This link to a video of an interview with Oliver Stone, Michael Moore and war correspondent Christopher Hedges from the Al Jazeera network was sent via Milan Kohout:
Hollywood and the war machine
Empire examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex
"War is hell, but for Hollywood it has been a Godsend, providing the perfect dramatic setting against which courageous heroes win the hearts and minds of the movie going public.
The Pentagon recognises the power of these celluloid dreams and encourages Hollywood to create heroic myths; to rewrite history to suit its own strategy and as a recruiting tool to provide a steady flow of willing young patriots for its wars.
What does Hollywood get out of this 'deal with the devil'? Access to billions of dollars worth of military kit, from helicopters to aircraft carries, enabling filmmakers to make bigger and more spectacular battle scenes, which in turn generate more box office revenue. Providing they accept the Pentagon's advice, even toe the party line and show the US military in a positive light.
So is it a case of art imitating life, or a sinister force using art to influence life and death - and the public perception of both?
Empire will examine Hollywood, the Pentagon, and war.
Joining us as guests: Oliver Stone, the eight times Academy Award-winning filmmaker; Michael Moore, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker; and Christopher Hedges, an author and the former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times.
Our interviewees this week are: Phil Strub, US Department of Defense Film Liaison Unit; Julian Barnes, Pentagon correspondent, LA Times; David Robb, the author of Operation Hollywood; Prof Klaus Dodds, the author of Screening Terror; Matthew Alford, the author of Reel Power; Prof Melani McAlister, the author of Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East."
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/empire/2010/12/2010121681345363793.html
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
On Censorship at the Smithsonian - Part 2 [54]
Kathleen McHugh just sent me this press release a few days ago:
http://artistmarketingsalon.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/spaces-exhibits-controversial-david-wojnarowicz-film/
There's a link to an excellent article by Holland Cotter off the New York Times link
(a link from a link from a link):
December 9, 2010, 2:54 pm
Critic’s Notebook: David Wojnarowicz’s ‘A Fire in My Belly’
By HOLLAND COTTER
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/critics-notebook-david-wojnarowiczs-a-fire-in-my-belly/
And here's another article of interest - a retaliation in a sense:
December 13, 2010, 3:18 pm
Warhol Foundation Threatens to End Financing of Smithsonian Exhibitions
By KATE TAYLOR
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/warhol-foundation-threatens-to-end-financing-of-smithsonian-exhibitions/
http://artistmarketingsalon.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/spaces-exhibits-controversial-david-wojnarowicz-film/
There's a link to an excellent article by Holland Cotter off the New York Times link
(a link from a link from a link):
December 9, 2010, 2:54 pm
Critic’s Notebook: David Wojnarowicz’s ‘A Fire in My Belly’
By HOLLAND COTTER
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/critics-notebook-david-wojnarowiczs-a-fire-in-my-belly/
And here's another article of interest - a retaliation in a sense:
December 13, 2010, 3:18 pm
Warhol Foundation Threatens to End Financing of Smithsonian Exhibitions
By KATE TAYLOR
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/warhol-foundation-threatens-to-end-financing-of-smithsonian-exhibitions/
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
On Censorship at the Smithsonian [53]
On December 1st, 2010, World's AIDS Day, the Smithsonian withdrew a video by the artist David Wojnarowicz from the exhibition entitled Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (publicized as being "America's first major exhibition of gay art") under pressure from the Catholic League and threats of "reviewing" of federal funding for the Smithsonian itself. Note that apparently none of the politicians or religious figures who complained so vehemently actually bothered to visit the exhibition or view the video which was withdrawn.
[JW: If this is not a living example of the Prostitution of Art, I'm not sure what is.]
Below are links to the original exhibit, the actual video and various articles on the fallout of a video being pulled from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (part of the Smithsonian) in Washington, DC.
The video which was pulled from the exhibition:
Fire in My Belly by David Wojnarowicz, Diamanda Galas
Exhibition Description @National Portrait Gallery Website:
Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture
October 30 through February 13, 2011
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/exhhide.html
November 30, 2010
GOP Reps Blast Smithsonian Exhibit Featuring Ant-Covered Jesus on Cross by Todd Starnes
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/11/30/ant-covered-jesus-exhibition-sparks-call-congressional-probe/
an excerpt from that article which probably explains at least in part why the video was removed from the exhibition:
"Incoming House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he condemned the use of taxpayer money for the exhibit but would not call for the removal of the exhibit.
"American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer funds in a tough economy," Boehner said. "While the amount of money involved may be small, it’s symbolic of the arrogance Washington routinely applies to thousands of spending decisions involving Americans’ hard-earned money at a time when one in every 10 Americans is out of work and our children’s future is being threatened by debt.
"Smithsonian officials should either acknowledge the mistake and correct it, or be prepared to face tough scrutiny beginning in January when the new majority in the House moves to end the job-killing spending spree in Washington.”"
[JW: Note that the exhibition itself also received major funding from private institutions including the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation]
December 2, 2010
TBD Arts: National Portrait Gallery censorship controversy: Who was David Wojnarowicz?
http://www.tbd.com/blogs/tbd-arts/2010/12/national-portrait-gallery-censorship-controversy-who-was-david-wojnarowicz--5383.html
December 5, 2010
guardian.co.uk: Hide/Seek: Too shocking for America
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/05/hide-seek-gay-art-smithsonian
December 7th, 2010
Dis Magazine Why David Wojnarowicz Matters by Dan Cameron
http://dismagazine.com/blog/11638/why-david-wojnarowicz-matters-by-dan-cameron/
Smithsonian Q&A Regarding the "Hide/Seek" Exhibition
(pdf file downloaded via the National Portrait Gallery Website):
1. Does the Smithsonian stand behind the "Hide/Seek" exhibition or are you going to close the show?
The "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery is a serious examination of the role sexual identity has played in the creation of modern American portraiture. The Smithsonian Institution stands behind the exhibition, and the show will remain open through the scheduled date of Feb. 13.
2. Why did the Smithsonian make the decision to remove the “Fire in the Belly” video by David Wojnarowicz from the exhibition?
Many people who contacted the Smithsonian and some members of Congress were upset about segments of the four-minute video (optionally accessed by visitors on a small touch screen in the exhibition) because it depicted a crucifix on the ground with ants walking on it. They interpreted the video imagery as anti-Christian. This imagery was part of a surrealistic video collage filmed in Mexico expressing the suffering, marginalization and physical decay of those who were afflicted with AIDS. In the video, Wojnarowicz used religious imagery placing his work firmly in the tradition of art that uses such imagery to universalize human suffering. Smithsonian officials and museum leaders are sensitive to public perceptions of the Institution’s exhibitions. In this case, they believed that the attention to this particular video imagery and the way in which it was being interpreted by many overshadowed the importance and understanding of the entire exhibition. Thus the decision was made to remove the video from the exhibition.
3. Who made the decision?
The Secretary of the Smithsonian, after hearing the opinions and views of the relevant parties, including the Under Secretary for History, Art and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery Director and the exhibition co-Curator.
4. How do you respond to critics, including the Association of Art Museum Directors, who say that you caved into conservative critics who think it's okay to censor art exhibits in museum?
We respect the AAMD position, and respectfully disagree with their conclusion. As a publicly supported museum, the Smithsonian has an important research and educational mission and needs to be responsive to a large and diverse audience. The change that was made was intended to clear up a misunderstanding, and help focus attention on the central theme of the exhibition, which is portraiture and the representation of gay and lesbian identities in American art.
5. What are you doing to warn visitors who may find the exhibition disturbing?
Acknowledging that some visitors may prefer not to encounter some of the subject matter in the exhibition, signs at both entrances read: “This exhibition contains mature themes.”
6. Why did you remove two protestors who showed the video inside the museum at the entrance to the exhibit? Were these two protestors banned for life by the Smithsonian?
The two people were asked to leave the museum because they were violating Smithsonian policy: They were videotaping in a no-photography area; distributing leaflets; and displaying a placard (iPad) – all of which are prohibited in Smithsonian museums. When the protestors refused to leave, Smithsonian security contacted the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. The police did not arrest them. The Metropolitan police issued the protestors a citation (barring notice), which states they are barred from the building for 12 months. The protestors were not banned from the museum for life.
December 14, 2010
email from Nathan who went to see the exhibition:
i went to see the exhibit with G. this past weekend....it was very inspiring. more importantly, a body of work that was highlighted gave a voice to my community which continues to be stifled. the censored pieces remind my community and others of who is in charge and that my community was permitted/granted permission to share their voice. it does not indicate a step in any direction and pushed me to remember that i am not a part of the majority.
also, the cultural attitudes that were propogated in this body of work onto the community by the community was offputting. all gay men (illustrated, photographed, painted) were athletic, muscular and presented an ideal. i did not see fat old ugly men as gay. instead, those were women dressed as those types.
[JW: If this is not a living example of the Prostitution of Art, I'm not sure what is.]
Below are links to the original exhibit, the actual video and various articles on the fallout of a video being pulled from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (part of the Smithsonian) in Washington, DC.
