Ecological Aesthetics advance copy just arrived!
So excited that my advance copy of Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics has arrived! Out July 3!
Julian says it’s a good read.
milwaukee art
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Review: Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s Inbound East at The Alice Wilds
Inbound East: Coastline
I have known Jessica Meuninck-Ganger for about ten years: as friend, colleague, someone I have written about (in my first book), and collaborator. She is smart, generous, detail-oriented, interesting, funny, sensitive, and… a bit manic (such is contemporary life). The work I am most familiar with is either deeply personal – presenting memory and dementia as they relate to facial expressions and materiality – and/or exploring a combination of form, space, and technique – installations, hybrid print-video projections and screens, and/or other mixed media projects that create potent story-based objects.
And so it was a pleasant surprise to read about Jessica’s latest approach to art-attunement: walking. According to her statement for The Alice Wilds, her Inbound East exhibition charts “the Milwaukee cityscape by departing east from 71st street and proceeding inbound toward Lake Michigan.” The artist walks, encounters, and takes photos, thinks, draws, and draws out, “overlooked aspects of the built environment,” chronicling:
matter, marks, indentations, and scratches. Hand-rendered textures of the metropolitan area include stacks of lumber, skillfully arranged patterns of cream city brick, fieldstone walls, composite fiberboard lap siding, rooftops, and cedar shake. She re-imagines, cuts, rearranges, constructs, and transforms her drawings into screen printed paper maps, buildings, landscapes, and waterways – providing distinctive views of a city.
Meuninck-Ganger pointing out the kind of building she’d choose to re-present
Jessica tactfully, tactilely, and tactically… walks. And the tacit agreement between her and her landscape is that their story will continue, forever and together, even when they are not face-to-face (as it were). The city might at many points be invisible even while we roam it, but it is always felt. Its landscape is always moving – both itself, and the people within and around it.
Jessica represents that city with her work. But not in the standard sense of the word “represent.” According to French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, the “re” in “represent” is not repetitive; it is intensive. In other words, to “re-present” is not to present again, but to present more of what is. It is a presence presented. Meuninck-Ganger has us remember, facilitate, enhance, refine, re-image, reimagine, and reintroduce our selves and our relationships to and with the vibrant city around us.
Several of Mueninck-Ganger’s building portraits
Unlike the busyness of her day as mother, teacher, administrator, world-saver, community engagement actor, and more, Jessica must slow down and… look. She might spend an hour or more simply drawing a building while in front of it, like the one she is pictured with (two images up). Short and warm, giving character to everything around it, that building (she often names them after friends they remind her of) stands out as different, but belonging. … And after she makes an archetypal drawing of such a Milwaukee building – from a very real and specific Milwaukee building – she shows these “portraits” (above) of the buildings she “knows” – as in, she has admired or been inside that space, felt herself change because of it. No building is ever completely “known,” of course (nothing ever is), but Jessica has an intimate knowledge of what these do, what they think, how they feel. And we see and feel this in the ways we experience her crafted representations.
Inbound East: Confluence
Or, Jessica might swish through a quick, one-minute sketch of an interesting tidbit – whether it be another building, a brick, or dripping water below a bridge… She might then revisit that drawing several days later, and re-present/re-draw that several times over, before turning it into a silk screen – representing the representation of a representation (etc) into one of her larger works.
More and more and more presences presented.
…
And you see, the East in Inbound East is not only about the direction of Meuninck-Ganger’s walks. It is also a reference to the influence of Eastern culture on her practice (as well as to Italo Calvino’s beautiful 1974 book, Invisible Cities, an inspiration for her). She uses Korean and/or Japanese-styled hand-made paper, inks, and cut-ups towards, for example, the production of pathway installations we are invited to traverse carefully, much like the artist traverses her city – looking for tactile details rather than a gridded whole. Above and below, Inbound East: Confluence is a two-wall installation of silk-screened and pasted-together prints that play between 2-, 3-, and 4-dimensions: flat, erected, and across time/space.
