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.
philosophy
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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.
Archives
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.
Archives
Tops of 2017: a different kind of year in review
This was a short-lived tradition I started almost a decade ago, and I’m stoked to reboot it. Here, I put forward four Top 5 lists of my own: The Top 5 people I newly met in 2017, The Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2017, The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable), and The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t. Hope you like it! Feel free to comment, leaving any things/people I missed but might (or should have) enjoy(ed)!
The Top 5 people I newly met in 2017
- Julian James Lafayette Stern. My newborn son. Obvs. Also his mom is AMAZING.
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De Angela Duff
De Angela Duff co-runs the Integrated Digital Media program, a creative technology degree (er, set of degrees – undergraduate, masters, and PhD) in the engineering college at New York University. She restructured it to be more creative – to cover design and arts thinking along with utilitarian engineering skills – and grew it to more than double its size in a few short years. All this and she is a proud woman of color to boot. She hosted me in New York, along with Luke (below) for a talk I gave at their program last Spring.
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Luke DuBois
Luke DuBois co-hosted me on my aforementioned New York visit. He and his work are fun, smart, political, and engaging on so many levels. He is most known for his “human portraits made from data” (this is Dubois’s TED talk) and for his work on Cycling74’s artful Software Development App, Max. He’s also a great teacher and composer, and a generous seeker of funds for his students; and one can get a real pulse on liberal news simply by watching his Twitter or Facebook feed fly by…
- All my new studio assistants: Mary Widener, Jenna Marti, Alex Gugg, Josh Passon, Reid Finley, and Olivia Overturf (actually, I met Olivia in 2016, but it’s a fit). These folks have been working feverishly on new sculptures, new experiments, my new card game, and more. They do so with passion, creativity, and professionalism, all while having to put up with a very strange boss.
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Maggie Sasso
Maggie Sasso was a Nohl Fellow (a big deal in Milwaukee) a few years back, and we were thrown together for side-by-side solo shows coming up in Madison’s Watrous Gallery in Fall 2018. We decided to meet up to discuss the space… and eventually agreed to collaborate! I’ve had a blast getting to know her, her work, and her family. She is very generous, very smart, very fun, and both creatively thoughtful and thoughtfully creative. If you don’t know her or her art… do yourself a favor! It’s humorous and tragic, with both implied and explicit narratives from the sites and lives she touches.
The Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2017
- Amanda Boetzkes is someone whose work I only briefly encountered while doing research for my new manuscript, and who then wound up giving amazing and insightful feedback on an earlier draft of that text, pushing me towards the book it eventually became. The book is, without any doubt, much stronger because of her constructive criticism. Boetzkes has some wonderful texts out there already, and I am eagerly awaiting her new book project, Ecologicity: Vision and Art for A World to Come, which “analyzes the aesthetic and perceptual dimensions of imagining the ecological condition.” More on Amanda Boetzkes via her website, or check out some of her writing via Amazon.
N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics was hugely influential on my dissertation and thinking, and I still cite her regularly in my classes and texts. Almost 20 years later, her 2017 Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious differentiates between a thinking that describes “thoughts and capabilities associated with higher consciousness such as rationality, the ability to formulate and manipulate abstract concepts, linguistic competencies, and so on,†and “cognition†(2), which is the nonconscious capacity for processing information, the latter gained through biological sensation or perception, or technological sensors, mechanical feedback, or data received from external sources, among other things. Cognition, in other words, is a “much broader faculty†extant on some level “in all biological life-forms and many technical systems†(14). Hayles wants to have the humanities engage with and better understand “the specificities of human-technical cognitive assemblages and their power to transform life on the planet†through a more coherent “ethical inquiry†(3-4). She wants us to look more closely at what and how those systems act, cognize, and think, what we do with and as them, and why. Hers is an important premise and fascinating study of the “supporting environments†humans are “embedded and immersed in,†which “function as distributed cognitive systems†(2). As I said in an earlier briefiew of the book, I found myself alternatively nodding with approval ,and shaking my head in disagreement, while reading, but that is precisely because this is such an interesting field with too much to debate. And Hayles’s bringing these ideas into the humanities is unmistakably important, and may prove to be another game-changer.-
Kathy High
Kathy High is the super cool bio artist behind Blood Wars, where participants contribute their white blood cells toward battle against each other in a petri dish, until only one winner in this (literally) bloody tournament remains. We’ve shot a few emails back and forth around the section I wrote about her work in my upcoming book, but I’d love to meet her in person.
- Ben Davis is the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class and an all-around great writer on the arts, aesthetics, pop culture, and how they all relate to both everyday and overarching politics. He is smart, and funny, and manages to wrap up a lot of difficult-to-understand aesthetic and cultural philosophy and theory into easier to understand texts, when it is called for. Part activist, part writer, part arts and culture critic, whenever I stumble onto his writings I always read and enjoy them, and imagine a coffee or beer with Ben would be fun and enlightening.