The video which was pulled from the exhibition:
Fire in My Belly by David Wojnarowicz, Diamanda Galas
Exhibition Description @National Portrait Gallery Website:
Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture
October 30 through February 13, 2011
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/exhhide.html
November 30, 2010
GOP Reps Blast Smithsonian Exhibit Featuring Ant-Covered Jesus on Cross by Todd Starnes
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/11/30/ant-covered-jesus-exhibition-sparks-call-congressional-probe/
an excerpt from that article which probably explains at least in part why the video was removed from the exhibition:
"Incoming House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he condemned the use of taxpayer money for the exhibit but would not call for the removal of the exhibit.
"American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer funds in a tough economy," Boehner said. "While the amount of money involved may be small, it’s symbolic of the arrogance Washington routinely applies to thousands of spending decisions involving Americans’ hard-earned money at a time when one in every 10 Americans is out of work and our children’s future is being threatened by debt.
"Smithsonian officials should either acknowledge the mistake and correct it, or be prepared to face tough scrutiny beginning in January when the new majority in the House moves to end the job-killing spending spree in Washington.”"
[JW: Note that the exhibition itself also received major funding from private institutions including the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation]
December 2, 2010
TBD Arts: National Portrait Gallery censorship controversy: Who was David Wojnarowicz?
http://www.tbd.com/blogs/tbd-arts/2010/12/national-portrait-gallery-censorship-controversy-who-was-david-wojnarowicz--5383.html
December 5, 2010
guardian.co.uk: Hide/Seek: Too shocking for America
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/05/hide-seek-gay-art-smithsonian
December 7th, 2010
Dis Magazine Why David Wojnarowicz Matters by Dan Cameron
http://dismagazine.com/blog/11638/why-david-wojnarowicz-matters-by-dan-cameron/
Smithsonian Q&A Regarding the "Hide/Seek" Exhibition
(pdf file downloaded via the National Portrait Gallery Website):
1. Does the Smithsonian stand behind the "Hide/Seek" exhibition or are you going to close the show?
The "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery is a serious examination of the role sexual identity has played in the creation of modern American portraiture. The Smithsonian Institution stands behind the exhibition, and the show will remain open through the scheduled date of Feb. 13.
2. Why did the Smithsonian make the decision to remove the “Fire in the Belly” video by David Wojnarowicz from the exhibition?
Many people who contacted the Smithsonian and some members of Congress were upset about segments of the four-minute video (optionally accessed by visitors on a small touch screen in the exhibition) because it depicted a crucifix on the ground with ants walking on it. They interpreted the video imagery as anti-Christian. This imagery was part of a surrealistic video collage filmed in Mexico expressing the suffering, marginalization and physical decay of those who were afflicted with AIDS. In the video, Wojnarowicz used religious imagery placing his work firmly in the tradition of art that uses such imagery to universalize human suffering. Smithsonian officials and museum leaders are sensitive to public perceptions of the Institution’s exhibitions. In this case, they believed that the attention to this particular video imagery and the way in which it was being interpreted by many overshadowed the importance and understanding of the entire exhibition. Thus the decision was made to remove the video from the exhibition.
3. Who made the decision?
The Secretary of the Smithsonian, after hearing the opinions and views of the relevant parties, including the Under Secretary for History, Art and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery Director and the exhibition co-Curator.
4. How do you respond to critics, including the Association of Art Museum Directors, who say that you caved into conservative critics who think it's okay to censor art exhibits in museum?
We respect the AAMD position, and respectfully disagree with their conclusion. As a publicly supported museum, the Smithsonian has an important research and educational mission and needs to be responsive to a large and diverse audience. The change that was made was intended to clear up a misunderstanding, and help focus attention on the central theme of the exhibition, which is portraiture and the representation of gay and lesbian identities in American art.
5. What are you doing to warn visitors who may find the exhibition disturbing?
Acknowledging that some visitors may prefer not to encounter some of the subject matter in the exhibition, signs at both entrances read: “This exhibition contains mature themes.”
6. Why did you remove two protestors who showed the video inside the museum at the entrance to the exhibit? Were these two protestors banned for life by the Smithsonian?
The two people were asked to leave the museum because they were violating Smithsonian policy: They were videotaping in a no-photography area; distributing leaflets; and displaying a placard (iPad) – all of which are prohibited in Smithsonian museums. When the protestors refused to leave, Smithsonian security contacted the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. The police did not arrest them. The Metropolitan police issued the protestors a citation (barring notice), which states they are barred from the building for 12 months. The protestors were not banned from the museum for life.
December 14, 2010
email from Nathan who went to see the exhibition:
i went to see the exhibit with G. this past weekend....it was very inspiring. more importantly, a body of work that was highlighted gave a voice to my community which continues to be stifled. the censored pieces remind my community and others of who is in charge and that my community was permitted/granted permission to share their voice. it does not indicate a step in any direction and pushed me to remember that i am not a part of the majority.
also, the cultural attitudes that were propogated in this body of work onto the community by the community was offputting. all gay men (illustrated, photographed, painted) were athletic, muscular and presented an ideal. i did not see fat old ugly men as gay. instead, those were women dressed as those types.
Monday, November 22, 2010
PoArt Performance: Milan Kohout [52]
Milan Kohout
The Mobius Artist Group
Boston, MA, USA and Czech Republic
www.mobius.org/content/full-bio-milan-kohout
www.mobius.org/blog/11
9/25/2010 - The Prostitution of Art at Open Studios:
Milan had kindly agreed to do two last minute participatory performances during Adriana Disman's durational performance.
Photos: Bob Raymond
11/2/2010 - Post Performance Artist Statement:
MK (Artist):
Here is my statement for your show where i was on the leash:
Wake up and bite your masters!!!!
I have been always saying what I have felt and I will continue to do it in-spite that stupid "political correctness",and some kind of fake "respect" to others which is our american society requiring from us. I feel that such a requirement is actually killing the artists as the social critics. It is killing artists as the only sane members of each society in the whole history of human kind. Artists should scream their feeling absolutely openly and as loud as possible and without absolutely any kind of the mind censorship. And nowadays comes again time for the artistic uprising!!! Because the fucking capitalistic oppressive system we live in is getting still bigger and bigger power over our lives and the rich "chosen pigs" think that soon we will turn into their disposable and completely controlled mass of the brainwashed slaves. Slaves who would maximally go as the sheep to their controlled puppet elections and would consider it as the taste of freedom.. We "the artists" have completely failed to be the rebellious scandalous and offensive social critics. We accepted the humiliating PC servitude position obeying the ruling class of the rich pigs and as so we have only "decorated" their chosen lives as the little poodles on the leashes. We have been "masturbating" some kind of empty conceptual post post modernistic boolshit art which has been building and "celebrating" only empty shelves of our existences as the real equal human beings in our society. We turned into the worst possible prostitutes- prostitutes who sold their minds and morality. I have to say that I respect prostitution as the honest job when you sell your body for fair and negotiated price not being forced into such a deal. But what absolute majority of nowadays american and as matter of fact even the whole world artist have done was a mind sleazy prostitution into which they were forceful pushed by the rich pigs who own the most of the capital in the capitalistic societies. We should rebel and create the artistic revolution and smash those fucking rich pig's oppression. We should wake up and grab back our art as the tool for the permanent social revolutionary change. We should use the force of art to reestablish our freedom of minds and bodies. We should return art where is belongs- as the political tool of the community, and the whole society. The word politic comes from the word Polis . And Polis means community of people and not masses of individualistic disconnected idiots controlled by the rich pig's medias. We should be again the equal human beings who enjoy their liberty and sharing of it within our communities. Long live artistic revolution!!! Fuck the ruling rich pigs!!!! Fuck capitalism !! Fuck private ownership of the space!!! Fuck "sold capitalistic democracy" which is serving only to the rich pigs. Let us brake our leashes and shit on the heads of our "masters"!!! It would be easy!!! Rich pigs are terrified of us because they know that slave mind can be controlled only by a short leash. Wake up and bite your masters!!!!
Milan
The Mobius Artist Group
Boston, MA, USA and Czech Republic
www.mobius.org/content/full-bio-milan-kohout
www.mobius.org/blog/11
9/25/2010 - The Prostitution of Art at Open Studios:
Milan had kindly agreed to do two last minute participatory performances during Adriana Disman's durational performance.
Photos: Bob Raymond
11/2/2010 - Post Performance Artist Statement:
MK (Artist):
Here is my statement for your show where i was on the leash:
Wake up and bite your masters!!!!
