Aby Warburg in Rome, winter circa 1928–1929.

If it’s true that hindsight is more than an action we take from the present, but a conflation of present and past, a moment when time’s fabric bunches and we reach out and touch the object of our sights (pulling it forward), then, following in the vein of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, does this object touch us back?

The pathos of the belief in this possibility can be found in the practice of German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), particularly with his library and his final project, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. As an eldest son, Warburg should have taken over the family banking business from his father, but on his thirteenth birthday, he allegedly offered this position to his youngest brother, Max, in exchange for the promise that Max would buy him all the books he ever wanted. Max kept his word.

By 1914, Warburg had amassed somewhere in the vicinity of 15,000 volumes, most of which were related to history, art, psychology, and religion. These volumes became the Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg—a research institute located in Hamburg that attracted scholars from all over Europe and America—and, eventually, the Warburg Institute, one of the more important art-historical think tanks of the century.

Warburg’s original cataloguing system, however, left many of the visitors to his library overwhelmed. He ordered everything according to what he called “the law of the good neighbor,” physically arranging (and rearranging) the books to critique, refute, or support each other. As a later scholar wrote, “A line of speculation opening in one volume was attested to or attacked, continued or contradicted, refined or refuted in its neighbor.”

Photograph of Panel 77 from Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, taken by Aby Warburg, 1925–1929. Photograph in the collection of the Warburg Institute, London

It was an extremely physical process; one that he repeated with the Mnemosyne picture atlas, which he worked on for the five-year period up until his death, juxtaposing images from different time periods against each other, hoping to understand why a particular style of representation or type of image would surface and resurface at different points in history, or in different cultures.

Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (named for the Greek goddess of memory) has enjoyed a second life over the last decade due to a renewed interest in archival projects, but what is fascinating about Der Bilderatlas is that, just like the library, it was frequently in motion. Warburg would order and reorder the images, as though to truly understand the links between past and present, he needed the physical experience, not just the intellectual.

Warburg manifested animist tendencies, and believed that the objects in his collections were charged with energy from a particular period. The photos included in Der Bilderatlas floated on large, black, rectangular panels that Warburg considered conductive. In the words of art historian Kurt Forster, for Warburg “to tap these batteries [artifacts] was to obtain a living current of life from the past.” He both touched and was touched.

Ultimately, Warburg’s system was too confusing for others. The library only really began to thrive after his family hired Fritz Saxl as an assistant, who created a workable catalog and began to manage its daily affairs. Warburg himself is rumored to have been schizophrenic, which would explain some of his behavior patterns, but for the sake of argument, it’s just as tempting to read the figure of Saxl as Prometheus and Warburg as a modern-day Epimetheus, “acting on the wisdom of a conflated instant.” In this version of the narrative, unfortunately, it is Epimetheus who is sacrificed, as though by opening himself up to the experience of being touched by the past, he is overrun.

Danielle Sommer is Blogger-in-Residence through May 29, 2013.

"To Know Is to Touch and Be Touched" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Carl Cheng, “U.N. of C.,” 1967. Film, molded plastic, Styrofoam and Plexiglas. 15 x 20.75 x 9 in. Courtesy Cherry and Martin.

In the fall of 2011, the Los Angeles gallery Cherry and Martin offered its visitors the chance to relive a once-in-a-lifetime experience. As part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, gallerists Philip Martin and Mary Leigh Cherry presented selected works from curator Peter Bunnell’s 1970 exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, including some of the first examples of artists working with photographs in a “fully dimensional” manner.

The original exhibition, which debuted at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with a roster of primarily West Coast- and L.A.-based artists, shocked and appalled its audience, winning scorn from many critics. Hilton Kramer, for instance, insisted that the integrity of the photographic process had been compromised. Forty years later, however, most of the show’s reviewers comment instead on the exhibition’s continued relevance and surprising freshness. Carl Cheng’s dioramas of molded plastic photographic figures and Michael de Courcy’s tower of photo boxes seemed as intriguing in 2011 as they did in 1970. What critics seem to disagree on was what word to use to describe the show. Was it a “re-staging,” a “revision,” or simply a “reprise?”

