The most fascinating kind of art

Tupperware Party: domestic fans gather to
socialize and consume (circa 1950s).

In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Warhol writes: "Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business-they'd Money is bad," and "working is bad," but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."  Having started out as a commercial artist designing store windows and ending up operating Andy Warhol Enterprises publishing magazines and cranking out portrait commissions holding this view makes sense. As Warhol wrote, calling an artist a $ELL OUT was the greatest of insults decades ago. Warhol predicted if not forged the way for the current possibility of "artist as entrepreneur" which has captured the mainstream media imagination with a spate of articles. The Economist wrote in its February 17, 2011 issue, "If businesspeople should take art more seriously, artists too should take business more seriously. Commerce is a central part of the human experience. More prosaically, it is what billions of people do all day." 

Warhol, Koons, and Hirst demonstrated that both fame and wealth could be achieved while an artist was still alive to benefit. The starving artist became stereotype than lapsed into "boho" lifestyle. Indeed the Internet has created new opportunities for young artists to make and sell artwork. Like a Tupperware party, young artists can develop networks of fans and friends, an inner circle of supporters willing to buy their wares. In 2007, Jen Bekman created 20x200 offering a "large selection of high-quality artwork starting at only $20." She welcomes novice consumers with only $20 to spend and hopes to turn them into art fans by offering editions of prints by an array of both the famous and the up and coming. Kate Bingaman-Bert started drawing then selling her drawings of her credit card statements to help get herself out of debt. Then she began drawing everything she bought and posting the drawings online as a project. The ongoing project evolved into her Tumblr blog Obsessive Consumption/The Office of Kate Bingaman Burt and a book. Even Minneapolis photographer Alec Soth, who has been embraced by the chic Chelsea art world has found a creative outlet in the realm of selling cheap items online to "fans." He recently established Little Brown Mushroom Books to publish and sell posters, zines, t-shirts, hats and books ranging in price from $7 to $950. Artists can craft an online artist profile using FaceBook then blog about their artistic process and projects for free on BlogSpot and selling hand made items on Etsy. It is free and easy but it takes a degree of persistence, resilience, adaptability and vision to stand out in the increasingly crowded online world of artists self-promoting and business becomes an art in itself as Andy said.

The Future Already Exists

Borges in Central Park,
New York, 1969 by Diane Arbus

Video Artist Bill Viola described electricity, in a lecture in 2009 at  Otis College of Art and Design (13:30-18:30), as a "gift from the sky." Electricity, remarked Viola, brought movement to images through video. It made the digital medium possible and it gave us all the power to send messages around the globe at the speed of light. Viola saw the combination of science, technology and art made possible by the digital medium as culminating in cultural change on the scale of the Renaissance. The digital medium, he predicted, will break down barriers between disciplines making knowledge universal and accessible to everyone. On the Web, all time and all knowledge coexist in ways Jorge Lois Borges described his 1941 story, The Garden of Forking Paths. Borges describes the work of a fictional  poet, calligrapher and governor named Ts'ui Pen who leaves everything behind to "compose a book and a maze" with the aim to "construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost." To new media scholars, Borges description of Ts'ui Pen's maze relates to the hypertext of the World Wide Web. The long process of conceiving, understanding and fully utilizing the tool of the Web may no doubt take centuries to fully work out. As Viola wrote in his essay Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?(1982): "Applications of tools are only reflections of the users--chopsticks may be a simple eating utensil or a weapon, depending on who uses them."

With the recent use of Web 2.0 social media to share information about the regime in Egypt, we see the Web's function beyond selling shoes and booking travel. Tim Berner-Lee and his CERN colleagues refrained form describing the political possibilities of the Web in their article titled The World-Wide Web (1994). "The World-Wide Web (W3) was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project" they wrote. Commerce may have outpaced knowledge-sharing with the development of entrepreneurial projects from Amazon to Facebook, but users ultimately use and sometimes subvert the tool. Through Web 2.0, artists can today avoid the traditional gate keepers of culture (e.g. art fairs, galleries, museums, publications) by building their own audiences by putting their work on sites ranging from Etsy to TuneCore to their own blogs where ideas as well as commodities are exchanged. FaceBook and Twitter are being used by even established gallery artists to share information on their projects and processes. The artistic process may be less mysterious than it used to be, but it is also accessible to audiences perhaps searching for familiar voices edged out of the mainstream. Meanwhile, Berners-Lee urges users to share "unadulterated raw data" by posting it on the Web to break down  barriers between people and disciplines.

