Manuel Pereira da Silva
Studies,
1959
Indian Ink on Bristol
board
65x49 cm
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Nuno Crespo
Nuno Crespo, in ípsilon, the best 2014
In 2014, there was an insistence on anthological
exhibition and a shift of attention in the works for attention on the artist.
Arguably the many levels and this year will be marked
by the end of BES and for any consequences that end. In the visual arts the
bank's failure brought the end of Avenue 211, one studios and exhibition space
with outstanding quality, diversity and where they could watch the remarkable
exhibition that hardly find another context to develop.
What prevails is the crisis and in this scenario the
question that more recurrently all ask is: how long? And this is not only a
question for the recovery of health and dynamism of the art market, but
essentially a question by another institutional context in which works, authors
and public can relate to a freer way, diverse and risky. And one of the
expressions of this lack of risk is the lack of group exhibitions, research,
where monographic attention on the authors gives way to the construction of a
thought to and from unique works of art.
There are known exceptions in other geographies of art
and the world are brought to debate, but in general we are witnessing a shift
of attention in the works for attention on the artist and an insistence on
anthological exhibition, in affirming the authority of an author, in
confirmation of a route.
This is not to diminish the individual authors and the
key role that some of them have to get through their works, brighten any time
and a generation together with his afflictions and transformations, but it is
to note the domain of a typology expository and draw consequences. This is a
situation to which all contribute - newspapers and their idea of information,
criticism, the directions of museums and art centers and the predominance of
the statistical analyzes, their obsession with the public as the main criterion
of cultural management and programming etc. - And where predominates the
prejudice of success: the exhibition spaces are now places of the success
stories of where they are absent experimentation, research, exploratory
projects and the risk associated with them.
The first consequence of this transformation is that
the art exhibition are today mainly reflects the market dynamics and not
expression of the uniqueness of artistic proposals, nor does it materialize
lines of thinking about reality, which is questioned, investigates and attempts
to change . And often driven by strong financial constraint, it is the market
that enables exhibitions, are their agents that through generous sponsorships
allow and enable exhibitions, catalogs pay, offer works in return for the promotion
and enhancement of certain set of artists. And the exhibits that require more
research, more time, greater risks are placed second and forgotten. It is the
predominance of the successful artist (where the success criteria are many and
varied) and the absence of exposures to think our present condition, i.e.
exhibits that without security and without the guarantees of art history, of
its established events and away from the main protagonists to risk thinking the
paradoxes of everyday life.
In an important text Alison Gingeras, known historian
of American art, said a major art magazine, ArtForum, about an artist: as far
as thinking about his works, they are immune to all that they say about,
because the person who through the mythology about him forged and succeeded,
managed to make his works indifferent to any dispute and thereby ensure the
history of Olympus a prominent place for all his work. The text of Gingeras is
about Jeff Koons, but it serves here as an illustration and symptom of
displacement of the attention we have been describing in which the authors put
under his shadow his work and thus the eclipse.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler, was 20 when the twentieth century came
in the 1960s attended the transition from what was left of the modern world and
the new contemporary world. Change after change. "If we want some kind of
revolution, we have to do manifestations, be out there, to organize ourselves,
we devote ourselves." And this is not even activism. It is
"citizenship," said to the Portuguese newspaper Público in an
interview on the sidelines of the Future Forum in Oporto, where he was guest
lecturer.
She began his lecture by explaining that, in the
1940s, when Jackson Pollock was doing his abstract paintings, or the artists or
the art public could imagine the intrinsic link between their world and the
major international financial flows.
How Pollock worked the screens on the floor, had
anything to do with the idea of territory and territorial possession. Indeed,
the fact that he give up the perspective - that was what made his painting -
binds with the history of land ownership. There is this and the most obvious: the
relationship with money, which intensified a lot, because it has become much
more visible. Pollock was part of the first generation of artists in the world
financial markets had focused in the United States and had become completely
hypertrophic. All this and the emergence of celebrity culture weighed much
about the abstract expressionists, most of which were part of a culture of
bohemian outsider vaguely impoverished.