In an interview, gallerist Philip Martin made it clear that the goal was never to simply reach back into the past and recreate the minutiae of the original exhibition. “You want the work to live and to be present as current objects,” Martin stated. “It doesn’t feel like historical material to me.” At the same time, the effect of Cherry and Martin’s decisions to pull the exhibition forward—to apply the lens of hindsight—can’t be ignored. “Art history is a narrative. It’s a story that we’re clearly always retelling ourselves. As a gallerist, as a curator, you’re trying to create a narrative that sparks people’s interest so they can see things afresh.”

When asked if the recent version of Photography into Sculpture revised history, Martin replied, “I’m not really sure what that means. I would assume that means you’re saying to people that history is not what they thought it was. I suppose to some degree that’s true, but at the same time, I think that to reach back and say ‘Hey, we couldn’t read this object, or we were reading it in a different way…’ That’s a statement of the present.”

There’s a famous photograph from 1913 called The Smoker. The smoker sits in profile, his face double-exposed with his hairline lost against the black background. His left hand is raised toward the camera, grasping an indistinguishable object. His right hand—actually, both hands—seem to be in multiple places at once, leaving blurry motion trails across the photograph, an effect the photographer, Italian Futurist Anton Bragaglia (1890–1960), carefully cultivated by leaving the shutter open for long periods. The same technique transforms the sitter’s cigarette and cigarette smoke into solid, white cords that snake from lap to mouth.

Michael de Courcy. “untitled,” 1970-2011. Photoserigraph and corrugated cardboard boxes. 12 x 12 x 12 in each box; overall dimensions variable. Courtesy Cherry and Martin.

The image is an example of what Bragaglia called photodynamism, a process developed by Anton and his brother, Arturo, in reaction to the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey. Chronophotography, according to Bragaglia, only interested itself in “the precise reconstruction of movement,” while photodynamism’s concern was with “the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of which still palpitates in our awareness.”

It occurs to me again that there are competing versions of hindsight. One presumes distance from what came before, along with a more precise, Marey-esque catalogue of movement (of causes and effects). The second—the sight on a gun as it links my eye and my target—involves the messiness of Benjamin’s flash and the conflated instant, of multiple layers of time pierced by the same arrow. In this version, the second we loose our arrow, we enter Bragaglia’s landscape, where the legibility of individual objects and trajectories is compromised and nothing is as important as the connective tissue that vibrates between and around things.

There is no prescription for the results of such an encounter, but perhaps this is a way we can have our cake and eat it too—to steal fire and bring our past along. After all, the clumsiest narratives are often the narratives that assume prescribed movement from A to B. Perhaps what makes shows like Cherry and Martin’s stand above the rest is that they don’t.

"Pulling Things Forward" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Image of the transit of Venus, 1882, taken by the Naval Observatory and Transit of Venus Commission. Dry collodion emulsion process. From the Naval Oceanography Portal, a website of the The United States Naval Observatory.

I am out to lunch with a good friend, talking about a new idea for a show. It’s a hot day (too hot), but I’m excited because I have the start of an idea: nothing mapped out, to be sure, but something. I want to restage an event that I read about recently, a 1958 event originally organized by the poet, ceramicist and former Black Mountain College professor M.C. Richards called Clay Things to Touch, to Plant in, to Hang up, to Cook in, to Look at, to Put Ashes in, to Wear and for Celebration.

I’m unable to articulate the specifics of how I would approach this new version of Clay Things, however, and the conversation hiccups and shifts course towards the trend in reinstalling older exhibitions, such as with 2011’s Photography into Sculpture at Cherry and Martin gallery here in Los Angeles. As enjoyable as that show was, why is it, my friend wonders, that art seems stuck in the past, without the same risk-taking that we see in the technology sector? I parry with a not particularly effective round of “what is art for,” but it’s a vapid effort, and with the heat and the rapidly nearing end of our lunch hour, the fight is lost before the real argument can even be defined.