Tim Berners-Lee in 1994 unleashing the Web

Art Alchemy & The Void

WC Gallery, 908 Talbot Avenue, DePere, Wisconsins, 2011

Our friend, the environmental sculptor  Roy Staab, rants incessantly about museums and curators caring more about dead artists and dead art than living artists and their work. He wants art to be free and alive and mostly for living artists to be supported (financially and psychically) and taken seriously. It takes effort(s) to accomplish what Roy wants. Last week our Digital Processes students visited the WC Gallery (allegedly the smallest gallery in the Midwest) just off  the kitchen in Dr. Stephen Perkins' home in a residential neighborhood not far from the Shopko store in DePere, Wisconsin. His day job is as a curator of art and professor of museum studies at the Lawton Gallery at University of Wisconsin Green Bay. By painting the walls of his small water closet metallic gold and inviting artists from around the world to exhibit, he has sparked dialog and opportunities for interaction. It is a sort of art alchemy.

Dear Artist Ray Johnson

A current exhibition of Ray Johnson works at WC titled Should An Eyelash Last Forever (Ray Johnson Works on Paper) runs January 22-July 29, 2011. The show includes 15 photocopy works neatly framed (for $60) and installed with an audio loop of a Ray rant. A Venice Lockjaw button sits on a pedestal on the back of the toilet. Though the show contained the works of a dead artist meticulously documented in a small catalog featuring an essay by Dr. Perkins, the gallery seemed alive with possibilities and the lingering aura and mystery of Ray Johnson. In a gallery talk, Dr. Perkins described his correspondence with Johnson via the U.S. Postal Service and telephone in the early 1990s just a few years before Johnson's suicide performance piece on Friday, January 13, 1995.

Johnson's enigmatic art process, which includes "Paloma-izing" his collages or otherwise reworking them to achieve an alluring patina, was documented lovingly in a film by Andrew Moore titled How to Draw a Bunny (2002). Moore and collaborator John Walter construct their movie as a film-noirish detective story. The camera enters the lives of Johnson's network of friends and attempts to assemble the pieces of a puzzle to the steady beat of jazz drummer Max Roach. Moore's skill for enlivening slow declines also manifests itself in his recent still photographs of the ruins of Detroit, Cuba and other places in the process of disintegrating just as Johnson was.

Living Curator Mary Jane Jacob

Curators like Mary Jane Jacob of Chicago wait for connections and directions to emerge in large-scale projects involving entire communities, living artists and in under-used and sometimes ignored or misunderstood public space. In a lecture titled The Collective Creative Process at Lawrence University on Tuesday, February 8, 2011, Jacob described her practice of observation, co-generation, action and integration. She urged artists, curators and community to establish clear aims, to trust the process (solutions will emerge!), to be fully present and to be sensitive to moments of insight. These methods evolved from her many projects in Charleston, in schools and sometimes galleries. Working within the system of art schools (she works for The School of the Art Institute), art institutions, publishers (she's edited a number of books published by the University of Chicago Press), she maintained a calm demeanor during her two days at Lawrence University. Amidst the overly-rational, carefully programmed culture of 21st century America, she granted permission to linger in the void and observe.

Doing is Knowledge

Allan Kaprow explaining Household, a Happening prepared for
Cornell University, May 1964. He gave a lecture explaining the piece
the day before a Happening or Activity then followed it with
a workshop to discuss the results.