I think we can say that abstract expressionism was
destroyed by his relationship with money and fame. Still say that there is a
reason for the transcendence model he proposed can’t legitimately remain in the
postwar world: the economy. So we know more [about the relationship between art
and money] and the pressure intensified vastly. Everyone who now has something
to do with the art world, even at the popular level, realize the connection of
this world to the world of finance, especially in the United States. As someone
said, we have reached a time when some of the artists are as or richer as their
collectors. It's not exactly like that because some of the patrons of art are
immeasurably rich, but obviously there are artists who have become extremely
rich. The 'financialization' art shot up to the top of the roof [media] that
makes the art world. In publications [reference] as the New York Times auctions
are so history as [the exhibition] ... It's like professional sports - what you
really hear is money, who cost much, who is doing as what the great players got
the best contract and how many millions of euros or dollars a year makes.
The art world has become a sort of big annual sprint,
the hundred meter hurdles to see who gets the better end quoted market. It is quantification
and 'financialization' of anything we considered before being out of the
valuation of goods system [whose value depends on the laws of supply and
demand] and we now know to be completely inside. This started happening in the
last four or five decades. We can’t pretend it is new. But reached an
unprecedented point. Let's look at a more popular reference - the movies:
nowadays it is thought a movie ticket for their results. If a movie is a ticket
success, people did not even bother to mention the fact that whether or not a
good movie. Maybe later in the specialized column [in the press], but the big
immediate step is always, "No. 1 at the box office."
The painting was an art easel. After it became too big
to be on the easel. What Pollock did no one had done before was to make the
paint a representation of the landscape but in landscape. And there is a
certain irony in the fact that the canvas becomes a territory for action
[Action Painting] and this is a good window through which to see the
relationship between art and power. The lieutenant’s land can’t set your
property without a metric system. Nor can represent the landscape to look real
without perspective. Now, the history of painting is the history of the
development and the rejection of perspective - because the abstraction is the
rejection of perspective, the choice of two-dimensionality, still, ironically,
on territory. This is especially ironic in the case of Pollock, because he
paints with the canvas on the floor. His canvas is an area where we have come a
territory. And even when he, in the end, to put back the canvas vertically [the
wall] everyone realizes how there has been reached "meaning" derived
from the horizontal. Such as land tenure is the basis of capital accumulation,
these paintings also become a principle of capital accumulation. At the time, no
one was thinking about it, but I can’t help thinking.
The transcendence model proposed by Abstract
Expressionism could not take place in the world and in the post-war economy,
because artists depend on the ideas of its patrons. That's why I often speak in
the development of the bourgeois public from the late nineteenth century and
the theories that link the abstract, symbolism, etc., as a way to escape the
issues of realism, which led to the representation of the working classes and
militancy of the working class. Of course, the artists did a lot of that, but
mainly in the design and engraving. And those who did not turn very well paid
for it by its patrons, who actually wanted was to see other images.
The transcendence model corresponds to the fact that
the artists show us another world. It was a very important theory. But at the
time the center of the art world moves from Paris to New York, in the 1940s... The
patronage in the United States never was very interested in intellectual
specializations or representation theories, just want things very immediate. As
Rockefeller once said about Rothko [Mark's painting] - and I paraphrase, offers
a relaxing space to tired businessman. This is perfect! The space of
abstraction is a view of another world, without any specifics. But this could
not last, because art has become appreciated in a way more massif. When it
became a commodity, an expensive commodity, Jackson Pollock appeared in Life
magazine cover. Life magazine was practically in every American home! Was in
doctors' offices - was everywhere. Defined the image of the world. Before
television be in the home of everyone, was there a Life. And in case one day
appeared this artist who was dethrone Picasso as the most important artist of
the twentieth century. Pollock eventually died drunk in a very short time after
car accident and this idea that art is supposed to be about something else,
mysterious, transcendent ... It's a little Catholic doctrine, this. I do not
know...