Are we educated to favor innovation and foresight? Prometheus was the hero, not his brother, Epimetheus. “He who thinks before” brought us fire, capital, and the arts; Plato blamed the “scatter-brained” Epimetheus, or “he who thinks after,” for leaving humankind “naked and shoeless” and wrought with mischief. And whether he opened the box himself or not, it was Epimetheus who helped Pandora loose her plagues upon the world: “But he took the gift, and afterwards, when the evil thing was already his, he understood.” Yet the actions we take—the museums we build, the narratives we write, the longings we keep secret—belie the idea that Prometheus is our only role model.

It’s true that seeing ahead (or behind) is not a one-to-one replacement for that next step—thinking about what is seen—even if the actions often travel together. But there is something in a name, and Epimetheus’s gives a further clue: the Greek prefix “epi-” doesn’t mean “after,” but rather “upon, at, close upon, or on the occasion of.” Epimetheus does not so much represent the act of looking or thinking backwards, but rather that of acting on the wisdom of a conflated instant, when both present and past merge. “Hindsight” used to refer solely to that part of a rifle that was lined up with the foresight, which was then lined up with your target, a mechanical aid to help you extend your physical presence, to reach out and touch another and bring it to you, even in death.

Image of the transit of Venus, 1882, taken by the Naval Observatory and Transit of Venus Commission. Dry collodion emulsion process. From the Naval Oceanography Portal, a website of the The United States Naval Observatory.

Hindsight, then, is like an arrow, shot from our own time into another, but once something is speared, it has to exist in both times at once, pulled forward and reactivated. Walter Benjamin wrote, “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” Benjamin feared for those who suffered the illusion of historical progress, but have we moved too far in the opposite direction? Have we forgotten how to steal fire?

The march of time has not been kind to M.C. Richards. A friend and collaborator to artists like David Tudor and John Cage, she was a transgressive thinker in her own right, but she’s been mostly erased from the landscape of postwar American art. Clay Things, Jenni Sorkin now argues, is the second documented happening in contemporary art history, not Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts—but do we live in a world where new constellations include stellar nurseries, or is our galaxy made up of dying stars?

Danielle Sommer is blogger-in-residence through May 29, 2013.

"Hindsight" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Danielle Sommer.

Thanks to Thea Liberty Nichols for joining us in April and taking residence on the blog for the third time. Her profiles of artists who work across disciplines or in administrative capacities can be found here.

Next up is Los Angeles-based writer and curator Danielle Sommer. Her writing has been featured in Art in America, Textile, Art Practical, and Landfill Quarterly. For three years Danielle blogged for KQED about visual art, and she currently edits the column “#Hashtags: Viral Thoughts on Art” for the arts website DailyServing. Her recent curatorial projects include The Collectors at Monte Vista Projects, and “If we don’t, remember me” at Little Paper Planes.

Our current theme on the blog is hindsight, which works well with Danielle’s interest in issues of collective memory and time in contemporary sculpture. “I’m really just a nostalgist at heart,” she says. Throughout her residency she will look at new versions of old shows, speculative fiction and its art analogs, and the relationship between longing and touch. Keep up with her on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter.

Thrilled to have you with us, Danielle!

"May Blogger-in-Residence | Danielle Sommer" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Jessica Stockholder. Courtesy the artist and University of Chicago Department of Visual Arts.

Jessica Stockholder is most readily known as a sculptor, but she brings a complex history and distinct approach to the discipline. Her remarkable sensitivity to color combined with her attention to pictorial space are in many ways very painterly, and in fact she began her artistic career as a painter at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Eventually her work crept off the canvas, across the wall, over the floor and then finally, in some instances, out of the exhibition space altogether.