The artworld produces "stillborn art" wrote Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) in his "Happenings" in the New York Scene essay first published in 1961. He sought a venue more free for artists than "the white walls, the tasteful aluminum frames, the lovely lighting, fawn gray rugs, cocktails, polite conversation" of chic galleries and art museums. He wanted to blur art and life and coined the term Happenings ("Happenings are events that, put simply, happen") and came to realize that the world and everyday life should provide the backdrop for his Happenings. By the early 1960s, he located his "activities" in dumps, parking ramps, the street, courtyards, auditoriums, woods and orchestratraed them though a "score" mimeographed or handwritten. It was his pushing, his yearning to break down barriers between artist and audience that makes his work from some 50 years ago increasingly relevant today. In 2011 and the era of Web 2.0, artists design projects circumventing the art establislhment to involve online participants by providing instructions for what could more or less be described as performance-inflected works to be completed in the outside world. Many of these art projects such as Post Secret have been embraced by the mainstream. In 2005 artist Frank Warren began inviting people to participate by mailing him their secrets on a homemade postcard which he scanned and posted on blogspot. Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher's Learning to Love You More listed assignments, which participants could complete and until 2009submit for publication on their website. New York artist David Horvitz posted ideas"anyone can use without permission"on Tumblr suggesting activities such as making fake press passes to gain free admission to art museums. Even institutions, such as the Minneapolis Institute of Art has invited the public to post portraits of photographers into a group pool on Flickr to coincide with their current Facing the Lens: Portraits of Photographers exhibition. Though Kaprow spoke against museums as more or less dead zones and resisted displaying his work, numerous museums have recently "reinvented" or "reinterpreted/reinvented" his "scores" including Fluids  mounted by The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in 2008. Many of Kaprow's "scores" have been collected and published as documents from an archive in Allan Kaprow: Art as Life by Eva Meyer-Herman, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal (Getty 2008). The coffee table volume makes his pieces accessible to a new generation such as our Digital Processes students who "reinterpreted" Kaprow's Routine piece one wintry Wisconsin afternoon.

Digital Processes students "reinterpret/reinvent"
Allan Kaprow's Routine
L to R:  Jinglei Xiao, Zenabu Abubakari,
Professor Elizabeth Carlson,  Kanesha Walker in
Lawrence University's Science Hall Atrium, 2.2.2011

Digital Processes students "reinterpret/reinvent"
Allan Kaprow's Routine
L to R:  Anam Shahid, Ali Scattergood,
Krissy Rhyme and Hillary Rogers in
Lawrence University's Science Hall Atrium, 2.2.2011

Digital Processes students "reinterpret/reinvent"
Allan Kaprow's Routine
L to R:  Tom Coben and Jordan Severson in
Lawrence University's Science Hall Atrium, 2.2.2011

Everyone is an Artist

Joseph Beuys planting one of 7000 Oaks.
A 4 foot high basalt stone was positioned next
to each tree to mirror the constantly changing
relationship between the tree and the stone.
Photos are posted to flickr showing their current state.

Nazi war trauma and abandoned plans to study medicine lead Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) to the Dusseldorf Academy of Art to pursue sculpture. He eventually gave up his early aspirations to emulate the work of British sculptor Henry Moore and created actions, multiples and installations instead. Through these works, he called for political reform and worked to engage the media and the public. Though some may perceive his art works (made of tallow, felt, honey and gold among other substances) as hard to "get", Beuys worked to draw in everyday people in hopes of breaking down boundries between art and life. Often associated with Fluxus, Beuys publicly denounced the movement. His works were his alone. His sculptures ran the gamut froms sweeping Karl-Marx-Platz in West Berlin on May Day 1972 to cooperating with the Guggenheim to install a major exhibition of his sculptures (as documented in John Halpern's Transformer video) to co-founding the Green Party to planting 7000 oak trees (7000 Eichen, 1982-7) to singing, with rock star swagger, his song Sonne Statt Reagan attacking American president Ronald Reagan's arms policy. Since his death, the faithful propagate his message via YouTube videos and a Museum Schloss Moyland which holds his early works. Contemporary artists and institutions also seem to be embracing the sorts of gestures that Beuys injected into the art discourse. Rirkrit Tiravanja prepared and served vegetarian curry daily to gallery-goes at David Zwiner in 2007) and part of his Untitled 1992 (Free) piece elevating cooking and eating to art.  Tino Sehgal made walking and engaging in conversation part of his art in This Progress staged in the empty Guggenheim in 2010 making human experience and thoughts a material for art.