I have been always saying what I have felt and I will continue to do it in-spite that stupid "political correctness",and some kind of fake "respect" to others which is our american society requiring from us. I feel that such a requirement is actually killing the artists as the social critics. It is killing artists as the only sane members of each society in the whole history of human kind. Artists should scream their feeling absolutely openly and as loud as possible and without absolutely any kind of the mind censorship. And nowadays comes again time for the artistic uprising!!! Because the fucking capitalistic oppressive system we live in is getting still bigger and bigger power over our lives and the rich "chosen pigs" think that soon we will turn into their disposable and completely controlled mass of the brainwashed slaves. Slaves who would maximally go as the sheep to their controlled puppet elections and would consider it as the taste of freedom.. We "the artists" have completely failed to be the rebellious scandalous and offensive social critics. We accepted the humiliating PC servitude position obeying the ruling class of the rich pigs and as so we have only "decorated" their chosen lives as the little poodles on the leashes. We have been "masturbating" some kind of empty conceptual post post modernistic boolshit art which has been building and "celebrating" only empty shelves of our existences as the real equal human beings in our society. We turned into the worst possible prostitutes- prostitutes who sold their minds and morality. I have to say that I respect prostitution as the honest job when you sell your body for fair and negotiated price not being forced into such a deal. But what absolute majority of nowadays american and as matter of fact even the whole world artist have done was a mind sleazy prostitution into which they were forceful pushed by the rich pigs who own the most of the capital in the capitalistic societies. We should rebel and create the artistic revolution and smash those fucking rich pig's oppression. We should wake up and grab back our art as the tool for the permanent social revolutionary change. We should use the force of art to reestablish our freedom of minds and bodies. We should return art where is belongs- as the political tool of the community, and the whole society. The word politic comes from the word Polis . And Polis means community of people and not masses of individualistic disconnected idiots controlled by the rich pig's medias. We should be again the equal human beings who enjoy their liberty and sharing of it within our communities. Long live artistic revolution!!! Fuck the ruling rich pigs!!!! Fuck capitalism !! Fuck private ownership of the space!!! Fuck "sold capitalistic democracy" which is serving only to the rich pigs. Let us brake our leashes and shit on the heads of our "masters"!!! It would be easy!!! Rich pigs are terrified of us because they know that slave mind can be controlled only by a short leash. Wake up and bite your masters!!!!
Milan
Sunday, November 21, 2010
PoArt Exhibit: Updates #21
The featured artist on Monday November 22nd, 2010 will be Milan Kohout of the Mobius Artists Group who performed at the closing of the Prostitution of Art exhibition.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
PoArt Exhibit: RICHard SMOLinski [51]
RICHard SMOLinski
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
http://vimeo.com/user3174176
PROSTarTUTE: the piece(s) that I would like to submit are
materializations of the portmanteau words, “PROSTartUTE,” and
“PROSTartUTION,” coinages that combine “prostitute,” “prostitution” and
“art.”
The artworks’ imagery overlays the transparent letters of the words
PROSTartUTE and PROSTartUTION overtop of a portion of an image of Jeff
Koons and Cicciolina. Printed onto magnetic paper and then cut into the
shape of the words, the works contain only teasing glimpses of an image
that hilariously married the cultural and pornographic industries. The
effect will hopefully be somewhere between a peepshow and graffiti-esque
advertising. I have included a pdf “sketch” for your consideration—just
imagine all of the material not contained within the alphabetic characters
cut away.
I am willing to contribute 4 pieces. Two could be used within the
performance and two could be installed outside of the gallery. Because the
pieces are magnetic they easily adhere to metal surfaces, such as
newspaper boxes, traffic poles and mailboxes, and are a sort of
non-permanent and non-damaging graffiti. While they may be displayed
out-of-doors they are not THAT weather-resistant—they may be left to
deteriorate over time.
During the performance the other two versions may be used in any way.
Indeed, it might be best if they are destroyed, leaving less evidence for
Koons’ army of attorneys to base future litigations upon.
Dimentions: 7” x 5” approximately.
9/8/2010 - Before the exhibition:
RS (Artist):
I have sent a selection of pieces via Purolator Courier to the home
address you provided. They should arrive tomorrow (Thursday) or Friday, if
there is no delay with customs. Please contact me if there are any problems with my shipment.
As well, I have attached a few scans for your records--unfortunately they
intensify the works' imperfections.
I hope the exhibition/performance goes great, and I hope we have the
chance to work together again in the future.
JW (co-curator):
I'm in NYC but my partner just sent me via cell phone an image of your package so it arrived safely! Thanks so much,
I will post your name on mobius.org sometime before the opening on Sept 18th
along with the other participants..
Thanks so much!
9/18/2010 through 9/25/2010 - Exhibition:
The artist's pieces were displayed on the table in the original clear binder (with a red edge) provided by the artist.
Photo: Bob Raymond
10/4/2010 through 10/8/2010 - Post-Exhibition Dialogue (excerpts):
JW (co-curator):
I meant to tell you that we displayed your beautiful magnets in the
original folder you sent them in - I tried to put them around the
space but would you believe everything must be made out of aluminum or
some other non-magnetic material because i wasn't able to stick them
to anything!
So I was wondering if you would give me permission to use your magnets
in some guerrilla performances and/or stealthy activities - I would
take your magnets and find places outside where they will stick -- and
document via photos and/or video shorts...
would that be ok with you?
I will wait for a nice day... (it's been rainy and cold the last few days)...
and go out there and place some of your magnets.
Lastly could I send one of your magnets to another artist if he/she
promises to use your magnets somehow and send me back photographs? I
have a few friends who would be game I'm pretty sure...
And sorry we didn't have some nice steel structures to put your lovely
magnets on!
RS (Artist):
Sorry the magnets proved problematic. I am not sure I feel a great deal of
ownership over the pieces so the alternate plan sounds great--I hope they
have an interesting lie in Boston or elsewhere, though photos are
appreciated. Thanks for keeping me informed.
JW (co-Curator):
the magnets are magnificent!! really, i'm truly sorry about that -
i didn't realize it would be a problem so my bad - not your fault at
all .. and it will give me an excuse to think up some guerrilla action
which i wanted to do anyway
strange coincidence, several months ago i asked another artist in our
group to give me "evidence" that i could leave behind if i snuck into
some abandoned or under construction (read not exactly legal) sites...
so i can use piece of your magnets as "evidence"
RS (Artist):
Good luck with the public interventions,
10/16/2010 through 10/17/2010 - Guerrilla Performances:
Photos from Evidence Left Behind:
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
http://vimeo.com/user3174176
PROSTarTUTE: the piece(s) that I would like to submit are
materializations of the portmanteau words, “PROSTartUTE,” and
“PROSTartUTION,” coinages that combine “prostitute,” “prostitution” and
“art.”
The artworks’ imagery overlays the transparent letters of the words
PROSTartUTE and PROSTartUTION overtop of a portion of an image of Jeff
Koons and Cicciolina. Printed onto magnetic paper and then cut into the
shape of the words, the works contain only teasing glimpses of an image
that hilariously married the cultural and pornographic industries. The
effect will hopefully be somewhere between a peepshow and graffiti-esque
advertising. I have included a pdf “sketch” for your consideration—just
imagine all of the material not contained within the alphabetic characters
cut away.
I am willing to contribute 4 pieces. Two could be used within the
performance and two could be installed outside of the gallery. Because the
pieces are magnetic they easily adhere to metal surfaces, such as
newspaper boxes, traffic poles and mailboxes, and are a sort of
non-permanent and non-damaging graffiti. While they may be displayed
out-of-doors they are not THAT weather-resistant—they may be left to
deteriorate over time.
During the performance the other two versions may be used in any way.
Indeed, it might be best if they are destroyed, leaving less evidence for
Koons’ army of attorneys to base future litigations upon.
Dimentions: 7” x 5” approximately.
9/8/2010 - Before the exhibition:
RS (Artist):
I have sent a selection of pieces via Purolator Courier to the home
address you provided. They should arrive tomorrow (Thursday) or Friday, if
there is no delay with customs. Please contact me if there are any problems with my shipment.
As well, I have attached a few scans for your records--unfortunately they
intensify the works' imperfections.
I hope the exhibition/performance goes great, and I hope we have the
chance to work together again in the future.
JW (co-curator):
I'm in NYC but my partner just sent me via cell phone an image of your package so it arrived safely! Thanks so much,
I will post your name on mobius.org sometime before the opening on Sept 18th
along with the other participants..
Thanks so much!
9/18/2010 through 9/25/2010 - Exhibition:
The artist's pieces were displayed on the table in the original clear binder (with a red edge) provided by the artist.
Photo: Bob Raymond
10/4/2010 through 10/8/2010 - Post-Exhibition Dialogue (excerpts):
JW (co-curator):
I meant to tell you that we displayed your beautiful magnets in the
original folder you sent them in - I tried to put them around the
space but would you believe everything must be made out of aluminum or
some other non-magnetic material because i wasn't able to stick them
to anything!
So I was wondering if you would give me permission to use your magnets
in some guerrilla performances and/or stealthy activities - I would
take your magnets and find places outside where they will stick -- and
document via photos and/or video shorts...
would that be ok with you?
I will wait for a nice day... (it's been rainy and cold the last few days)...
and go out there and place some of your magnets.
Lastly could I send one of your magnets to another artist if he/she
promises to use your magnets somehow and send me back photographs? I
have a few friends who would be game I'm pretty sure...
And sorry we didn't have some nice steel structures to put your lovely
magnets on!
RS (Artist):
Sorry the magnets proved problematic. I am not sure I feel a great deal of
ownership over the pieces so the alternate plan sounds great--I hope they
have an interesting lie in Boston or elsewhere, though photos are
appreciated. Thanks for keeping me informed.
JW (co-Curator):
the magnets are magnificent!! really, i'm truly sorry about that -
i didn't realize it would be a problem so my bad - not your fault at
all .. and it will give me an excuse to think up some guerrilla action
which i wanted to do anyway
strange coincidence, several months ago i asked another artist in our
group to give me "evidence" that i could leave behind if i snuck into
some abandoned or under construction (read not exactly legal) sites...
so i can use piece of your magnets as "evidence"
RS (Artist):
Good luck with the public interventions,
10/16/2010 through 10/17/2010 - Guerrilla Performances:
Photos from Evidence Left Behind:
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
PoArt Exhibit: Updates #19
Bob Raymond
http://www.moeboyd.net/
http://www.mobius.org/artist/bob-raymond
this moment: missives from another world slideshow
Bob Raymond of the Mobius Artists Group just uploaded some beautiful photographs on the Mobius flickr account from the Prostitution of Art exhibition. In addition, he has generously offered photographs from the Mobius archive, some of which may end up in this blog eventually.