The young artists today see themselves as producers of
tradable goods. Some project a successful career of about 10 years. It's like
the millionaires.com: had an idea that was purchased, if
reformed and had a happy life somewhere not to do anything that they did not
want. This is what many young people think of elite schools, for which they
paid a lot of money. They think: make a fortune and
disappear overnight.
Wednesday, December 03, 2014
Hyper-art
The age of aesthetics inflation is offset,
des-hierarchical, and structurally eclectic.
We are in a fragmented culture, Balkanized, where they
multiply many different miscegenation, where cohabit the most dissimilar
styles, where the cool trends proliferate without order, without temporal
regularity, worthless unit. With transaesthetic capitalism triumphs a chaotic
profusion of styles in a huge supermarket trends and looks in fashion and
design. It's a jarring proliferation, unregulated, featuring contemporary
aesthetic field, parallel to economic deregulation, which constitutes the turbo
capitalism.
Found in all the great museums of the world works or
exhibitions of these contemporary artists in vogue.
According to the World Tourism Organization, has
become, with its 900 million international travelers, the world's first
industry, representing around 12% of world GDP. Never exhibitions and museums
were such frequency records, 8.8 million to the Louvre, 6.5 million for the
Palace of Versailles, 3.6 million from the Pompidou Centre in 2011.
The inflationary dynamics not confined to objects,
styles and trends but also to classified monuments (in France has 38,000
historical monuments and picturesque villages 300) and art exhibition spaces.
First, museums and contemporary art centers: worldwide, the number of museums
increases 10% every five years, was in the United States before 1920, 1200
museums and about 8,000 in the early 80. It is said sometimes, by grace, which
creates a museum by day in Europe: more than 30,000 museums are now classified
in the 27 countries of the European Union. Paris alone has more than 150
museums. The number of museums in France is the subject of debate: in 2003,
France Museums Direction declared in 1200 in the category of "museums of
France," but beyond this category some guides publish lists ranging from
5000 to 10,000 museums. There is hardly a community that would not have
"his" museum, as identity affirmation signal and which is not least
as susceptible tourist attraction center to generate visitors and therefore
commercial repercussions.
During the 80s, the number of art galleries
experienced a great increase and has almost doubled. In 1988, the number of
galleries rose pair 848. Many of these galleries have a very short duration,
which has caused, and its mortality rate offset by a high birth rate, the
number remains relatively stable. The Bill'art guide 2004 edition had 590
galleries of modern and contemporary art and estimated about 6000 places
"open to the public with the vocation to present all forms of art."
Galleries, in fact, continue to multiply while the art market, leaving the
limits of the West, globalizes. At present there are thousands of galleries and
art spaces that present in Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Abu Dhabi, thousands
of exhibitions and tens of thousands of works of artists, they now are
numerous.
Wave that also reveals a proliferation of biennials,
exhibitions and international art fairs worldwide. After the Kassel Documenta
and the Venice Biennale, we now have over a hundred biennials, which have
hundreds and thousands of artists. More than 260 fairs are arranged annually
around the world. Asia is already participating on an equal footing: the fair
Art Stage Singapore met in 2012, 140 galleries and Hong Kong Art, twice. Which
joins the parallel fairs or "off", joining younger galleries, less
established and who are less known and less expensive artists. In Paris, in 2009,
FIAC had 203 galleries of 210 countries, and even more 4 off fairs and 73
exhibitions. In 2010, Art Basel Miami received 2000 artists, 29 countries and
250 galleries, while a multitude of fairs and parallel events unfolded a little
everywhere in the city. Fairs that are organized in network now, and that
function as multinational Art: Art Basel, after Basel invested in Miami and
Hong Kong, and the English Frieze fair spread to New York. And the process of
expansion widened even with VIP Art Fair, the first art fair online that met in
2011, during a week, 130 international galleries presenting 7500 works and 2000
artists.
With the artistic capitalism, the small world of
old-art led to the hyper-art,
superabundant, proliferating and globalized, where the distinctions between
art, business and luxury disappear. Here, the profusion (works and
demonstrations) has nothing to do with the waste "damn part", according
with Georges Bataille; it shows the new face of artistic capitalism, to adapt
effectively to the global proliferation of large fortunes and collectors,
investors and other speculators, created a marketing system and dissemination
of art internationally.
Tuesday, December 02, 2014
Four main logic of the artistic capitalism
The general terms that specify the artistic capitalism
can be reduced to four main logic:
First, the integration and generalization style order,
seduction and emotion in goods for commercial consumption. Artistic capitalism
is the economic system that works for the systematic aesthetization of consumer
markets, objects and everyday context. Now the aesthetic paradigm is no longer
foreign to industrial and commercial activities, but incorporated into these.
Results from a mode of production marked by osmosis or symbiosis between the
rationalization of the production process and the aesthetic work, financial
spirit artistic spirit, accounting logic and logic imagine. In this
configuration, the artwork is most often collective, entrusted to teams with a
limited creative autonomy, framed by managers and integrated within more or
less bureaucratic hierarchical structures. The fact is that it comes to
creating beauty and spectacle, excitement and entertainment to conquer markets.
In this sense, it is a strategy or a "charming engineering" featuring
artistic capitalism.
Second, a generalization of the entrepreneurial
dimension of cultural and creative industries. Now, the art worlds, are less
and less "world apart" or an "economy in reverse" are
governed by the general laws of the company and the market economy, with its
imperatives of competition and profitability. With the artistic capitalism
triumphs the management of cultural productions. Even museums should be managed
as companies, implementing marketing and communication policies, increasing the
number of visitors and finding new forms of revenue. In the artistic capitalism
works are judged on the basis of their business and financial results, much
more than by their proper aesthetic features.
Third, a new economic surface of the groups engaged in
the productions provided with an aesthetic component. What was a marginal
sphere has become an important sector of economic activity involving huge
capital and performing colossal funds business. We are no longer in the time of
small art production units but in the mastodon’s culture, transnational giants
of creative industries, fashion and luxury, and the globe as a market.
Fourth: the artistic capitalism is the system in which
they are destabilized the old artistic and cultural hierarchies, while
interpenetrating the artistic, economic and financial spheres. Where worked
heterogeneous universes are developed now hybridization processes that mix of a
unique aesthetic way and industry, art and marketing, magic and business,
design and cool, art and fashion, art and fun.
Monday, December 01, 2014
How to write about contemporary art
Orit Gat is a writer and contributing editor of
Rhizome. She lives in New York, USA. Orit Gat article in the frieze magazine, Issue
167, November-December 2014, about Gilda Williams new book on how to write
about contemporary art.
Let’s assume there is a crisis in art writing. The
past decade saw a number of essays, books, panel discussions and events
debating the state of criticism, the death of the critic and the demise of art
publishing. So, let’s imagine that crisis: reviews always simply describe what
is on view rather than say anything about it; catalogue essays never produce
new knowledge, only serve to promote an artist’s market value; and the language
of press releases, so often derided as hollow, has taken over. All those roundtables
that bring critics back from the dead and onto the podium reflect a growing
anxiety over the communicative possibilities of writing.
Gilda Williams worries about all of the above. Call it
by any name – her slightly derogatory ‘art-patois’, mystical ‘speaking in
tongues’, or plain old ‘artspeak’ – it’s all barely comprehensible to Williams.