Her creative process embraces chance, humor, and imaginative problem solving, and the work itself embodies these things. Stockholder feels her art “is indexical of the process of coming to knowledge and understanding,” and in many ways the art’s physicality remains an integral aspect of its ultimate meaning.

Jessica Stockholder, “Vortex in the Play of Theatre with Real Passion,” 2000. Duplo, theatre curtain, work site containers, bench, theatre light, linoleum, tables, fur, newspaper, fabric, and paint. Courtesy the artist and University of Chicago Department of Visual Arts.

Stockholder’s attraction to readily available, human-scaled objects for use in her sculpture and installation has been impacted by her relocation to Chicago where she is Chair of the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts. When asked if and how having new materials at her disposable has affected her recent work she commented:

“It is taking me a while to find places to find stuff here in Chicago. I am living in Hyde Park which is definitely not oriented around consumption! Thus far I don’t find the kinds of materials available here to be substantially different than elsewhere, though I’m sure there are all kinds of eccentric nooks and crannies here yet to be discovered!”

Back in 2005, Stockholder was featured in Art21’s “Play” episode, and her work does often “play” with dualities. But looking back at her segment, she had this to say about the characterization of her work:

“I was very happy to have my work featured by Art21, and didn’t at the time see that it was useful to discuss my mixed feelings about ‘play.’ But now that some time has passed—and in the context of this one-on-one discussion focused not at a group of artists but only on my work—I will say that the word ‘play’ feels a little threatening. Within the hierarchies of value that we live with, being a woman is already something to deal with. Adding the childlike connotations of the word ‘play’ to the mix doesn’t feel productive from my point of view. How about the words ‘experimental’ or ‘exploratory’? I also enjoy talking about my work in relation to chance or serendipity.”

In both her sculpture and installation, Stockholder relishes destabilizing the dichotomies between dynamic and static; tangible and immaterial; and ephemeral and fixed. In each of these instances, her work traffics in the third dimension of space as well as the fourth—of time. It is meant, in her words, “to be experienced.”

_____

Jessica Stockholder was featured in Season 3 of Art in the Twenty-First Century; watch her segment here.

Thea’s interview with Stockholder was conducted via email in March 2013. Per the artist, the initial image in the video above is not of “Color Jam” but of a work in Madrid titled “Peer Out to See.”

"100 Artists | Jessica Stockholder" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Tavi Gevinson. Courtesy the artist.

Thea Liberty Nichols: Lady Gaga has been quoted as saying that you’re the “future of journalism.” Do you think this is because of how you’ve approached things, as a talented “rookie“ engaging in a dialogue with your readers? Or, do you think it’s because of the new media formats, such as personal blog and online magazine, that you’ve employed to get your ideas across? Or is it something else altogether, like simply the content of your writing itself?

TG: I think she was talking about the democracy of blogging and the influence somebody who hasn’t been working in the industry for years can have. There’s still a hierarchy within the community, though.

“Rookie: Yearbook One” cover. Courtesy the artist.

TLN: Since your writing has gone from the platform of personal blog, to online magazine, and most recently to printed, published book, can you identify some advantages and disadvantages to each? Do you prefer one over the others? I know the music industry, like publishing, has done a lot of soul searching over the past decade, and I’m curious if you think your generation, or you specifically, will invent a new format for media to exist within or be distributed by? For example, Beck seems to have looked backwards by publishing musical scores instead of recordings, whereas Björk previously issued a digital, app-generated album. I don’t know yet if I think one approach is better than the other, but they do strike me as two totally different answers to the same, maybe unanswerable, question.