Photographs will be worked into the existing blog posts for the artists in the show gradually and the links back to the updated blog posts will be posted via subsequent Updates.
In the meantime, here is the link to the current set of photographs:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mobiusorg/sets/72157625163943183/
If you download any of these images and post them anywhere, please be sure to credit
Bob Raymond.
http://www.moeboyd.net/
http://www.mobius.org/artist/bob-raymond
this moment: missives from another world slideshow
Bob Raymond of the Mobius Artists Group just uploaded some beautiful photographs on the Mobius flickr account from the Prostitution of Art exhibition. In addition, he has generously offered photographs from the Mobius archive, some of which may end up in this blog eventually.
Photographs will be worked into the existing blog posts for the artists in the show gradually and the links back to the updated blog posts will be posted via subsequent Updates.
In the meantime, here is the link to the current set of photographs:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mobiusorg/sets/72157625163943183/
If you download any of these images and post them anywhere, please be sure to credit
Bob Raymond.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
PoArt Exhibit: Susan Shulman [50]
Susan Shulman
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
www.susanshulman.com
A surprise last minuted signed poster was sent in by Susan Shulman of the image that was posted on this blog:
WHAT DOES IT TAKE YOU TO BUY ART: Susan Shulman [20]
9/18/2010 - Opening Night of the Exhibition:
Susan Shulman's piece was part of the magazine which was on display at the exhibition.
Photo: William Evertson
9/19/2010 through 9/25/2010 - Exhibition and Closing SOWA Open Studios:
Received and installed Susan's signed poster in the faux Mobius Shop.
Photo: Bob Raymond
11/5/2010 - Epilogue:
The co-curators plan to use the artist's poster whenever possible for various prostitutional events at Mobius along with future incarnations of the faux Mobius Shop.
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
www.susanshulman.com
A surprise last minuted signed poster was sent in by Susan Shulman of the image that was posted on this blog:
WHAT DOES IT TAKE YOU TO BUY ART: Susan Shulman [20]
9/18/2010 - Opening Night of the Exhibition:
Susan Shulman's piece was part of the magazine which was on display at the exhibition.
Photo: William Evertson
9/19/2010 through 9/25/2010 - Exhibition and Closing SOWA Open Studios:
Received and installed Susan's signed poster in the faux Mobius Shop.
Photo: Bob Raymond
11/5/2010 - Epilogue:
The co-curators plan to use the artist's poster whenever possible for various prostitutional events at Mobius along with future incarnations of the faux Mobius Shop.
PoArt Exhibit: Updates #18
The featured artist of the day will be Mail Art and A Book About Death alumna, Susan Shulman.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Damien Crisp [49]
[reprinted with permission of the author]
Irrational / Slaves
Slave
Expanded
There are no new waves, there is only] the ocean.
Damien Crisp
Published by Unknown.
April 15, 2010.
Brooklyn, New York.
Copyright © Damien Crisp
Expanded
There are no new waves, there is only] the ocean.
Damien Crisp
Published by Unknown.
April 15, 2010.
Brooklyn, New York.
Copyright © Damien Crisp
Irrational / Slaves
Resistance is thought fully awake. Irrationality is
the last point of resistance in our society.
Everything else can be reified, integrated, then
communicated.
Only irrationality is haunting.
The rational is a corporate mind. It
advertises a deep suspicion of intellectuals. It is
the American work ethic. It is a homogenized
society unable to distinguish between suburban
centers. It is the ideological fluidity behind
consumer design. It all makes perfect sense.
The distilled essence of a consumer possesses
only irrational impulses but the corporate stream
is a rational stream and seduces with strategies
of rational pretense. The ultimate rational desire
is the fantasy of reaching the moment you no
longer have to think or make sense of chaos.
In the past, the constant stream of corporate
reality has been described as the electric
irrational. It was the nonsense of the machine
and the rational was resistance to the nonsense.
But we, consumers, are bloodied now.
And stream demands the rational. The
stream is a collective corporate ethos and it is
very real. It hallucinates lifestyles. Business is
universal messaging: direct communication,
effective graphic design, institution,
understanding your target market.
The consistency of a Starbucks is rational.
We - our cameras – are mesmerized by
the irrational. The stream is mesmerized by
charlatans, murder, infidelity and disaster
ordered by rational form within the circle of the
lens. The circle is the form scanning us always
for news.
In contemporary art, the irrational is a mumble.
It is anti-transaesthetic.
The irrational is not specific.
It is the absence after production, or poems, or
dissent, or manifestos, or experimentation, or the
death of the author, or the punctum, or
hallucinations, or garbage, or luxury confronted,
or the autobiographical, or vomit, or modest
awkward neurosis, or shyness, or screaming, or
theory unhinged, or blood, or an unlit room, or a
witch’s spell, or the outsider, or the uneducated.
It is a momentary protest against fixed rational
demographics, fixed rational identity, fixed
rational meaning in a homogenous world.
The irrational multiplicity of meaning, there is
no end. There is emotion and there is a copy of
poetry’s resistance to capitalist codes.
The rational begins an inquiry into art
by establishing a boutique. Later, the initial
inquiry becomes aggressive expansion.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the art
market experienced its largest expansion in
history. Safe in its bubble, the business of art
sharpened its rational logic. No longer quaint
and plural, dealing art is now as homogenized as
any other corporate profession.
Standard modes of presentation and
standard modes of conduct evolved like a spider
web on a glass wall. The standards are appeals to
investors, speculators - you can have faith in art
because we are professionals. Come inside.
Investors have grown as an influence
over contemporary art. An identity as thoughtful
collector became too limiting.
The investors, the speculators, advanced and
became a collective audience magnetizing both
the production and the content of art towards its
own ethos.
A corporate ethos dictates taste and thought.
Writers, curators, and museums follow
investments the way artists once followed critics.
The tragedy of this growing influence of
corporate thought is the thorough incorporation
of art’s context. Art cannot escape its context.
Art is torn the way reality is torn, torn by the
difference between a life lived and life lived on
reality television. Poetry, substance, love and
experimentation are flickering in and out of
consciousness, almost dead. The human is
erased.
It is the human that is missing from
much contemporary art. Missing from the
objects. Missing from the discussion. Missing
in the bright white boutiques called galleries
that rely on two forms of alienation to project
value and power- social alienation and alienated
objects.
Art made to flow with everything, powerful as
a market and entertainment commodity, is
otherwise powerless. It relinquishes art’s
potential as a force of resistance, favoring the
dependable consistent veneer of porn over the
turbulent subjective spiral into love.
The commercial art world drowns art’s
resistance, its possibility for awakened
irrationality but art will transcend its numbing -
the past decade of fun. Murakami’s fat face will
explode and his colors for once will have
emotion.
This promise is the script of a poetic return.
The irrational with a particular voice implies
language opened by impulse and scissors. Art's
value of resistance is it's ability to rupture daily
life; a break never aimed to please the “masses”
- a word designating a group controlled by
corporate thought.
The irrational is ahead of the masses.
The irrational is not entertainment.
Investors manifest entertainment. Investors
manifest corporate thought. The product they
value is a streamlined consistent product.
The contemporary art market almost demands
artists become entertainers as calculated, as
rational, as any brand but the most compelling
art is still ahead and will always be ahead of
ordered consensus or entertainment.
The conceptual and aesthetic directions
of contemporary art are regulated by an
unregulated economic system. Contemporary
art galleries are writing art history from the
shadows of office desks.
History is the market's ad campaign.
What is left for history?
A history written by an unregulated
economic market is a false history.
Galleries are the gatekeepers. In an
unregulated market oriented system criticality
often becomes a tool for solely market oriented
aspirations. Critique no longer applies to an
artist frozen in place by investment aspirations
inside the economic system of a dark
unregulated form.
Beyond sight or unity, the art world is an ocean.
The commercial art world is a construct. The
ocean contains the construct, but the construct is
ever expanding; is seductive, and seeks to
contain the ocean. This is the difference between
two worlds. Constructs of rational desire are
now synonymous with corporate negotiations of
reality. The ocean is its own reality.
The ocean is hypnotized by its boutiques and its
corporate events: fairs, auctions, and openings.
Is the ocean only an economic reality? Or is it
still subject to political critique, to personal
interpretations, to negative reviews, or to love.
Art's economic value has to fall,
leaving questions of value to rest on the trance
of love, truth of reified experience and the
psychological effect.
Most people in the ocean are schizophrenic.
Most hate the ocean and love the ocean. Most
enact its destructive gestures. Most curators,
artists and writers quietly desire their own
version of a paradigm shift, and most gallery
workers who are otherwise devoted to a
commercial space whisper privately their
anticipation for the market’s collapse.
Some always resist and always want
something else.
Some desire something else even as they try to
grow up and accept the order. Some people lose
their desire in the ocean and turn stories of their
past resistances into conversations at gallery
dinners.
