, the Barkley L. Hendricks show at Jack Shainman is sharp and beautiful and it's up for another two weeks for the New Yorkers.






http://brooklynrail.org/2016/04/art/bar ... aila-pedro

[famnexdo]

nice.
the malik sidibe photo show up concurrently at the other shainman location is a barn burner and i think both shows work really well together in a weird way.

[fatrick]

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[Phil]

Agreed, going straight from one to the other was one of the better Chelsea experiences I've had this year. Though I thought the more recent work in the Sidibe show felt a little stuffy. The best of the earlier photos are tip-toeing such a fascinating fine line between studio and street work that it was a bit of a bummer to seem him get so controlled in the post-2000 portraits.

[fatrick]

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[galactagogue]

I hate that I'm agreeing fatrick but I am. I want to learn to enjoy works that are overtly political in the same ways i enjoy anything else I instinctively appreciate, but something falls flat for me nearly every time. It's very frustrating because I do want to reconcile that somehow.

[fatrick]

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[Phil]

I want to learn to enjoy works that are overtly political in the same ways i enjoy anything else I instinctively appreciate, but something falls flat for me nearly every time.

Certainly get this as far as things that are basically journalism being presented in gallery or museum spaces (thinking of the Poitras show at the Whitney, or good chunks of Here & Elsewhere at the New Museum a couple years ago), but these Hendricks paintings work for me as paintings before anything else. And I think their real political insight is much more on the level of form than anything to do with the sloganeering: the way that the play with portraiture and color field/minimalism works through the expectations of black art, and who's allowed to deal with abstraction; and in person, the glazing on the faces renders them basically impossible to see, which grounds a very academic art historical point—how tied to skin color classical techniques are—in topical concerns about visibility.

[galactagogue]

yea i definiteky read most of those things as being political but still adjacent to my primary appreciation//reaction i guess.

[PROBLEMATIC]

Where/what is the most egregious offense in the pink suit? out of curiosity

[Phil]

yea i definiteky read most of those things as being political but still adjacent to my primary appreciation//reaction i guess.

Have you seen the Jack Early show at Fergus McCaffrey? Would be interested if you find the 'issue painting' (?) aspect of those too on the nose to really get into. Certainly can't argue with that re. some of those Hendricks paintings, esp the Fuck Fox News one.

[landspeedrecord]

personally I just didn't like those jack early paintings aesthetically pleasing (even though it felt that they were trying to be palliative) and they didn't make me feel anything

I didn't find the the subject matter of the paintings (gay hustlers juxtaposed with pushpops & ice cream cones) to be particularly deep, I found the actual works themselves to be ugly up close; and I'm not that interested in things that take a lot of time and are technically impressive (eg the hand painted wallpaper that was the background of most if not all of the work)

[Phil]

I dunno I think the two nudes in there are some of the sexiest paintings I've ever seen. Would like to put my face in that ass.

But yeah if you're not turned on by the surfaces it's easy for me to imagine that it just doesn't work at all.

[galactagogue]

ill check it out Phil !

[Phil]

Thought it had another week, but it closed yesterday. Anyways...


(This one is something like 9 feet tall.)



Also landspeed, the background soldiers were screen printed, for whatever that's worth.

[landspeedrecord]

I think those photos look much better than the works did in person, oddly enough

[galactagogue]

yea im into the colors and the framing/cropping feels more effective for me

[can]

as someone with no background in this i do enjoy the discussion/debate/argument

would be interested in more critical posting

[galactagogue]

yea im into the colors and the framing/cropping feels more effective for me

now that i'm actually at a computer and not my phone...

so part of the major differences for me between Hendricks and Early is almost purely in the power of the composition. the contrast makes me think hendricks is possibly intentionally being naive with his composition?? But even then, it seems to work against the tone for me. I think I get prickly with identity themes though, to be frank.

[Phil]

I think those photos look much better than the works did in person, oddly enough

Can't say I agree re. Early's work, but this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. A considerable amount of painting these days seems conceived to photograph better than it looks in person. Like I think Jenny Morgan is a genius, but in person her paintings don't have the same charge that they do in photographs, because you can clearly see that it's just incredibly meticulous painting rather than some uncanny frankenstein of oil and photoshop.