TG: They’re each good for what I needed them for, so it would feel like an apples and oranges comparison. Blogs are great because the author-reader interaction feels very direct and it can be loosely structured, just scattered thoughts and musings. But they’re not taken very seriously. Online magazines usually feel like magazines that didn’t have enough money to be in print, but I think that’s changing as people take the Internet more seriously. I don’t think David Fincher would have directed a Web-only series a few years ago. But online magazines are good because you can publish more than you can in print, and that leaves more room to say what you really want—there’s no word count, you can be more immediate, etc. Print is good because of the aesthetic and sentimental value, and because it costs more money on behalf of the creator to put something out in print, so you can trust that it’s better than what you might find online, or at least a more thorough experience of the creator’s work.

TLN: Am I right in thinking Cadaver is your first film? You seem comfortable working across genres and disciplines, including fashion, visual art, music, feminism, and pop culture. Do you consider writing to be your main discipline or does your practice encompass acting and singing as well?

TG: I acted in a short film when I was 11, I think. I consider writing my main discipline just because it’s the only thing I do every day. I have Rookie editor duties I do every day, but it’s not the actual act of curating or editing or art directing. I think like an archivist, so being a writer feels more part of my personal identity than anything else. But I am also interested in how you can apply the stereotypically central characteristics of a writer to something like acting that is more about performing. I think acting is strongest when it’s like good writing, with its strength being in the subtleties not flashiness and with research done by observing.

Interview conducted via email March 2013. Thea Liberty Nichols is Blogger-in-Residence through March 29, 2013.

"“The only thing I do everyday” | Tavi Gevinson" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Edie Fake.

I got a bus while I was living in San Francisco. I was tattooing at the time and able to save the money for it. For several years, I had been moving every four months or so. I had deep wanderlust. Finding a rolling home had started to seem like the only solution. I got this amazing bus from this badass, Kevin Sour, who taught me how to drive and take care of it. The bus had a rich history and a really solid veggie oil conversion. From there, I recklessly decided to drive it from the Bay Area to Philadelphia with my friend Heather Ciriza. That ended up being several months of what I would call “clown school”—finagling grease, wrangling the bus down the road, being this large, dirty, weird spectacle. I sort of crash landed in Baltimore after that, until I got the urge to get driving again. I organized a performance tour called Fingers.

Edie Fake. “Nightgowns” from the Memory Palaces series, 2012. Gouache and ballpoint pen on paper. 14 x 17 in. Courtesy the artist.

There were nine of us on the bus for Fingers, and although it was crowded, it worked really well. There’s so much to think about when trying to maintain a big vehicle. When I was doing it alone maintenance was all I could think about. But with friends it got so much easier, and I got into making work and performing again. We did a loop around the East Coast and Midwest. On our way to our last show the bus broke down in a big way outside of Louisville. It took a long time for me to give up on fixing the bus. While I was working through it, I moved into Scott Tankersley’s living room closet here in Chicago. The city gave me a really warm welcome. I was able to get a foothold quickly and start scheming again. The bus is now retired on queer land in Tennessee.

Performing and tattooing are both very much a combination of your own energy and other people’s…as is being alive! Acknowledging that is really important for me; it’s part of a multimedia social conversation. I think that staying part of the conversation is staying open to new ideas and methods and letting them adapt your own vocabulary. I’m not sure how else to talk about it except in these vague terms. Sharing what you do, as flexibly as possible, helps other people understand your ideas. Simultaneously, being as flexible as possible toward what other people are sharing with you expands how you understand the world.

I started out working in animation. I was a film major in college and then worked as a negative cutter for about six years. After school I gravitated toward making drawings, collages, and comics because the resources were easier to access, and a lot of the language of film stayed on. My Gaylord Phoenix comics especially developed from thinking about translating animation into static drawing. I almost think about collage like film editing and I almost always see smaller work as part of a larger body, like scenes in a movie.

Edie Fake. “Gateway (for Dara Greenwald)” from the Memory Palaces series, 2012. Gouache and ballpoint pen on paper. 14” x 17” in. Courtesy the artist.