She sets out to correct this problem in a new book, How to Write About
Contemporary Art (published by Thames & Hudson) which is structured to
untangle the linguistic mess we have supposedly got ourselves into. In
countless bullet points, she describes the field, its key players and its
particular penchants (citing, amongst other things, a number of frieze
articles), and then moves on to discuss style, the work of pitching and the
different forms of writing in the contemporary-art context. Williams’s
methodology is flawless. She brings in some 50 examples of texts, ranging from
exhibition reviews to snippets of catalogue essays and artist statements, and
attentively analyzes them. She highlights the use of active verbs, points out
specific nouns, deconstructs complex grammatical structures and, all in all,
seems to read these samples more closely than anyone has done before. In
confident style – ‘Unless discussing a certain shark floating in a tank, or
that porcelain bathroom fixture signed “R. Mutt”, never assume your reader
remembers or has seen the art’ – Williams stresses that the essential approach
to writing about art should be to answer three questions, easily summed up: (1)
What is it? (2) What might this mean? and (3) So what? This formula is meant to
answer what Williams sees as the inherent paradox of writing about art –
‘stabilizing art through language risks killing what makes art worth writing
about in the first place’.
In the world Williams describes, the old-school critic
is gone, replaced by a ‘jack of all trades’, but she does not dwell on the
origin of this disappearance – the reality of writing about art, which is low
pay, freelance hustle and a constant struggle to keep one’s ethics in check –
or its consequences. While Williams acknowledges that writers are implicated in
some way in the larger art economy, the conclusion she draws is that ‘today’s
critics are not as powerful as they once were […] Occupying almost the bottom
economic tier of the art-industry pyramid, critics are least affected by cycles
of boom and bust. When art bubbles burst, art-writers often have more to write
about and nothing special to worry about. As Boris Groys asserts, since nobody
reads or invests in art-criticism anyway, its authors can feel liberated to be
as frank as they please, writing with few or no strings attached.’ Does a
position of power enslave a writer? Not necessarily. In fact, it could give the
critic further traction and support his/her role as someone that should – and
potentially could – keep the market in check. As for Groys’s assessment that no
one reads criticism anymore, the conclusion that should be drawn from it is
that what we urgently need right now is not more writing, but more critical
writing.
No book could teach a writer to be interesting,
opinionated, engaged or passionate. And that isn’t the objective of this one.
Its goal is to take a discipline that Williams conceives of as highly unregulated
– and professionalize it. In outlining exactly how an auction catalogue differs
from a museum’s wall label and a magazine review, down to the vocabulary and
tone each should accommodate, Williams gives insight to the inner workings of
very different industries: academia, auction houses and mainstream and
professional press. With an eye on the rise of numerous academic programmes in
art writing, a book on the subject could be seen as a democratizing entity, but
the difference between a book and a school is interaction. Even if one recoils
at the idea of needing an MFA in art criticism in order to write for a magazine
– another instance of an art world in which the terms of participation are a
secondary degree, often accompanied by academic debt that few can financially
justify – at least those programmes allow students a sense of community.
Whether found in a graduate programme or not, it is the participation in
discourse and interest in one’s contemporaries that makes someone a critic.
Williams’s technique is married to the work of art – let the work lead you –
which risks resulting in formulaic art writing that neglects the intellectual
context from which the artwork emerges.
Art writing is not an industry in crisis – quite the
opposite. Art publishing has developed into a realm complementary to the work,
not one that merely describes it. The physical and conceptual expansion of what
art can be has also produced a publishing landscape with a positive
anything-goes ethos, which we should promote, rather than suffocate. Writing
about art has become a space in which good writers can discuss anything, lofty
or mundane, from politics to neckties, philosophical trends to internet memes.
While Williams claims that art writing needs to be grounded in descriptions of
the art – the ‘what’s there’ – I’d argue that this extended field of publishing
is what makes for vibrant reading material, whether or not it ever mentions
that this or that video installation has two screens and a total running time
of 15 minutes. Art writing should be sharp and opinionated, but also sometimes
flimsy and erratic. Art writing doesn’t need to be professionalized further –
it needs to be granted room to experiment and expand. These more wayward forms
of writing create an art world that is more perceptive, where what we read is
equal in its intellectual ambition to the work we look at.
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