Inbound East: Confluence
Michel de Certeau’s highly influential paper, “Walking in the City,” defines a tactic as an agile, material, and detail-oriented (tactile) approach to making change. It is opposed to a strategy, which takes a more institutional (structured) and less flexible approach, towards specific ends. Google Maps and city ordinances, strategic plans and road works: these strategically make futures without consideration for the everyday encounters we have with our own mappings within the city, their roads and where they take us. Whereas Jessica’s tactic for engagement is to walk and draw. And she represents the forces of what she finds in different modes. We continue to feel them in and around her show, even in their absence, and even after we’ve left the gallery.
Inbound East: Confluence
Or with Inbound East: Coastline (very first image), the artist plays between the city as seen from above, the drawings she makes in town, and the space of the gallery itself. She paints the walls and backdrops the same water/sky blue to make it larger than us, but gives us a floor-based installation… and then reminds us just what an illusion these strategic views are, with the plastic plug holes in the gallery wall left overtly white, the blue-painted foam leaking onto the wood paneling of the floor from the dry wall. Here the plays between 2- and 3-D feel more tenuous, are disconcerting even while they are satisfying.
spotted on my walk with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
On Saturday May 19th, I joined the artist and about 20 others on a walk from the gallery, in and around Walker’s Point. She told us about her process of choosing buildings to draw, walking and forcing herself to pay attention to what is present, rather than what needs to be done. She even gave us artwork clipboards to “work” with. I got to know and see beauty in the sometimes invisible cities before me, in both large and small, known and unknown – with my three kids, some strangers, and some acquaintances I hadn’t spoken to much before.
Meuninck-Ganger’s gifted clipboards
It was… nice. It made me want to walk and think, play and draw… more. To spend more time concerning myself with the city and its inhabitants, concerning myself with… well, myself, and my relationships and environments.
And isn’t that what all art should do?
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s Inbound East is on view at The Alice Wilds in Walker’s Point, Milwaukee until June 16, 2018.
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Phonēy Prints
Some of my own work above… More than meets the eye, PhonÄ“y Prints are produced using ink made from ground up smart phones – complete with glittering grit in the details. More coming soon, part of The World After Us (though not yet posted on my main site!).
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Review: Jesse McLean’s When It Rains it Pours at Green Gallery
As I slowly walked towards the Green Gallery via Farwell Avenue on a snowing and icy Wednesday night, two 60-inch (or so) glowing LCD screens grew larger and larger in my vision, each presenting me with videos of how we consume… well, consumption.
Catalog (excerpt, 6 minutes total running time)
On the left, a delicate yet confident pair of hands mechanically browses a Sears catalog from the late 1800s – scouring over a landscape of hand-drawn horses, which market saddles and harnesses for us to purchase. On the right, we see a different kind of browsing and browser, our all too common doubled metaphorical “window” into Amazon.com: a scrolling grid of colorful and mostly useless objects, devoid of context, background, or sizing information (a bicycle appears smaller than a keychain).
Scroll (excerpt, 40 minutes total running time)
It’s mundane. Funny. Sad. It’s hard to look at. Hard to look away. Who buys this shit? Oh, wait, I think my daughter has that patch… Oh, that ghost pin is kind of cute. Is there a list of prices somewhere? No, not for the art… for the objects in the video…
Wait. What the fuck is wrong with me?
These videos present a very concrete frame for thinking about some of the (first print and now) digital realities around us, for reflecting on how we engage with distance shopping and online culture, visual literacy and the consumer society it encourages. That complexity can’t really be described concisely – at least not very well. But we can feel it in, and want to talk about via, the strange comparative gestures McLean dishes out. There’s just so much she implicates (positive and negative, frustrating and gleeful, embarrassing and desirous) in the continuous and varying relationships we have with money and objects, matter and concepts, looking, seeing, and being seen; buying and selling, being and becoming, hating and loving, and more.
Catalog and Scroll, image courtesy of Green Gallery
The show is, on the one hand, a wink and a nod to those critically-minded folks that are self-reflexive enough to recognize our participation in that culture, how contemporary society (and all of its predecessors) consume, and are often consumed by, things and spectacles, trends and treats. And on the other hand… It reminds us that we (“critically-minded and self-reflexive folks”), too, are no better; or at least that we can always do better. The feeling that rose in me reminded me a bit of this Jon Rafman quote, from his bizarre interview with Bad at Sports in 2010 (I’m paraphrasing here): sometimes, in Postinternet culture, we never know if we’re celebrating or ironizing what we make art about.