Every time I catch one of Alexander Stewart’s and Lilli Carré’s Eyeworks Festivals I am reminded how much animation can accomplish and what a strange experiment it can be. For those reasons, I think a lot about taking up filmmaking again. I feel like I’m in a bit of a cocoon with it though. Rather than jumping into it, I’m waiting for a cohesive project to envelope me. Part of this is because of time constraints—I feel pulled in other directions and I know how much a commitment a film can be. Hopefully, it will become a bigger part of my practice soon. Until then, I’ll just have to let the residue linger on other mediums.

Edie Fake. “Pride Route (Orange)” from the Memory Palaces series, 2012. Gouache and ballpoint pen on paper. 17 x 14 in. Courtesy the artist.

For as long as I’ve been an artist, I have felt part of communities where bartering and collaborating are critical parts of growth. Cross-pollinating is how ideas spread and get expanded upon. Sharing what we can is how we help each other thrive on this messed up planet. It creates networks, emotional bonds, kinship, thought, and physical resources. You can’t always give and you can’t always take. The balance is something I’m always working out.

As told to Thea Liberty Nichols via email in March 2013. Thea is Blogger-in-Residence through May 29, 2013.

Visit Fake’s Tumblr to see more from the Memory Palaces series.

"You Can’t Always Give and You Can’t Always Take | Edie Fake" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Faheem Majeed.

There are a number of aspects of my personal history that shape who I am as a person and artist. My parents were both members of the Nation of Islam. Shortly after my birth they both denounced their affiliations and moved to Charlotte, NC. My father grew into a respected politician and businessman. I grew up in city where every other yard had a “Majeed Cares” campaign sign in it.

After an amicable divorce, I spent my teenage years with my mother in Minneapolis, MN.  She was a respected social worker and executive director of a chemical abuse agency. She believed that no matter how dysfunctional they were, everyone needs a family.

This confluence of experiences and influences is the foundation of my work and really shaped my thoughts on the possibilities of the impact of my work. As I developed as an artist in Chicago, I combined that perspective with what I was learning about the black arts movement and groups like AfriCobra, Blacks Arts Guild, Chicago Imagist, Spiral, etc.

When I first came to Chicago in 2003, I didn’t know many people. Artists from the historic South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) welcomed me into their space where I spent the next year absorbing and falling in love with its amazing history, constituency, and constant struggles. Rummaging through the SSCAC’s basement was more of an experiential education than I could obtain from the coursework and reading during my undergraduate studies at Howard University. The smell of aging paper, the accumulation of forgotten or abandoned art, uncovering posters and flyers from the ’40s and ’50s, and reading through the correspondence from past directors felt like coming home. Those objects spoke to me and each had its own story. The curator in me sees the ability to put these objects together in a way that is different from their originally intended purpose. I try to refocus the lens and tell a story that was not obvious or perhaps lacked a voice. I synthesize these objects into my work by discussing and sharing them with others and engaging and appropriating from the ones who created them.

Faheem Majeed. “Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden I,” Mixed Media, 2012. Courtesy the artist.

I was eventually asked to fill the position of executive director of the SSCAC. As I became more involved, my studio practice suffered. I was torn between two passions. I felt that I was at a crossroads and had to make a decision, so like any sane person that is faced with a difficult life decision, I decided to go to grad school.

I quickly figured out that, at the time, I wasn’t willing to step away from either role. So with that decision, my art practice shifted from welded steel figurative representations of my community to an administrative arts practice that creates institutional critiques of culturally specific institutions (you’ve got to love art speak). Basically, I use to be a steel sculptor and now I use my knowledge of running a small black arts non-profit space to challenge and draw attention to the strengths and needs of similar spaces.

In 2011, I stepped down as executive director and curator of the SSCAC. A year later, as a part of the South Side Hub of Production, I was asked to produce an intervention that engaged the building, so I decided to build a shack on the roof. I was driven by my realization that I was going through a transitional phase in my career. I was and still am a builder of institutions, organizations, and relationships but at that time, I was a man without an organization. I needed time to let go and move on so I asked myself: “Can I build without a clearly defined purpose or affiliation and be satisfied? And does it matter if it only satisfies me?”