Others desire nothing political, simply the
attention that is there - our eyes. Change would
fuck with the gaze. The sense of cool, art’s
marriage to fashion, is too light to pick up
questions with political weight.
The ocean itself is haunted by a hallucination:
finding its dead father decaying in a gallery,
under the structure of an ideal space, growing
like ivy across his corpse.
The ocean’s commercial construct is
not the pluralized morphing gel as it is often
described - with hundreds of scenes and just as
many versions of ‘good art’. If the ocean lacked
a center, artists would never become stars.
The center of the ocean is a magnet. The ocean
is magnetized by the successes of last decade’s
commercial construct and its famous expansion.
There is a space for every style of artist, but the
spaces are only identifiers within an industry.
Commercial art’s architectural fragments, its
spaces, galleries, play with infinite combinations
in the spectrum of desire - courting attention
with rebellion, and/or ignoring attention with
utopian disconnect, and/or giving the system a
reassuring professional atmosphere, and/or
constructing glamour, and/or courting attention
with a promise of theoretical-intellectual-critical
relevance.
Each space plays off of its relationship between
its artists’ commodities and the irony of selling
ideas, swimming between love and hate of the
whole.
The beach.
Packing and leaving.
It is the legacy of the Unibomber that shows the
futility of withdrawal from corrupt systems. I
haven’t left New York because there is a war
over real estate; real estate linked in real time to
art history.
And Godard reminds us of the
state of the dead revolutionary.
Even the death of the revolutionary left wing is a
stereotype. Any attempt to re-define an artistic
power structure through political gestures has to
contend with itself: an attempt at a stereotype.
I am here - in this paradox - writing the
experimental and the political and the irrational
after the grand narratives have died.
Alienation from the stream has a limit. It has a
boundary. We are confined to language and its
systems.
Still, an artist does not have to disconnect into
utopian purity from corporate or media reality
to make work that is alien to the stream.
In the end, after everything, maybe art will stage
its own disappearance, realizing it cannot exist
in a rational business structure because its only
real value is its resistance to...
Modern / Slave
The slave falls from the sky. It is the
resurrection of the avant-garde for nothing at all.
No worth. No value. The slave hits the ground,
breaks into pieces and lives again.
The sound of the slave's body hitting the ground
is the sound of the avant-garde and the echo has
the same historical strangeness as the word
'modern'.
'Modern' is the condition of alienation from the
stream. It is the irrational. It is Charles
Baudelaire.
A modern artist is compelled to be an
artist, and at the same time is deeply ill existing
as a commodity. A modern artist resists the
commodification of their work, of their
existence as an artist and of their existence at
large.
Modern is an artist breathing difficult thought
with disregard for its economic potential.
The modern artist breathes resistance
with infinite variations but in every variation
the idea of a career becomes an awkward joke.
It creates neurosis, creates conflict,
contradictions, questions.
To be difficult. Irrational. To betray your own
class. To resist the taste of money as it seduces
poetry. To disdain the fatal deadening of art. To
contain all of the fractures and contradictions of
modern emotion.
The work produced by a modern artist contains
conflict in its material and conflict in its
content. The material and content become
resistant to whatever modes of commodification
are dominant, pushed to the edge either
consciously or subconsciously by an artist.
The point is not whether an artist is
commodified or not, but that there is poetry in
their resistance.
The modern artist
eats exile; is resistance; seeks
visions.
The modern artist is not a professional.
The professional seeks the concrete. Seeks the
rational. The investment. The archival material.
The next big thing. The ivy league. The correct
career path. Seeks to understand their market.
Seeks face time.
The professional is obstinate in the shadow of
art's lineage of transgressive gesture, and adapts
corporate modes of production, and produces
consistent replicas over the span of a mature
career.
The professional has no memory of the ocean.
The professional is afraid to speak, navigating
the art world as if it were any other corporate
realm, erasing the object 'self' with business
etiquette.
The professional is an artist who has given their
power away. The professional exchanges life
for a career, but art is not a career and fades
away in the exchange.
Modern is a political state of resistance
to commodification of art and commodification
of reality as a whole.
It is an existential crisis.
The modern artist has been taught the
underground is dead. The death of the avant-
garde is written as an allegory of the end of
corporate resistance. Jackson Pollack died as an
image on the cover of Time magazine. The
truism: resistance is futile – is the anesthesia
numbing our bodies and dropping our dreams
into a stream of emptiness.
The modern artist understands the
popular conception of the trajectory of the
underground but understands the lie and still
plays with visions deep in the margins and
shadows.
This is neurotic existence underground.
But, there are two undergrounds in the ocean.
One underground burns a memoryscope through
the expanding corporate structure building in the
ocean to contain. This is the underground of
dissent and it burns counter histories in the
corporate structure. The hole burned is
democratic space. The underground of dissent is
only an impulse, but it has a memory.
The other underground decorates the ever
expanding structure; the underground of style.
The idea of the underground is shoplifted and
inscribed onto the structure both as a pure style
and as a business model: the process of a
marginal scene kissed into the spotlight.
Seduced into a new corpse, this
underground dies to flow with everything else.
Quaint or crass or dumb replaces dangerous
thought. Seriousness is discouraged.
Everything is fabulous and feels like nothing.
This is the new dead underground;
the underground of style; and art as a fun and
fabulous nothing is the new tone of the new
dead underground, complimenting the leisurely
ethos of luxury and glamour. Promised access
to the new is marketed within the content.
Art as a clever product, as a post-historical
remix. Art as self-expression with a mass
produced similarity. Art as entertainment. It is
the myth of Warhol and the tone permeates the
media’s image of the ocean as a social gala.
None of these cultural sources feed
new experimentation. The style of the
underground so often co-opted on purely
commercial terms does not leave a trace or
influence of experimentation in the system that
appropriates.
Instead, the system deletes the political and
aesthetic contexts of various past underground
fragments to distill empty signs.
Missing from the New York art world is the
viewers' search for ruptured consciousness.
There was a time when installing a couch in an
empty gallery would confront expectations. Now,
it is a psychologically mute or empty gesture
signifying your fashion within the art world.
Lost, are viewers seeking existence confronted.
There is a special destruction when avant-garde
gestures and histories are used superficially - a
destruction of challenge or experimentation that
was inherent to the original gesture.
After everything, it feels like the union of art
and fashion was a mistake. In the underground
of style, the artist is imaged as the ultimate
follower of trends – the brightest slave to trend.
The idea of an underground is abused
by corporate desire. The idea of an underground
is abused by the kids themselves who once
would have constituted a fresh breath of air for
experimental scenes, but now re-enact its
emptying.
Commercial gallery spaces dressed in either the
codes of youth rebellion or the codes of a
historical avant-garde pretend dissent and build
a corpse around real past moments.
A mirage keeps the possibility of a vital and real
underground influence buried so deep in the
margins of culture the ocean is no longer
capable of recalling its gifts of invention.
Inside the art industry, the underground of
dissent, the avant-garde, once the breath of
experimentation, is dead. Only the image of the
avant-garde is absorbed by today’s commercial
construct.
The new avant-garde lives in the underground of
dissent. Democratic space grasps the very edge
of the ocean. The underground of dissent is the
edge. Democratic space is the avant-garde now.
It is counter culture. Dissent. Intellectualism.
Sub-culture. And it is left wing. Signs pointing
to the mystique of culture’s historically radical
edge are digested and emptied by capitalism's
gesture of reification, but democratic space
remains, and remains ahead of taste, invisible.
Art's living underground is populated
by dots on a map, a dysfunctional and loose
thread of artists sharing at least one gesture:
speaking without the permission or attention of
a commercial industry.
Underground there is no division between the
audience and the artists. Anything is possible.
Invention becomes a value. Popularity is
organic feedback as the crowd seeks and seeks
compelling art in the crowd.
Capitalism seeks thought and space,
consuming democratic cultures.
The underground seeks the irrational.
The underground seeks democratic
space to promote democratic thoughts. The
underground has moved into the body of each
participant.
Above ground there is a rumor of the
fragmentation then death of the it's narrative,
but it never had a definite narrative, only an
impulse or a sentiment with unpredictable
manifestations.
Institutionalization of the self can form the
other audience, a new audience with a forgiving
power structure. It is the author writing this,
now, who has institutionalized himself with a
manifesto. Here, I am myself and I am not
myself.
I am writing for the ghost of the avant-garde.
From the past I know the commodification of
the empowered self - the d.i.y. - is always a
possibility, and I can accept a new loophole for
the definition of resistance; the possibility that
commodified resistance can keep resistance as
it is packaged in circulation.
I can accept resistance as a commodity
unless I decide the commercial art world has
lost its ability to represent the quite but violent
subjectivity of art, and the quite but violent
protest against the stream that can feed into the
impulse for experimentation in art.
This shift, from an intellectual circle and a
small culture to a luxury brand industry worship
glamor and luxury, marks either the death of art
or a sharp division between what could be
called a fun club and those still compelled by
art and its ideas.
Misconceptions behind the notion of the death
of the avant-garde short circuit the possibility
for something new. The supposed death of... is
often used as a defense of the commercial art
world's emptiness, as well as a defense for the
theory art is simply another commodity. Can I
escape the ocean's constructed industry?