I hate to love to shop for the stuff I hate to love.
The Invisible World (Books), 18h x 24w in
To the right of these videos is a beautiful framed print of some Life books on various subjects: Primates and Ecology, Mathematics and The Mind, Evolution and Ships, to name a few (see above). Again, I struggle. I’d be interested to know what the books contain: both for knowledge, and to guess when they are from, as represented by the language and beliefs they present (we know so much more now, both scientifically, and about our own judgments… right?) . But then… I could as easily see this stack of books in Goodwill as I could in the Anthro or Geology department at UWM, or – oh, the irony – on a hipster’s mantelpiece.
Objects (Thumb drive), 20h x 16w in
On the other side of the video pieces discussed above, there are several framed prints of strange and funny objects; they are visually contextualized as if on instagram, with potential “like” hearts in the upper left corner (and numbers – mostly zeroes, and one 57K – that tell us their ratings); and I don’t know if that’s real (were they actually on Insta?), or even if the objects are real. Â Are they from Amazon, or 3D printed, or just rendered / virtual?… It’s amusing. And weird. And uncomfortable. I look around at other people looking, wondering what they are thinking. And I question it. And I question myself, again.
It’s so easy to get lost here, cycling around, cynical with the world and myself, and everyone around me… But then, here we are, in a crowded room despite the weather, talking and chatting and laughing and recognizing ourselves and our issues, for better or worse: making and looking at art, trying to be and do better than what came before.
Is that so wrong? In the world of alternative facts and fake news, where a reality star is president and an ex-president war criminal has become a painter, can we trust images or computers? Dogs or books? Anyone – even ourselves? And to do what, exactly? And with what power?… So, then I forgive myself… After the Greatest Generation made America Great and the Baby Boomers built on that, only so the latter could dismantle the safety nets they both created once they were through to the other side… our responses have to first be criticism with cynicism, if only to make room for the productive discussion and activism I have come to see Gen Xers and – yes – Millenials, are truly capable of. We need to look closely, then walk away – if only temporarily, to regroup – to find meaning, and purpose, and to make change.
See a Dog, Hear a Dog (McLean video still, total running time 17:40)
The center room, then, has three looping videos from 12-20 minutes each, which I admittedly came back to several times, not realizing they were separate – yet still having a hard time tearing myself away from them each time. Thankfully, McLean sent me links later, to rewatch and ponder. Let me first say that McLean’s juxtaposition of sound (or the lack thereof) – music, text, reading, effects, jarring silence – with image – realistic video, abstract digital drawings, and more – is masterful. With See a Dog, Hear a Dog, (17:40), she somehow creates a strange but familiar, almost nostalgic, empathy with and sympathy for, computers, dogs, humans, and shapes. We hear a computer telling us her feelings and reading from the bible. Dogs whimpering and wailing. A piano playing a sad melody. The affect/effect is a combination of watching CNET, Mr Rogers, and Arrival. The stories and texts are strange and implicitly political, the crying dogs terrifying and sad, the music eerily teacherly, and the “conversations” difficult to follow – despite our knowing how hard all of the subjects are trying to communicate (though what, exactly, is not always clear).
The Invisible World (video still, total running time 20:15)
The Invisible World, then, is 20 minutes of Sci-Fi snippets, scientific how-to’s, unboxing and shopping spree youtube clips, home videos, stills of “warm” and “homely” objects (think a yellow butter dish from the 70s) paired with texts about capitalism and meaning, audio narratives about vaccines (among other things)… and more, all juxtaposed in McLean’s signature style outlined above, with sound bridges and silence, embedded empathy and oddities. This was the video I couldn’t tear myself away from, watched waiting to see and hear what would happen next, trying to make sense not of the film (it’s impossible), but rather of my feelings about it, about the tactics deployed and how and why. In the end, I think I encountered precisely my feelings around trying to communicate and relate: to information and consumption overload, to others and things, to our pasts, presents, and futures (and future pasts). Communication, like consumption – I can’t help but think – always fails. But… perhaps it’s still worth trying?