Faheem Majeed. “Shack on the Roof,” Mixed Media, 2011. Courtesy the artist.

The idea was to build a quaint yet visually engaging sculptural space with no defined content and see what happened. Well what happened was that people were attracted to the space and wanted to engage and build upon what was there. A handful of artists used the space for various interventions and while I knew some of them, there were others that were new to me. I was purposefully removed from the role of curator and gatekeeper from the project. I was excited about making a space with no curatorial voice. Just first come first serve. It was a great moment for me where I could recapture the concept of building, figuratively, and again create space that can speak to a community. The process helped me move forward and [this] summer, I am expanding the project with a much more intentional approach towards encouraging involvement across communities.

In terms of the aesthetic value, I’m highly concerned with the visual appeal of my pieces but I’m not creating to appeal to others visual preferences. The thought or idea inspires the medium and the medium drives the appearance of the final outcome. As an artist and curator, I always want to create a compelling aesthetic and I put my all into everything I create because I want the end product to be something of quality, something I’m proud of. But in terms of how others receive what I am making, I like to feel that they see what I put into it rather than just seeing a beautiful object. I want them to connect to its patina, use, and history so that it takes more than one glance to really answer the question of its aesthetic value. My work should grow on you.

I am very excited about my new role as administrator and faculty at University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) College of Architecture and Arts. I feel like a big part of my being asked to come back to UIC is my past success of marrying my role as an administrator and artist into an engaging art practice. Many of the students coming out of our program are either interested or already very involved in civically engaged art practices.

As told to Thea Liberty Nichols via email in March 2013. Thea is Blogger-in-Residence through April 29, 2013.

"“My Work Should Grow on You” | Faheem Majeed" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Thea Liberty Nichols.

Thanks and best wishes to Amanda Beroza Friedman, our March blogger-in-residence, who contributed a series of conversations between herself and other women artists living in New York. If you missed any of Amanda’s posts, you can find all of them here.

Next up we have Thea Liberty Nichols returning to the blog for the third time. Thea is a writer and curator living in Chicago. She recently co-curated Afterimage with Dahlia Tulett-Gross, and will be opening another exhibition at The Franklin in 2014.

Throughout April, Thea will loosely cover artists who are working outside of their practice or across disciplines. The artists she’ll profile might curate exhibitions, work as teachers, act as “informal mentors,” or collaborate with other artists to create work. Check back next week for Thea’s first post.

When asked what she’s most looking forward to in April (aside from her stint on the Art21 Blog), Thea expressed my own sentiments: “Fun in the sun. I try and stay away from complaining about the weather, but I can’t wait to sweat again, eat ripe fruit, and hop on a bike.”

Happy spring and happy to have you back, Thea!

"April Blogger-in-Residence | Thea Liberty Nichols" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Mira Schor. “Expropriation Series: I’m Glad to See You Are Keeping Busy,” 2012. Ink and oil on gesso on linen, 24 x 28 in. Courtesy the artist.

ABF: Can you talk about your other recent body of work, the Expropriation series? In our discussion these works came up in connection with Federici’s argument on how we got to our current state of the triumph of global capitalism.

MS: In those works the figure is not resting in the earth of her own volition, she’s been thrown there head first. Expropriation surrounds us, whether it’s corporate downsizing, unemployment, climate-caused displacement, or expropriation of bodies of knowledge that are deemed obsolete. In one painting, painted at the peak of Hurricane Sandy between 7:30 and 9PM on the night of October 29, 2012, the figure had landed head first in the earth pitched down from a stormy dark sky. A cheery snarky little caption reads, “I’m glad to see you are keeping busy.” I was using appropriated language, quoting verbatim a haplessly condescending comment a former student wrote me in an email this winter.

ABF: We spoke about the possibility of painting paradoxically, defying commodity culture because of its specific relationship to time. I often think about how paintings can exist in their own time.