- Lin-Manuel Miranda. This is a no-brainer. If you don’t know who he is, I can’t help you. Hell, I feel like I’m pretty late to his fan club myself…
The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable)
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Bill Viola
Electronic Renaissance, Bill Viola at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. I find Viola’s slow motion and high definition video installations of the last decade to be mesmerizing; where he began as an experimental video artist, playing with time and image, he has now mastered that material and discipline. He has long been re-staging historical (mostly religious) paintings, with a few moments before and after in his detailed slo-mo imagery, and this exhibition curated his updates alongside the originals. It was a wonder to take my time with the show, an affective and curious ride…
- The Venice Biennale. I finally made it out! What an amazing few days of jumping around contemporary art and ideas, and a beautiful city. I’d never been (though some of my work has been part of the periphery), and I feel like this was a very strong year. Candice Breitz has always been a favorite (since my time in South Africa, 2001-2006), and I was very pleased to be introduced to the work of Michel Blazy.
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Rashid Johnson
Hail Now we Sing Joy, Rashid Johnson at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Locals: if you missed this, you missed out. Johnson is a master of mixed media and installation, using materials that allude to race and gender, identity and escape, while pushing us to explore how we think-with ourselves and our surroundings, histories and presents, materials and how and why they matter. Not only are there explicit ties to politics and its knowns and unknowns, but implications of ecology and more long-term accountability, and where these coincide with issues of race and class, interpersonal relationships and how they function.
- Stacey Williams-Ng, tour of Black Cat Alley. Wlliams-Ng has amplified how Milwaukee murals are acts of politics, dialog, community, and commercialism, all in one. Black Cat Alley has launched a lot of debate and new business, a shining light on a number of locally featured artists. Yes, there was some controversy around Adam Stoner’s mural (and again when it was painted over) – but in my opinion the outcomes of the conversations it spurred have had a net positive effect, mostly because of the generosity of everyone involved. It was great to get a group tour with other generous folks in the Fall of 2017.
- Shane Walsh at The Alice Wilds. I did not review this show because it was before my blog was rebooted, but I did follow up with this post about Shane’s work a few months later.
The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t.
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Nicole Eisenman in Munster
Skulptur Projekte Münster. Only every ten years, this citywide exhibition sees new permanent commissions, several exhibitions and ephemeral projects, and a whole history of work of years gone by. I went a decade ago and … wow, it was like a treasure hunt! I hope I make it again some day.
- Sara Cwynar’s Rose Gold at Foxy Production. I’m just gonna pull from the text on this one, because it totally nails it: “Apple’s Rose Gold iPhone [tracks] how the phone acts as a talisman of desire for objects, people, power, and money. The film considers how individuals — the artist is one of its protagonists – negotiate complicated feelings of love and hate for commercial objects and how features such as touch and 3D resonate directly with the user’s emotions and imagination.”
- Sean Slemon’s Confluence Tree. I LOVE Sean’s work, and wrote the catalog essay for this one – but sadly had to miss it. More on his work and this show via this post.
- “Merce Cunningham: Common Time†at the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Mostly known for his cutting-edge and revolutionary choreography from mid-last century until his death in 2009, Cunningham also collaborated across genres and disciplines from installations to theatre, costumes to printmaking, painting, music, and more. I’ve loved and appreciated much of the work by his contemporary William Forsythe, and I imagine this show was stunning…
WanÃ¥s Konst. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I understand what is going on here, but it looks RAD. I love it.
Comment with your lists!!!
Archives
Details for “The World After Us: Speculative Media Sculpture Project” roundtable, Wed, Dec 6th 2:00
Please join us this Wednesday afternoon in the Digital Humanities Lab (2nd floor, UWM Golda Meir library) for the latest installment of our Research Round Tables – refreshments provided! Discussion and feedback encouraged! Co-sponsored by the Office of Research.
Wed, Dec 6th | 2:00 p.m.
The World After Us: Speculative Media Sculpture Project (A “Working on it” Research Round Table), Nathanial Stern, PSOA and Carol Hirschmugl, Physics.
Tentatively titled “The World After Us,†Physics Professor Carol J Hirschmugl and Art and Design Professor Nathaniel Stern are working towards a multidiscplinary project that will hopefully have outcomes in the forms of new coursework, educational gallery installations, and more fine arts-oriented sculptures. Drs. Stern and Hirschmugl are together asking: What are aesthetic, conceptual, and pedagogical ways of re-presenting geological time and concerns, and their relation to our media devices? How might we artistically embody and point to real and cutting edge sustainability research? How can energy concerns be manifest, as digestable information, affective installation, and understandable curricula? They are speaking and working with engineers, artists, physicists, and environmental scientists to learn about such things precisely so that they might embody them in a series of artworks, narrativize the process, and make this project pedagogical as much as it is aesthetic and conceptual.
Archives
Heidegger in the Kitchen
This 3-year-old, mainstream “for beginners” type video totally made my morning (though I tend to think of Heidegger as more of a phenomenologist than existentialist). Seriously. Watch it if you haven’t seen it. It’s really good. We should all strive to be more authentic jelly babies.
I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday weekend. I’ve got draft posts on local artists Greg Klassen and Jessica Fenlon in the works for the coming while. Also: my baby son is due shortly (37 weeks!), so there’s that.