Or, could the way an object is valued
be re-ordered? I think it is the art object that
makes itself second to modes of corporate
production, makes itself second to corporate or
media images, by flowing with the corporate
stream - lacks resistance.
I also think the artist who imitates the corporate
image in their being - in their career and across
their body of work lacks resistance. This is our
point now in history. We all know the most
compelling underground culture is, in a marxist
definition, destined to be a commodity. Instead,
maybe we could say there are artists whose
work inhabits an autonomous corporate or
media reality. Autonomous overall, the content
never stretches into other conceptual realities. It
is a commodity.
It is a question of resistance: does the object
contain resistance to the stream of corporate
thought. In my own definition, an object that
contains resistance is not a commodity.
I cannot control the art object once
it leaves my studio. I really have no desire to
dictate meaning.
An artwork is a commodity in its conception, or
not - an artwork can either conform to the tastes
of its future market and an artist can mimic the
professional in the ways the artist engages the
art world (meaning they think of a 'career') or
an artwork and an artist can embody resistance.
The most compelling art contains
resistance to the commercial art world and the
most compelling artists do not do whatever they
can to make it but instead fight for their own
vision. This, for me, is the difference between a
commodity object and an art object.
Reconsidering the word “commodity”
is an attempt to separate two approaches to
contemporary art: wholesale acceptance and
courting of commercialism versus a rebellious
and neurotic resistance to commercialism.
I do not think artists critique capitalism by
embracing its modes of production or its image.
To believe that, is to fall into the marxist
definition of commodity from which there is no
escape. This definition leads to one place: the
idea that art is an empty commodity and there is
no way to resist.
The commercial art world can lose its
power. It is possible the commercial art world
could become the easy listening station on the
dial, sound within a string of radio frequencies.
If the commercial art world fails, it will
die by words, writing.
The real underground has always
thrived on writing.
It has always bled experimental thought.
Writers are not dangerous enough, are not
writing history. Artists rarely write, are not
writing history. Writers are most often
subjugated to covering artists presented by
galleries and have very little influence over the
art market beyond filling dealers' binders with
clippings of positive reviews.
Experimental thought – dangerous writers,
dangerous theorists and artist writings seem
negated by market forces because everyone
places their faith and attention on a commercial
scene that lacks time for experimental thought.
The business surrounding contemporary art
flaunts its arrogance by mocking critiques as
irrelevant, bitter, jealous, cynical and ignorant.
What the art world lacks is sympathy for honest
opinions and the sympathetic intelligence
required for honest self-reflection, as opposed
to its neutered self-reflection mass produced by
its sanctioned critical entities. Negative critique
is seen as anti-social or counterproductive.
Everyone desires happiness, no revolutionary
tendencies and no anti-social behavior. There is
a love it or leave it attitude, a sort of Vietnam
War syndrome. If you question or critique the
market as an artist you are not welcome to the
fold, as if businessmen and businesswomen
own the art world, not artists, as if the context
of art is not a space worth contesting.
The commercial art world is a world of
fear, of gossip, and the way to be accepted
socially is to erase your opinions. Stepping over
the line separates the crowd: shallowness from
experimentation.
Make brash critical statements. Beyond
honesty and self-reflection there is a historical
philosophical point to critical statements - that
manifestos, or wild opinions, or the political left
wing, or the avant-garde - is not dead.
Critique, critical writing, questions how
current art history is written by corporate desire
and negates the professional artist's willing loss
of power.
Die in poverty and obscurity.
You will be called a cynic or bitter.
Cynicism is not critiquing the art market.
Critique’s flaw is idealism, if that is a flaw. The
commercial art world mourns the loss of its
own idealism when it labels resistance cynical
and bitter. Cynicism is letting yourself be
complicit to the deadening of art: social power
games, celebrity culture, the loss of critical
thought.
Critique of commercial art practices is belief in
art beyond it’s luxury value. The belief is: art is
just another commodity. It has always been a
commodity and benefits from a deregulated
economic system.
This belief is a cynical death wish, a wish
for art to die as a commodity. The politics of
deregulation of an economic market makes
transparent the corporate impulse of the
market's players.
Art is not alive in a capitalist space.
Imagining a democratic space for art
begins with questions and criticism.
It is not cynical to describe the commercial art
world as a force of simulated business drones
kidnapping visionary wolves from the woods
and teaching them the ways of the sheep inside.
Cynicism is complicity. Bitterness is a
loss of an ethical center. Naivety is belief in the
glamor of a corporate hologram.
Domination / Universal
Galleries reintroduce the philosophy of the
universal because the art market is serious
business now.
Interpretations are too slippery.
Irrationality is too slippery.
The art market
needs an authoritative voice communicating the
pretense of universal understanding behind any
work it values. The tendency of galleries to
over-define artwork with press releases, refined
statements, soft art reviews and commissioned
catalogue essays blocks the potential for
multiplicity of understanding and what was
once irrational becomes marketable.
The philosophy of the universal is the re-birth
of the author. A cynical re-birth, the artist’s
voice is controlled and represented by a gallery.
The re-birth is always false life, always
false because the author is born dead.
Gallery dealers seek the rebirth of the author
with branding and repetition. The commodity,
the idea, has to be simple and so self-sustained
it can infinitely appear as sub-headlines on the
covers of popular magazines. Artwork needs a
seemingly utilitarian function as a justification
for investment because our world economy is
based on a whole program of corporatized
modes of universal packaging such as design,
fashion and television. The role of a dealer, a
dealer seeking to act out the impossible re-birth
of the author, is the role of a conspirator
subjugating an audience’s perception. Artists
facilitate the conspiracy: the fascist dream of
universal communication spun from an
authoritative center.
The art market lavishes jewels and kisses on
artists who work within the flow and replicate
corporate thought in the guise of branded
identity or branded style or branded concept.
Professional artists relish without
question the cold, numb, mirrored surface of
our empire of empty signs without questioning
the idea of empire (a dominated state of reality).
Every gesture made by a professional artist, no
matter how mundane, is a destructive political
act. Every gesture is a second of the death of
subjectivity or multiplicity or poetry. Meaning
is transmitted in one direction from producer to
consumer as ingredients of the commodity. The
distinction between art and modes of corporate
persuasion disappears.
Without domination the viewer, aware
or unaware, forever shapes the meaning of any
artwork, and without domination viewers
collectively multiply its meaning beyond
coherence; beyond unity of thought. The system
of domination can only control the meaning of
its objects and the biographies of its artists
when the audience is passive and dependent on
mediators: dealers, art advisors, popular taste,
commercial magazines.
It is too simple to initiate comparison of the art
market to anything in the past.
Money has always followed art but
the strength of its influence comes and goes.
It writes periods of art history then disappears.
Today, money is a tyrant in the ocean. The
tyrant deludes us with a false sense of
immortality. Even now, in a city bleeding from
massive unemployment, the tyrant deludes us.
The gap between the lower classes and the
upper-class is growing into a physical barrier
spilling across the collective space of New
York’s art world. Shallow press coverage of
what was an organic expansion of the art market
inspired financial institutions to focus heavily
on art as an investment for adventurous
customers. Banks, a new breed of art historians,
created departments to advise their new breed
of collectors where to put their money.
Dealers either spread their legs or
unzipped their pants.
There is nothing inherently wrong with art sold,
the problem is that the ocean now is the taste of
its investors, which frames the ocean as a space
of luxury distinct from the pain of reality -
artists are nothing more than court jesters
smiling for replicated socialite images
decomposing in salt water.
There is a paradox in the ocean:
The art market is unregulated. Investors
should not trust what is being hyped. Artists and
curators and museums and dealers are seduced
by the investors' growing influence, which leads
to a zeitgeist catering more and more to wealth.
The thought patterns of Ayn Rand are
materialized in the image of the dealer as diva
and in the business practices of dealers, artists,
collectors and auction house players - greed is
good and government should absolutely not
regulate economic systems.
The politics of the business of art align
with conservative political agendas that advance
capitalism over democracy by seeking the total
abolition of ethics in business practices.
If art needs
democratic space to breath, then it is dying in
the anti-democratic art market.
For the workers in the commercial art industry,
the daily realization of a professional screen
between art and money kills their pleasure and
kills their trust in art as an irrational force.
Commercial art's workers often lose the ability
to see art as anything other than a social
network centered around luxury commodities.
The most severely deformed viewers are gallery
workers themselves trained in acting out the
intimidations.
For many critics of the commercial art
world, postmodern and pop are now catchall
phrases responsible for an over commercialized
phase and a flood of superficial art dominating
the market. Both are accused of promoting
shallowness and the emptiness of signs.
The art of the past 30 years is not postmodern
art or dominated by pop. The influence of the
art market creates its own genre, its own tastes,
not based on any theory but rather on an
imitation of entertainment and luxury business.
Most art since the early 1970's is
commercial art. “Commercial art” is a non-
specific art movement.
“Commercial artists” are ultimate control; are
in ultimate control of their objects. They do not
control their objects at the end of the day. They
do not control their meaning but their insistence
that the meaning is controlled persuades us to
feel the kind of corporate induced happiness of
something imitating the much deeper response,
the sublime.
It is violence to subjectivity.
It is the thought that art is a career, or
art is an investment, which implies logical moves
and a professionally strategic impulse behind
decisions including the choice to create or
encourage a narrow focused brand. Art is not a
career.