MS: Painting is always under attack, as a prime example of art as commodity and an exemplar of the modernist idea of the autonomous artwork. And most of us are conditioned by media to prefer movement. I often talk about the idea of the displacement of pictorialism, the way the exact same area of wall space that might previously have been occupied in a museum by a large painting, let’s say Courbet’s The Studio of the Painter or his Funeral at Ornans, is now the site of the same-sized projection of a video. There’s image, narrative, pictorialism, the only difference is motion, sound, and the specific time of the particular video. However paintings also contain time. In fact at best they contain time in a way that opens up contemporary time and defies spectacle. It is not Fordist time of the minute by minute, digital time of the microsecond by microsecond, it is the layered time of your experiencing it through vision and your relation to it in space. That experience contains, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not, the time of the painting’s making, the time of its layers, edges, and surfaces. A painting can open up time, liberate it—when you paint or when you look at a painting. That’s the time I’m interested in and I think that kind of time does defy commodity culture.

Mira Schor. “Modest Painting,” 2000. Ink and gesso on linen. 12 x 16 in. Courtesy the artist.

The critique of the autonomous artwork connects to the critique of the modernist model of resistance. But I find it questionable when ideas are foreclosed. The current answer of a radical practice is social practice, engagement with community at the level of design and social work divorced from anything resembling aesthetic concerns. I have no individual expectations that any of my paintings can have a political effect in undermining global capital or the corporatization of thought. But to eradicate the generative potential of looking at a painting, or other kind of art object, is perhaps just another victory over individual agency and subjectivity.

ABF: In this vein, I wanted to touch on your articulation of the idea of “modest painting” (put forth in the essay of the same name that’s in your book A Decade of Negative Thinking). This phrase does not so much refer to scale but painting where the artist focuses “on the painting itself,” not their ego, and thus skirts “the intrusion of modernist ‘styling.’” You give Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard as early examples of “modest painters” and Jack Tworkov and Myron Stout as artists who share this trait working during the time of Abstract Expressionism. Do you think this painting distinction is relevant to conversations in contemporary art? 

MS: I propose “modest painting” as a counterbalance to the pressure on artists to self-commodify in order to survive with the realm of the spectacle. There are lots of paintings that are aimed for the boardroom or the boardroom-sized living room of some hedge fund manager, that are meant to compete with and support other spectacular pursuits in the culture, but there are still paintings that do something else, that work with what painting can do. I’m careful to note that not all modest paintings are small and not all small paintings are modest.

What matters to me is a kind of rigor towards painting itself, whether it be medium or subject matter. It’s not that an artist like Tworkov did not have an ego, or desires for career and name, and yet he was driven by larger ideas about meaning and methods of achieving meaning. Recently I spoke about the concept of modest painting and found myself including a filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick as an example of that quality of modesty: if you channel surf and land in a Kubrick movie you can’t stop watching it. Why? Because he has subsumed his own ego to form, he is working with narrative of course, but also framing, lighting, sound, timing, all the characteristics of film. It’s not just about him.

For myself one way I would define how that rigor enters my work is submitting my work to a constant interrogation from antithetical discourses. I’ve probably immersed myself more in the critique of painting than most painters. I stay on the train almost to the last stop, then I do get off and continue painting, but I think that trying to understand the—ever-shifting yet interrelated—terms of the critique hones my decision to keep doing it. I do have an entire other practice, of writing, and, in some cases on my blog, of the format of a photo essay, yet each means of address has its own purpose, and means something necessary for me and not interchangeable. Painting at its best gives me necessary food that I can’t get anyplace else, whether I’m the viewer or the maker.

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To read more from Schor, visit A Year of Positive Thinking, an online ”postscript” to her printed book A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (2010).

Amanda Beroza Friedman is blogger-in-residence through March 28, 2013.

"An Avatar of Self: A Conversation with Mira Schor (Part 2)" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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