Wherever You Go, There We Are (still, total running time 12:00)
And Wherever You Go, There We Are has audio of spam emails, read by an automated correspondent, juxtaposed with hand-colored historical postcards (with some hand-written and some typed texts on the underside) to create a 12-minute artificial travelogue. There are occasional videos of fingers clacking an invisible keyboard, upright; videos of natural landscapes or highways; and a feminine hand on a computer trackpad. Taken together, it wanders and has us wonder around real and virtual, affect and effect, perception and performance. Where do we go when in front of our screens? Where don’t we? Where does the value or lack thereof lie in each?
Rains (excerpt, total running time 7 minutes)
In the last room is Rains, a 7-minute video of digital rain, pouring quickly, but more slowly changing direction, ignoring gravity: up, down, left, right, in arcs and planes and more. A reference to the title of the exhibit, it does kind of sum it all up. A torrent of things and feelings and people and animals, stories and not-yets, all push and pull, potentially drowning us. We can try to bring an umbrella. Or stay inside… And sometimes we might. But sometimes, we could try asking someone else for shelter, or building some of our own – perhaps big enough for friends and family, with a fireplace, and a couch, and some whiskey. Sometimes, we might contemplate why it comes down so hard, what conditions lead to this, and if and how we might change them. And sometimes, we might run outside and play in that rain, allowing ourselves to revel in the water – and invite others to join – consequences be damned. After all, we are the ones who will be left to clean up any given mess, whether our own, or from the others who came before us.
A Nohl Fellow last year, and an Assistant Professor in the department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at UWM, Jesse McLean is a talented artist, generous teacher, and interested/interesting person to chat with. When It Rains it Pours is not an easy show. But it’s a necessary one. It doesn’t provide answers, or even direct questions. Rather, it asks us to question ourselves and our relationships to contemporary digital and consumer culture; and more importantly, it then has us ask, What’s next?
When It Rains it Pours is on show at Green Gallery East at 1500 N Farwell Ave through May 12. The gallery is open Wednesday – Saturday 2-6pm or by appointment.
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Phossils
Hello world! I have a baby. And am getting married next week. So blogging has been slow…. But then, there’s this new stuff I’m excited about.
Phossils are, more or less, fossilized phones. Here I subject media devices to extreme heat and cold, artificial pressure and geological time, or other intense conditions that weather and turn these materials into… somethingelse. Through research, experimentation, and craft, I have tried to transform phones into crude oil, coal, or other fossil fuels, into synthetic archives and simulated relics for a future time. Cook, freeze, burn, smash, blend, and more… and put the results on exhibit, in beakers and tubes, on pedestals and stands, and/or as archaeological finds.
Yay, art!
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Briefiew: Art and Tech at VAR Gallery, Milwaukee
Maksym Prykhodko’s shout, an interactive installation.
Happy New Year, Everyone! I apologize for the minimal posting of late. Aside from the obvious holiday season, my son Julian was just 4 weeks old on Sunday – so I have literally had my hands full quite a bit over the last while (usually full with baby). Things will pick up again, if slowly, as we get into a routine… Here’s my first in a while: a Briefiew of the Art and Tech exhibition at VAR Gallery, Milwaukee, at which – disclaimer - Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and I have a few of our collaborative pieces.
It seems a bit dated and broad to call an exhibition, simply, “Art and Tech” in the year 2018, and yet the content and context of this show give it an edge that is both genuine and enlightening.
Artist-curators Becky Yoshikane and Cristina Ossers, in front of 3D printed works by Fred Kaems
First: context. The artist-curators, Becky Yoshikane and Cristina Ossers, are both graduates of the once-quite-large but now-defunct Interdisciplinary Arts and Technology program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and every single artist exhibiting has either taught within, guest spoken at, or graduated (or, in two cases, at least taken classes) from, that same program. And more than half of them have exhibited, and received press, internationally for that work.