It is the era of “commercial art” - psychology,
the subjective and poetic nature of reading as
well were swept under the rug by its ascension.
Its purest form may be as a joke told in a
painting or a perfect object born of a legitimate
factory.
It is collective permission, through the ideology
of capitalist will, to believe art objects are not
emptied of value when they are equal products
in the stream of all commodities, as if the
gallery was an extension of a suburban mall.
Most contemporary art, fodder, is “commercial
art”. It lacks deepness of thought. It lifts pop and
postmodernism superficially as a packaged
narrative.
“Commercial art” exists because a dynamic
market was born. Born in the early 1970s, when
contemporary art became an important auction
house commodity, the market itself has become
an influence – a critic defining trends and
ideological paths.
Now, too many artists are careerists and express
nothing but disdain for any form of theory or
interpretation. They seek a brand strong enough
to be emphasized within the noise of an over
saturated market.
In the end the sought after brand is
hollow: is a hologram. They give in to the steady
feedback of money.
Investors and their audience have
chosen art fairs as the perfect context for
“commercial art”.
You go because you feel safer in a shopping
mall than in a museum. There are no ideas in
malls, just products. No nagging questions. Find
something for your taste and put it on the wall
next to the table that holds your designer hand
bag. We will be waiting for you in the parking
lot. We will cut your throat.
Bled from corporate sponsors, an art fair is a
trade show. Iggy Pop roams a stage on the
beach, a stage sponsored by Cartier, and he
sings for a crowd of young professionals who
have been flown to Miami to sell art in trade
show booths under the shadow of a strip of strip
mall buildings.
Decadence is beautiful, but sponsored
decadence is not decadence at all.
Critics of commercialism miss the point
when they criticize postmodernism and pop's
influence. Pop and the postmodern have been
stripped of their meaning by both the commercial
art world and its detractors. Pop and the
postmodern have been re-written to mean
relishing in money and crass commercialism.
Both pop and postmodern are dead and have
been dead for years, if only because they are
diluted. But essences of ideas do not die. It is
strange to argue to reinstate a definition for
postmodern or pop but it is important to try to
untangle these generic cultural symbols and
photograph their essence.
Critics have typically characterized a postmodern
artist as one who takes any configuration of signs
and creates his own self-justified brand. It is not
postmodern - postmodern is the artist who,
expecting a viewer to come, lays open signs in
anticipation of their multiple interpretations by
multiple viewers.
Some people give postmodern art a look, an
approach, a classifiable taxonomy that revolves
around a mix of pop and irony. On the contrary,
all postmodern could imply for art is: the viewer
creates the meaning based on their own
subjective interpretations of language (text or
image based). And on an economic level, it
means giving the corporate machine the word
"Art" for commodification, while mounting
resistance with irrational, emotional, fucked up,
avant garde objects that do not play within the
tight confines of commodified art. Postmodern
art is art from the unconscious - that leaves
interpretation open to the viewer.
A postmodern art world allows room for endless
poetic response. It is not a problem. The problem
is the fixed brand.
The implications of postructuralist
thought, the seed of postmodern thought, subvert
any attempt to freeze or package the meaning of
any artwork. Branding, closed meaning, becomes
the death of interpretation as well as the cold
structure of fascist restraint that emanates from a
centralized artistic project.
Ambiguity, open meaning, is not an
easy destination. The opposite of brand, it is a
conscious attempt, and it is for me synonymous
with trying to project a vision.
Critics who characterize the ideological
map of the ocean as a terrain of irresponsible
postmodern assertions, a terrain easily
manipulated because it is influenced by
postmodern values (specifically its notion of
open poststructuralist interpretation), are only
asserting their own philosophical agenda to
return to an older form of rigorous theoretical
discourse – a central criteria – from which
everything can be judged.
It would be a mistake to return there, if
a return was even a possibility.
Poststructuralism, the antithesis of corporate
branding, is the return of poetry through the
death of philosophy and the speculative chants
of theory.
It is the original modern impulse of
resistance to the market through difficult form.
Dead as a catchphrase and over institutionalized
as a philosophy, its essence is synonymous with
awakened irrationality, and its essence is far
from blind acceptance of an art market's
corporate thought.
Postmodern art was defined by the critics of
postmodern thought. The rewriting of pop art
was authored by its proponents, not its critics,
one meaning - art about itself as a commodity.
Pop ascended along with the theory the avant-
garde is dead. If the avant-garde is dead, then
the artist's role is to make work that flows with
corporate culture, and to act from the belief
nothing new can be made.
Warhol has become the flavor art investment,
losing whatever subversion he once created.
Shallow misinterpretations of Warhol’s
intent have become the defense of an industry
that seeks to erase the differences between
selling art and selling product.
I don’t think his success or the value of his ideas
equal a justification for relishing in the media
stream at the expense of the poetic or the human.
Warhol began at a time in which pop art was
disruptive to the sleep of art.
I still believe in Warhol.
Branding is not pop. Branding is the
way artwork and artists are presented in the
corporate model. Branding is counter to the
notion of the death of the author, the notion of
self as a fluid always shifting entity, the notion
of meaning being contingent to the viewer, the
notion that the context in which art is shown
effects the art's meaning. All of these notions
are what we have been given by postmodern
theorists.
Neither the influence of pop nor
postmodern theory are the accurate pin points of
the commercial virus.
The virus is a taste for fast.
If a line has to be drawn between “commercial
art” and everything else, then a line is between
work that flows with the corporate stream and
everything else. It is a line between fast and
slow, between professional entertainer and
visionary. It is the ethos of investment and the
gallery system that encourages artists to be
professionals instead of visionaries.
The correlation, the analogy, is found in
the music world and in the difference between a
pre-packaged band and an organically cultivated
band. There is no division of style that can be
pin-pointed. The division has to be seen one
band at a time.
The market pretends pluralism.
The market pretends a de-centered
system lacking a central criteria but in reality
nearly everything is fast. It is an aesthetic of a
culture of complicity - the taste of an industry.
Fast is retinal and by-passes criticality.
Fast reduces art to the level of stock. Fast is just
like fashion. Fast is a closed meaning. Fast is
autonomous. “Commercial art” is fast.
What counteracts “commercial art”?
Sincerity counteracts. I, the writer here
spilling his thoughts, counteracts.
Slow is the antagonist of corporate thought.
Slow is an expansive intelligence in a
form. Another name for slow is difficult form.
The artist who dives into difficulty, explosion
of meaning, resistance. The modern.
Slow arrives at thought, emotion,
language that does not travel at retinal speed.
Retinal speed flows with everything.
In New York’s relatively short history of art,
economic upheaval marks each new cycle.
Financial meltdown brings experimentation.
Periodic death is a welcomed tourist.
The failure of commercial galleries
is good news. The collapse of art markets is
synonymous with oxygen: thought and risk.
Waiting. Money kills itself.
Sitting here, writing this,
I know it isn’t possible to kill the business of art
with words.
For now, the ocean is synonymous
with the tale of an elite group of objects in
commodity circulation and despite the ocean’s
recurring private desire for failure of each era’s
economic boom, the culture of this economy
pretends immortality. The current model of a
commercial gallery and its effect on the broader
art world - the numbing of artwork by the
professional incorporation of art’s context - is
not the only possibility. A new model would be
born with cracks in its ethical framework to
count and alter, but the current model is wholly
destructive.
Standing in a gallery, you can feel resistance in
the artwork or you can feel fabulous next to the
art, or you can feel nothing.
The etiquette of professionalism often
co-opted by galleries establishes a sort of
impersonated corporate atmosphere. It is a
space for feeling fabulous or feeling nothing.
Resistance is veiled as a sleeping beauty.
Standing in a gallery, trying to look at artwork
through this veil, you see another screen of
interference: a corporate ethos.
You are standing in spaces that seem to be
marriages of high end boutiques and prestigious
law firms. All signals flash intimidation.
You are confronted with the bright white space
as container for a string of blatant and subtle
intimidations.
The intimidations are ‘money’, and
because they are ‘money’ they are ‘insecurities’.
The need for these intimidations is a loss of
faith in art - the insecurity that art needs to
pretend glamor.
I feel the gap between the upper class and the
lower class when I’m trying to look at artwork.
I still see art. Still, I can look at art.
Sometimes I feel art. I go out to look and I still
find work I can feel.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
PoArt Exhibit: Lawrence Charles Miller [48]
Lawrence Charles Miller
Newport, PA, USA / NYC, USA
www.saatchionline.com
8/20/2010 - Original Proposal:
Stealth Verso
a poster announcing an exhibition of drawings.
The original drawings are on the reverse side of the poster.
this is an act of selling myself - no shame - yes prostitution of art
The poster is destroyed if the drawings are cut out and sold (up to Mobius and action artists)
Dimensions: the over all poster is 17x36 inches (horizontal). The drawings are 8x10 inch each (Strathmore drawing paper adhered to verso)
9/4/2010 through 9/7/2010 - Installation queries:
JW (co-curator):
Got your tube today in the mail!
Should I wait to open it until we install it at Mobius? I'm afraid if I open it now I might not be able to stuff everything back in the tube safely - the tube looks completely fine (not a nick on it) so I'm sure the contents are safe.