Every sphere of human activity, even peeling a potato can be a work of art as long as it is a conscious act -- Joseph Beuys

Beuys at the peak of his career from a 1987 BBC documentary

Animal Magnetism

Bruno S. watching his mobile home repossessed in the barren
Wisconsin winter landscape in Werner Herzog's Strozek (1977).

The relationship of Bruno Schleinstein and Werner Herzog came to mind while reading a passage from Herzog's 2009 book Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on Making Fitzcarraldo:

A fairly young, intelligent looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no. (19)

Watching Bruno S. perform for Herzog's camera in spaces like a prison cell, his own apartment in Berlin and later in a mobile home set in the cold beige and brown landscape of central Wisconsin in November, we ponder the potential psychic residue for both men after Stroszek. Drawn together perhaps through the fateful pull of the flux of the fluid described by the German Physician Franz Mesmer, the two men worked together on two films The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (1974) and Strosek (1977) and never again. In Bruno's obituary dated August 14, 2010, The New York Times quoted his reflection on his post-Herzog celebrity status: "Everybody threw him away." But he did not necessarily feel exploited. "I have my pride, and I can think, and my thinking is very clever," the Times quotes him saying. His flashback performances on camera are cruel and compelling as he appears to relive his childhood experiences in orphanages and at the hands of Nazi tormentors. Bruno and his struggles become integral to Herzog's metaphoric closing scene. A lingering shot of a chicken doomed to dance against a cheerful yellow backdrop for viewers willing to insert a quarter in the slot. The chicken exits and the scene fades to black all the while an ecstatic Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee tune (Hootin' the Blues) plays as the chicken prances leaving viewers to search for meaning in the pained emotions and bleak landscapes that pervaded the film.


Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee performing Hootin' the Blues (circa 1959)


Infamous dancing chicken scene from Stroszek (1977). Herzog states in the voice over commentary that it seemed to him to be among the most important moments of cinema.

Dreams and Nightmares

Werner Herzog (b. 1942) on location for Fitzcarraldo (1982) set in Peru

Werner Herzog's fascination with characters living an extreme existence or landscapes providing an extreme shooting environment pervades his search for ecstatic truth. From the Amazon jungle to central Wisconsin in November, the self-taught German filmmaker has crafted his films around his desire to leave behind a record of the state of the human soul. In a text Herzog wrote for wife Lena Herzog's photographs documenting the pilgrimage site Bodh Gaya in Western Tibet (published in 2002 as Pilgrims: Becoming the Path Itself), he wrote of  Mount Kailash:

The mountain itself is not only a very impressive pyramid of black rock with a cap of ice and snow on its top, it immediately strikes the voyager as something much deeper - an inner landscape, an apparition of something existing only in the soul of man. (9)

Plainfield, Wisconsin (infamous for the crimes of the oft-satirized bachelor farmer/killer Ed Gein), says Herzog in Herzog on Herzog, "is one of those places that are focal points where every thread converges and is tied into a knot...where dreams and nightmares all come together." (146)  In his film Stroszek (filmed in Berlin, Manhattan, Plainfield and Cherokee, North Carolina), Herzog blurs documentary and narrative form to articulate his vision and over-arching concept. Starting with a script based on a real man named Bruno Schleinstein, the film evolved during the process of shooting which has long been a part of Herzog's film making practice. Improvising and collaborating with places, landscapes, animals, pimps, doctors, truckers, deer hunters, auctioneers and waitresses he happens upon, Herzog intuits truths about the "universal theme of shattered hopes" (144) and ends up with a film that questions what it means to be human.

Excerpt from Les Blank's 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams