MITPressLog

Would you go to Art School?

How should artists be educated? And is it worth attending a $35,000-a-year art school so that one graduates in debt into an uncertain market?

The last major change in art education came nearly a century ago, when the German Bauhaus was formed. Today, dramatic changes in the art world, combined with a revolution in information technology, raise fundamental questions about the education of today's artists. Nevertheless, an estimated 30,000 Master of Fine Arts degrees are granted each year.

Those in New York can join a discussion about the future of art schools with the editor and contributors of Art School, a book that looks at these issues. All are invited to join the conversation this Sunday, November 15, in the Rose Auditorium at Cooper Union's incredible new 41 Cooper Square building.

Three conversations will take place, discussing the most pressing issues facing the transmission of cultural knowledge today and for the future. Speakers and moderators include Dennis Adams, Thierry de Duve, Shirin Neshat, Hans Haacke, Boris Groys, Liam Gillick, Saskia Bos, Steven Henry Madoff, Ernesto Pujol, Ute Meta Bauer, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Jeffrey Schnapp, Anton Vidokle, Matthew Higgs, Charles Renfro, Dana Schutz, and Brian Sholis.

Schedule:

1:00 p.m.
Flows of Knowledge, Infections, Temporary States
Steven Henry Madoff, moderator
Ute Meta Bauer
Thierry de Duve
Boris Groys
Jeffrey Schnapp
Anton Vidokle

2:15 p.m.
The Usefulness of the Academy, Learning and Doing—or Nobody Asked You to Do Nothing
Brian Sholis, moderator
Paul Ramirez Jonas
Matthew Higgs
Shirin Neshat
Dana Schutz

3:30 p.m.
Social Context and the Role of the Academy in the 21st Century
Saskia Bos, moderator
Dennis Adams
Liam Gillick
Hans Haacke
Ernesto Pujol
Charles Renfro

Free and open to the public.

Frederick P. Rose Auditorium
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
41 Cooper Square
New York, NY 10003

Alphabet City Festival

If you are in Toronto this weekend, visit the Alphabet City Festival. This year's theme is water, which coincides with the newly published book. 

The festival will include gallery exhibitions, a book launch and signing, and performances.

Asylum: Three Weeks On Press in China

Have you ever wondered how books are printed and bound?  Chris Payne was was kind enough to share his first-hand experience at Everbest, where he supervised the production of his new book, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. 

Not long after we had finished my second book, Asylum, I received a call from my agent-editor-book designer, Scott-Martin Kosofsky, whose first words were: “ I hope your passport’s in order because you’re going to China next week”.  The printing company, Everbest, needed me “on press” to OK final proofs.  Given the number of photographs in my book, I was not surprised.  I was not disappointed either: seeing my work finally printed would be a dream come true.

This was my first time being on press and also my first trip in China. The headquarters of Everbest are in Hong Kong, but the printing plant is located in Nansha, on the mainland just across the border. The plant looks like every other factory in the area: boxy, built of concrete, and clad entirely in the same small ceramic tiles used in bathrooms.  Despite its drab appearance, the interior is a beehive of activity.  Unlike many printing companies, Everbest binds their books on site, so every aspect of book making is contained under one roof. They even have their own power plant.  

Everbest employs close to 1,000 workers, most of whom have migrated from rural villages to work here for higher wages.  They are predominantly young, in their 20s, and work 12 hour shifts, six days a week.  To save money, almost everyone lives in the dormitory next to the factory, where they share meals in a communal canteen.  Their schedule seems grueling, but I was told that given the opportunity, these people would gladly work overtime. 

 

A Round Peg at the Whitney

What do Sol LeWitt, Sonic Youth, Dean Martin, Mel Brooks, Merle Haggard, Hudson River School painting and midcentury New Jersey tract housing have in common?  Randy Kennedy poses this art-world stumper in his New York Times look at the Dan Graham retrospective which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art last week. 

Kennedy's piece provides an interesting look at Graham's life and work.  Liz Kotz wrote a bit about the exhibit for Artforum, commenting:

Tracing the evolution of Graham’s practice, the exhibition aims to loosely unite the artist’s divergent production around “the changing relationship of individual to society as mirrored through American mass media and architecture at the end of the twentieth century,” per cocurators Chrissie Iles and Bennett Simpson. The show, comprising about one hundred works, will navigate vastly different kinds of visual and perceptual experiences, from the private space of the page to screen-based and time-based works to the emphatically public pavilions. The events program will include a panel on music and collaboration featuring Graham, Kim Gordon, and Thurston Moore, in addition to other talks and screenings.

But don't take our word for it.  The exhibit runs at the Whitney until October 11th then moves to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in November. 

The Third Way--A Meditation on Creativity

In the most recent issue of Tin House, famed editor Daniel Menaker discusses his tenure at The New Yorker, Random House, and HarperCollins.  What struck me in this conversation is when the interviewer asked:

What do you think the motivating factor is for most writers you’ve worked with?