I'm thinking we might hang it using strong fishing line for the exhibition (Sept 18-25th - exact times tbd -- but at least Sept 18th 8-10pm and Sept 25th 11am-6pm) and then have people take away pieces of it on Sept 25th (when there will be performances, hopefully foot traffic during open studios and so on)...
LM(Artist):
Thank you for letting me know everything arrived. Your idea for installing sounds good. I wasn't sure how it might fit in to your space and plans there.
Please feel free to do as you wish - and to take donations for the drawings to benefit Mobius. The drawings are all graphite originals. Signed and dated.
Hope they weathered the roll and tumble - but then they have been at sea.
9/18/2010 through 9/26/2010 - Exhibition:
The poster was taken out of the tube without any mishaps for the opening night of the exhibition. It was carefully laid on the display table containing the Prostitution of Art magazine along with Richard Smolinski's piece. The co-curators decided to save the poster and it's destruction for the closing but the closing proved not to be a suitable event due to the nature of a simultaneous five hour durational performance and the drifting in and out of the audience for open studios.
Photo by William Everton:
10/4/2010 - Post-Exhibition Quandary:
JW (co-curator):
I love your poster and drawings -- we tried to save them for the
Closing but the closing ended up not being the kind of event where we
could gather people around to take apart your poster so it's still
intact.
Would you like us to save it for another fundraiser or event and use
it somehow and videotape whatever we do to it - this might not be for
a while?
or would you like us to perhaps find something sooner, perhaps a class
or gather a group of people to take it apart (and document it).. (we
thought about using it in the Drawing Marathon which was on Sunday
Sept 26th but I don't think there were enough non-Mobius people in the
space at once to make it work)
Sorry we didn't use it! It just seems too beautiful to destroy!
Just let me know if you have a preference...
LM (Artist):
Please feel free to keep it and use it as you wish.
If you don't think it will work I could use it for a show
I'm having in December.
Of course I'd rather Mobius have it -
JW (co-curator):
AWWWWW!!!! thanks so much Larry!!
10/18/2010 - Facebook dialogue excerpts:
JW (co-curator):
i am still thinking about how to use your piece
i want to videotape whatever we do --
maybe the next drawing marathon at mobius (oct 24th) i will see if I can set aside a moment for people to perform with it and draw the performance at the same time!!!
wow that would be pretty whacky wouldn't it -- kind of a drawing infinite loop or something.... (-:
whatever happens, it will end up on the blog somehow and thanks again!
LM (Artist):
Please don't worry about using the Stealth Verso piece - maybe someday it will come in handy, or not.
10/24/2010 - Drawing Marathon 9:
On October 24th, Mobius Artists Sandy Huckleberry, Lewis Gesner, Margaret Bellafiore and Jane Wang installed Lawrence Charles Miller's The Stealth Verso and proceeded to destroy it. Three mirror-like metallic silver boards were suspended next to the drawings at varying heights.
Unfortunately, the co-curator couldn't remember if the four drawings on the back of the poster were also to be destroyed in the performance (they weren't). Two of the drawings were left completely intact. The entire performance was videotaped and is shown here along with video stills:
Newport, PA, USA / NYC, USA
www.saatchionline.com
8/20/2010 - Original Proposal:
Stealth Verso
a poster announcing an exhibition of drawings.
The original drawings are on the reverse side of the poster.
this is an act of selling myself - no shame - yes prostitution of art
The poster is destroyed if the drawings are cut out and sold (up to Mobius and action artists)
Dimensions: the over all poster is 17x36 inches (horizontal). The drawings are 8x10 inch each (Strathmore drawing paper adhered to verso)
9/4/2010 through 9/7/2010 - Installation queries:
JW (co-curator):
Got your tube today in the mail!
Should I wait to open it until we install it at Mobius? I'm afraid if I open it now I might not be able to stuff everything back in the tube safely - the tube looks completely fine (not a nick on it) so I'm sure the contents are safe.
I'm thinking we might hang it using strong fishing line for the exhibition (Sept 18-25th - exact times tbd -- but at least Sept 18th 8-10pm and Sept 25th 11am-6pm) and then have people take away pieces of it on Sept 25th (when there will be performances, hopefully foot traffic during open studios and so on)...
LM(Artist):
Thank you for letting me know everything arrived. Your idea for installing sounds good. I wasn't sure how it might fit in to your space and plans there.
Please feel free to do as you wish - and to take donations for the drawings to benefit Mobius. The drawings are all graphite originals. Signed and dated.
Hope they weathered the roll and tumble - but then they have been at sea.
9/18/2010 through 9/26/2010 - Exhibition:
The poster was taken out of the tube without any mishaps for the opening night of the exhibition. It was carefully laid on the display table containing the Prostitution of Art magazine along with Richard Smolinski's piece. The co-curators decided to save the poster and it's destruction for the closing but the closing proved not to be a suitable event due to the nature of a simultaneous five hour durational performance and the drifting in and out of the audience for open studios.
Photo by William Everton:
10/4/2010 - Post-Exhibition Quandary:
JW (co-curator):
I love your poster and drawings -- we tried to save them for the
Closing but the closing ended up not being the kind of event where we
could gather people around to take apart your poster so it's still
intact.
Would you like us to save it for another fundraiser or event and use
it somehow and videotape whatever we do to it - this might not be for
a while?
or would you like us to perhaps find something sooner, perhaps a class
or gather a group of people to take it apart (and document it).. (we
thought about using it in the Drawing Marathon which was on Sunday
Sept 26th but I don't think there were enough non-Mobius people in the
space at once to make it work)
Sorry we didn't use it! It just seems too beautiful to destroy!
Just let me know if you have a preference...
LM (Artist):
Please feel free to keep it and use it as you wish.
If you don't think it will work I could use it for a show
I'm having in December.
Of course I'd rather Mobius have it -
JW (co-curator):
AWWWWW!!!! thanks so much Larry!!
10/18/2010 - Facebook dialogue excerpts:
JW (co-curator):
i am still thinking about how to use your piece
i want to videotape whatever we do --
maybe the next drawing marathon at mobius (oct 24th) i will see if I can set aside a moment for people to perform with it and draw the performance at the same time!!!
wow that would be pretty whacky wouldn't it -- kind of a drawing infinite loop or something.... (-:
whatever happens, it will end up on the blog somehow and thanks again!
LM (Artist):
Please don't worry about using the Stealth Verso piece - maybe someday it will come in handy, or not.
10/24/2010 - Drawing Marathon 9:
On October 24th, Mobius Artists Sandy Huckleberry, Lewis Gesner, Margaret Bellafiore and Jane Wang installed Lawrence Charles Miller's The Stealth Verso and proceeded to destroy it. Three mirror-like metallic silver boards were suspended next to the drawings at varying heights.
Unfortunately, the co-curator couldn't remember if the four drawings on the back of the poster were also to be destroyed in the performance (they weren't). Two of the drawings were left completely intact. The entire performance was videotaped and is shown here along with video stills:
Drawing Marathon 9: Lawrence Charles Miller
Video Stills [complete slideshow/set here]:
In addition, the artist's piece in it's new configuration was used in the subsequent solo performance by Sandy Huckleberry, thereby creating an accumlative installation which in turn was drawn by two artists who attended the drawing marathon.
Drawing Marathon 9: Sandy Huckleberry 1
[this is part 1 of 7 of Sandy Huckleberry's performance
- to see thumbnails /access videos for parts 2 through 7, please click here]
Photos: Margaret Bellafiore
10/25/2010 through 10/26/2010 - Epilogue:
Excerpts from facebook emails:
JW (co-curator):
we videotaped and destroyed the Stealth Verso piece.
unfortunately, i had stupidly forgotten whether you actually wanted us to also destroy your four drawings -- i thought probably not but while we were talking about it, one of the artists performing carefully cut out a hole in one of the drawings.
We left all the other drawings intact thankfully!!
I'm ashamed of myself - i should have doublechecked (and should have known better - in a previous show, an artist told me to completely destroy her entire installation so that's probably where the brain freeze came from )..
ARGH!
On the positive side, the video of the performance turned out wonderfully AND the resultant installation (with your separated four drawings hanging in the air) were used intact as part of a subsequent performance/installation
and the shapes of your 4 drawings were drawn by two other artists
i plan to post the video along with video stills by weds this week.. and once Margaret uploads the photos of the two other artists' drawings of your drawings (!!), i will add that to the blog post...
and again sorry sorry sorry!
JW (co-curator):
I will post on the blog on weds or thursday..
in the meantime, here's links to the video
http://www.vimeo.com/16160762
and a slideshow on flickr:
http://www.vimeo.com/album/1461434
hopefully you will enjoy and not freak out )-:
fluxus?
peace
ps i have 3 of the drawings whereupon i discovered one has a corner taken off it - so only 2 completely intact..
LM (Artist):
Not to worry. I intended for Mobius to do anything beyond cutting up the poster. So it sounds like it was a success. Sorry for not responding sooner. Got a flu and layed up. Best-
JW (co-curator):
sorry about the flu - hope you feel better soon - don't let it turn into pneumonia!
thanks again so much for your kindness.
i am so relieved i'm not now on your shit list..
ps and oops here's the slide show (i sent the wrong link before):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mobiusorg/sets/72157625109890133/show/
feel free to download any photos you like for whatever..
the blog will also 3 photos that Margaret took which feature your piece...
LM (Artist):
You just made me smile. You could never be on such a list !
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