Posts Tagged ‘ american ’
“…Never has the American art world functioned so efficiently as a full-service marketing industry on the corporate model…” [full text here]
From February of 2009, but still relevant none the less. Worth a read.
The last paragraph in particular might even give one hope.
We will be performing this Friday night at 6.3p – don’t miss it!
in partnership with Sub-City Projects
@ The Fine Arts Building
410 S. Michigan Ave.
This time about the “indentured servitude” that student loans are piling onto Americans, and its effects on both the (idea of) middle class and the “American Dream.”
See a great article with multiple links here.
It’s my personal belief that student loans are creating an over-educated, under-employed/employable class of citizens in this country – particularly in the arts, but in other disciplines as well. The upside, I suppose, is that such conditions generally make fertile ground for true revolution.
Marlene Dumas famously wrote,
“lf a Prostitute is a person /
who makes it a profession/
to gratify the lust of various persons /
for economical reasons or gain, /
where emotional involvement may /
or may not be present— /
Then it seems not so far removed /
from my definition of an artist.”
“31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.”
What does it mean to re-perform a drawing? Even if the original drawing was life-sized? How does involving the body – as a viewer, as opposed to a producer – change the experience with the artwork as object?
There is a sort of object-producer dichotomy in the drawing that is absent when we perform the action. Our bodies are object. Object twice-removed…When we do reperformances, we don’t claim authorship at all. We break free from the notion of authorship, so in a very real sense, Longo is still the author; we’re just allowing him to use our material, to use us as material.
Why Longo?
We were looking for: A portrait. A couple. An object that captured the idea of identity wrapped up in the exterior. Something to model Cash & Ruby on. Something that was already present in – already visually present in the art world – while at the same time, related to our cultural consciousness. Our awareness of ourselves during the 1980s in America. A man and a woman wearing business suits. Money. The notion of surface. Radical surface. A young Caucasian man and woman, well-dressed, attractive.
Transporting ourselves from the analog to the digital. Flattening everything. Giving it all the same value. That’s what happens with the composite. We don’t put ourselves into any sort of scene: it’s a completely clean, neutral space, a non-space, digital space. The original piece of work has all sorts of potential. Our reperformance is just one type of actualization that is available for Robert Longo’s original drawing.
This video by Circlesquare takes it to the next level.