Menaker answered:

Artists and writers and performers basically want the recognition and admiration of people they don’t know, which is weird.  Unless you take the phrase “people they don’t know” and translate it to “parents,” which is what Maxwell [Ed: William Maxwell, famed editor who preceded Menaker at The New Yorker, and author of the great novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow] would say; the people you don’t essentially know as a writer are your parents, and the people whose approval and attention you want are your families, your parents. Then it suddenly all falls into place.  And I think that’s a dark reason that people write and perform and act and sing and so on. 
And then there’s the brighter side, which is the genuine desire to share your feelings and insights and your observations with others.  And to make them all into art and to create something of reasonably lasting value that others can get something from. 

Menaker continues later in the interview:

I think it tends towards the darker side.  Not the bad side, by the way, but the more troubled side—to continue to seek, in basically an unfulfillable way, whatever it is that’s missing.

What I wonder is do all the motivations for creating art, for living in an artful way essentially boil down to either approval seeking or insight sharing?  Is there a third way? A fifth?  A tenth way to explore and define the motivations driving artists and writers?  While I find this dichotomy unsatisfying, I’m not sure he isn’t correct. 

How do artists and writers who create for only themselves fit into this picture, those whose focus is personal challenge, or creating intrigue for the sole purpose of feeding their private, inner lives? 

Forty Years of Leonardo

Check out the following video to hear Leonardo editor Roger F. Malina discuss the evolution of the Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for Advanced Science and Technology) now marking its 40 year anniversary.

Leonardo/ISAST was founded in 1968 with the goal of integrating science and art, becoming a channel of international communication for artists who use science and developing technologies in their work.

In more recent news, the folks at Leonardo have also organized a book series based on the values and ideas in the journal.  They also have a Facebook page where you can get news about new projects, issues, and events. 

Wednesday Blog Watch: Robert Giard

One of the academic library blogs mentioned last week, Yale's "Poetry at Beinecke Library", recently posted about their acquisition of the photographs of Robert Giard. Giard (1939-2002) was known primarily for the hundreds of portraits he took of gay literary figures, including (with links to the Yale images) Edward Albee, Adrienne Rich, David Leavitt, Allen Ginsberg, Quentin Crisp, Doris Grumbach, and others. To see more of the Yale images, they can be found in Beinecke's Digital Library. Around 200 of Giard's gay literary portraits were published in the MIT Press book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers. An interview with Giard about this book can be found here.
If you happen to be in the Toronto area, there are a couple of shows featuring Giard's work: the Stephen Bulger gallery is presenting a significant number of his photographs in the "Portraits, Nudes, and Landscapes" show (which ends August 2nd), and also some of Giard's photos can be seen at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto in an exhibit called Queer CanLit which runs until August 29.
 

From Gospel to the Godfather

Tonight, there's a concert between DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist at McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn at 8:00 pm. Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid has put together an after party for the event.  It will be one of his only shows in New York this summer, as he's been busy with events for his new book, Sound Unbound.   The show is a special presentation of his next film project - it's a remix of the Stax Records archive. If you don't know Stax Records, I guess you can think of it as the Motown Records of the South. Soul, Funk, Power!!! The concert will be a video remix party with rare video material from Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sam and Dave, and lots of crazy rare video material from the deep soul music archives of Stax Records. Here's a video clip:

It's not to be missed!  And it's FREE!

Music Hall of Williamsburg
66 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn
Doors 9:30 pm / Show 10:30 pm / 18+
Map and directions: HERE

6 Questions for Boris Groys

In the new issue of Art Lies, Kurt Mueller asked NYU's Boris Groys six questions about urban space and its relationship with art.  Here is one of them.

What is the relationship of art to urban public space (in whatever form it exists)? Is this a productive relationship? To what ends?

Every urban population believes in having its own collective psychology. One can ridicule this belief, but it has produced a lot of poetry, music and cinema that we are accustomed to valuing. The volume of poems about Parisian air or St. Petersburg’s weather is a sufficient justification for their architecture. However, if we don’t speak about art that is stimulated by a city but about art in the public space, then one should be very careful. The chance that any really good artwork can go though all possible channels that evaluate it is minimal. And, in general, art that is exhibited outside of arts institutions has to additionally identify itself as art. That makes art shown in the public space even more conservative than art shown within the framework of institutions.

The rest can be found here.

Groys discusses some of these issues in greater detail in his new book, Art Power.  Check it out. 

The ubiquitous Anish Kapoor

Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art is the site of a major exhibit of the works of Turner Prize-winning sculptor Anish Kapoor. The exhibit - Past, Present, Future - runs through September 7 and has been widely (and mostly positively) reviewed in recent weeks.

From the New York Times:

[A] brilliant and unpredictable if sometimes ingratiating synthesizer who has simultaneously refined, repurposed and betrayed some of the dearest beliefs and most despised bêtes noires of late-20th-century sculpture.

From the Boston Globe:

The clean contours of Kapoor's biomorphic shapes are constantly dissolving into optical fuzz. Again and again, they confound our attempts to see how they were made, how they are prevented from falling over, or where they begin and end.

And in Time magazine:

The paradox of Kapoor's work is that it has debts to the blunt boxes of minimalists like Donald Judd and Robert Morris as well as to the weightless atmospheres of James Turrell. But the blend of heavy and vaporous, declaring and beckoning--that's all Kapoor's.

Though it isn't mentioned in the reviews, the catalogue for the show was published by the MIT Press and has recently been released. More information on the book is available here.