[bazooka]

i enjoy fatrick's shittalk. but i live in the middle of fucking nowhere and have no access to shiny contemporary art being posted itt cuz it doesn't exist outside urban centers w thriving art markets. so to me 'contemporary art' is something quite diff. and the comment 'it would die in an apartment' resonates with me. cuz the best place for me to see art is often in someone's apartment. there's an event coming up here in may where people are opening up their apartments/art studios/etc and there's gna be a map and the idea is you bike from place to place. i'm pretty excited about it. i'm generally allergic to $$$/careerist impulses in art, & while i don't knock people who find themselves in that position, it bums me out that we basically have to push for that, as artists, in this world, when for me it's kinda antithetical to the practices that work best for me, worrying abt career shit. then again some of these successul artists with careers have various un/low paid labour they rely on? so i guess if you have that going for you it changes the calculus a bit? basically i'm wondering what relationship ppl itt have to contemporary art. like i live in nebraska, i make art, i go to art shows on a monthly basis. i've been to nyc once and went to three galleries and one of them had shit that moved me to tears, the other two had shit that was alright-but-boring. i have no way of engaging w most of the art posted itt except via the internet. i used to look at much contemporary art via tumblr but i'm not on tumblr anymore. i'm kinda plugged into creative community in chicago and kc somewhat, and am socially adjacent to various edgy net art dude types, but for the most part i'm not super interested in what they are doing. i really enjoy looking at art and thinking about it and there's a few museums locally and regionally that have some combination of cool stuff that's newer and cool stuff that's older. the museum in town has been doing some adventurous continual reimaginging/reinstallation of their permanent collection the last year or so, before it was completely static for a long time. so that's exciting to me. but as far as what's available to me i find myself most drawn to images and pieces that were created long ago, and i guess i don't have a lot of patience for the art world modus operandi of 'doing a new thing', or i guess the idea of 'aesthetic progress', if that makes sense. often feels kinda forced or shallow. whenever i come across a painting or drawing at an art show locally that i completely love i try to buy that shit. but with my own art i try to give it away or have it be donation/pay what you can. right now in my apartment i have two paintings that both cost me a couple hundred bucks or more. i have one painting a friend gave me as a gift. i have a giant drawing me and a friend made. and i have some other stuff that i stole or was free to me. i'm going to stop now, but that's some info about my relationship to contemporary art. i'm curious where others are at. there's been some vague tossing around of bona fides but it's mostly felt contentious thus far. the only boarder itt whose art/relash to art i really know anything about is scurrydog cuz i've followed his art posts over the years. other boarders itt i am familiar w their postings but generally don't know where they are coming from on this subject. i like the dialog that has happened in this thread and i generally don't enjoy threads that are soley/primarily "pictures of medias consumed" or whatever. although i'm loving all the pictures of art too. idk. kind of a vague ramble. hope yall are doin good.

[walt whitman]

fatrick's cranky derailing of the thread has been very productive and thought-provoking. thank-you.

but, i have to point out the obvious: art's complicity with unjust economic forces has been part of the game since, well, at least the renaissance, no? isn't that the basis of this entirely familiar, vaguely Marxian mode of criticism - that the discerning critic should uncover/rule out the inauthentic artists who (gratuitously) make money, because such work is a commodity, and real art is...something else. something radical, perhaps? anti-market. (definitely anti-Painting!) the problem i have with this logic is that art, not matter how sophisticated the formula, always falls short. so, what other sorts of questions could we be asking of a work?

i'm not suggesting we ignore the political economy of art. in fact, we should consider it more seriously than some half-hearted and mean-spirited posts. we (the art consuming public) should always ask: who are the people that buy and circulate artworks, that provide funding to the museums and galleries that display this art stuff to the public? what sorts of people are hired to curate major exhibitions representing different parts of the world and who christen the up-and-coming artists? what about the power dynamics of funding sources, institutions, exhibitions intended to function as "cultural brokers," to borrow mari carmen ramirez's term, so the art-world may become more inclusive to traditionally peripheral groups and cultural identities? what sorts of trade-offs are made on behalf of artists from diff regions of the world in order to present/commodify their work, to make it legible in a still Eurocentric art-world? this is all more compelling to me than belittling ppl, & sarcastically capitalizing Pronouns.

the ethics of art production, distro and exhibition have never been sharply defined, easy to perceive or understand, whether we are discussing the (mythological) historical avant-garde or the latest contemporary art painter. so when someone like fatrick attacks how mickalene thomas employs staff to create her work (perhaps in a dehumanizing way? he didn't expand much) that is something that i find interesting. how is the material being handled, and by whom? since i have been unable to find any articles or sources online to corroborate these claims (i suppose i'm just lousy at google?), i would love to hear more about her process. labor and authorship are really complex in the realm of art. consider the realm of narrative film - should we pay more attention to the director or the screen writer when evaluating a work as good or bad art? what about the camera operator? what about the grips? or the other countless names that scroll down the end credits? certainly someone involved is being exploited. at what point does that reality intervene on my experience of a work of art?

but then again, why is it OK for us to dismiss her entirely for employing "4 white dudes" to create some if not all of these pieces? should artists of color be forced to make artwork by their own hands? not even el anatsui makes his own work, man. at a certain point, it seems that even people of color should be allowed to employ the artistic structures of collaboration started by warhol, et al. let's not forget not too long ago, the awkward whitney bienniale blow-up over Donelle Woolford/Joe Scanlan...

[cartola]

good posts what should we discuss?