Given its success (and there’s plenty of it, if you look at its graduates), what does it say that this program no longer exists? Is it because of the overly territorial environment of academia, amplified by cuts, cuts, and more cuts? Is it that creative uses of technology are now seen as more suited to design, business, or engineering programs? Could it be that technology has become so integral to all forms of art that it need not be its own major any longer? But what does that mean for the discourses of the digital, or for more advanced skillsets that require faculty and labs, like programming, electronics, and fabrication? These questions are part of the overarching background to the show.
More than anything, however, Art and Tech seems to be placing Milwaukee’s computer fine arts scene – which, on this show alone, includes some of the progenitors behind the world’s largest Maker Faire, a coder behind one of the most popular “expensive” ($30) music-making apps, highly-regarded fellowship, grant, and residency winners, and teachers from across the continent – within both a local and global context of thoughts and thinkings-with Art, Media, and Social Change. How do we interact between the digital, selfhood, consumption, data, projection, play, community, and more? Technology and Art/Culture, I constantly remind my students, are never separate. And at the present moment: all studio practices are digital studio practices; all cultural practices are digital cultural practices. And we need much broader and deeper explorations here, also asking how, why, and where we explore, together. And Milwaukee is one hub for precisely this.
The whole show is worth your time, to be sure, but here are a few of my favorite highlights…
Scott Kildall, two pieces from Strewn Fields
Scott Kildall’s Strewn Fields mine (pun intended) impact data from Earth-bound meteorites, and transduces these numbers into mappings for a high-pressure waterjet / cutting machine, which then carves into rock, producing new forms. Kildall calls the pieces from this series “data-visualizations” on his web site, but they are so much more than that. From stone to stone, marring to marring, I ask, what is lost or gained? How does Earth re-member (that is, embody again), violence, impact, or change? At what scale can we see, touch, and feel, the Earth, its climate, and the wonder that (and how) it simply is? Where do meaning and matter coincide, disperse, reconfigure, and relate/transform? I see all of these questions, and more, in each small tablet. I have been a fan of Kildall’s work for some time – why I chose to collaborate with him on several occasions – and yet I believe these understated sculptures are some of the strongest work I’ve seen from him to date.
Alycia Griesl’s Malfunctions
Alycia Griesl’s portraits that likely employ either desktop scanners or some form of slit scan imaging are probably the simplest of works on exhibit, yet it is precisely this thinking that shows how far we’ve come in the last decade or two. Whereas prints such as these would be considered high-tech and highly “filtered” in years gone by, we now see them only as emotive, and even recognize the procedure, the lines as moments of time, the colors as relics of the that process.
Adam Wertel
And Adam Wertel’s kinetic sculpture (I missed the title, but it’s probably something like Drawing Machine, given his other work), sees an occasionally and slowly rotating block of charcoal drawing, building up, and sometimes dripping lines on paper and graphite on the floor… If you sneak behind, you can see the mechanical arm, guess at his use of magnets. Like in Kildall’s case, there’s a kind of deployment of authorship coupled with a purposeful amplification of the agency of mark-making, in both senses of the phrase.
Fred Kaems displays photographs of people interacting with the large 3D printed sculptures he places in public spaces, changing all of people, places, and things, at once. Pete Prodoehl shows his funny and quirky interactive sculptures that make noise and emphasize maker culture itself, “when pushed.” Morehshin Allahyari, who I recently wrote about, displays her Dark Matter (above, video courtesy of the artist and Upfor Gallery), a video of binary-yet-mixed worldwide icons – barbies with guns for arms, playboy bunny scissors, and more. Most interestingly, this video is meant to travel, with NASA, to an international space station.
some of Pete Prodoehl’s sculptures
Works by David Witzling, Kevin Schlei, and Bryan Cera (another recently covered artist), (and, as mentioned, Jessica and me) are also on show, and there will be various other workshops and screenings. Overall, it’s a microcosm of some of the most current explorations in and with digital media, what it is and does and might be, how it thinks and asks us to think.
Art and Tech is on view through February 3rd at Var Gallery.