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.
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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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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!!!
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Syllabus sharing! Interactive and Generative Art – a Max, MSP, and Jitter class at UWM
Welcome back to another episode of syllabus sharing here at Implicit Art!
“Bound by periphery,” Caitlin Driver in Art 316
This class focuses on interactive technologies and aesthetics in contemporary art. Students will learn basic software development and real-time computational methods. They simultaneously learn and make projects with MIDI sounds or drawings, digital audio, human interface devices (USB game controllers, Bluetooth phones and more), and recorded and live video files for mixing and computer vision (body- and motion-tracking, for example). Assignments include many small projects with varying technical goalposts, as well as a mid-term and final artwork that will be more focused on conceptual-material aesthetic themes.
Most of my students have little or no background in coding, so, like my Electronics and Sculpture class, this syllabus works as an introduction to interactive art. That said, I offer it at the 300-level, so that my digital art students will understand bits and bytes, audio and video, how computers “think,” and my other artists will be able to bring their skills with crafting images or objects (etc) into the mix. I also “stack” it with a 400-level class, so grad students, or advanced students that want to take it a second time, can add another dimension of creativity and criticality.
I teach this in Cycling74’s Max: a visually-based, object oriented programming environment. What does that mean? You build a flow chart for your data (whether that be sensors from a phone, a video feed, sounds, etc), and that input is transcoded and turned into something else. Come again? OK. For example (an example I give on the first day, and that I remade in my PJs while typing this – shown left), plug a microphone object into a meter object to see how loud real-time sound is. Take a video grabber and plug that into a screen (“world”) object to see your live webcam. Use a multiply (“*”) object with each stream on either side, and you get a live video that fades in and out based on how loud your subject speaks into the microphone. (Kitty, from kitchen: What are you yelling about in there? Me: Just blogging!  Kitty: ???) It’s relatively easy, super cool, and completely visual. (Processing, which is more direct coding in Java, is actually taught in the music department at UWM, and I often recommend my students take that, too).
Joe Grennier’s “Faces” in Art 316
I’m gladly sharing last year’s syllabus and calendar online. It is under a CC-by license (Creative Commons Attribution), meaning, you can do whatever you want with it (use, distribute, remix, etc), so long as you credit me and acknowledge the license I used, link back to this page, and do not prohibit anyone else from doing said same.
The semester arc is project-based, and I teach ‘objects” (in the flow chart) and data dynamics (etc) as we go along with make, make, making. This is the order:
“R2-generatorâ€
A generative “doodle†of software-based sound, which often sounds like R2D2, using MIDI and/or digital signal processes, and any combination of buttons, toggles, metronomes, randomizers, counters, and/or other learned objects.
“Pollack-botâ€
A small, generative drawing project using jit.lcd or jit.gl.sketch, math, decision trees, gates, switches and/or the keyboard or mouse.
“Vizzie Visualizer and/or BEAP beaterâ€
A generative or interactive project that uses randomness, feeds, and/or live input towards somewhat interesting or provocative ends. Students will be required to use both video (live and/or pre-recorded) and digital audio (live and/or pre-recorded) as part of this project – and pre-made patchers from the Vizzie and BEAP libraries are most welcome.
“Stupid pet trick†(mid-term)
An interactive art work with some form of external input (Human Interface, Computer Vision, Arduino, etc). uses pre-recorded video and/or live or pre-recorded sound along with some other form of input/output. Students will write a brief statement about their work (less than 300 words), and their technical abilities and use of inventive juxtapositioning will be judged against this text’s framing of concept, creativity and both interactive and visual aesthetics.
Final Project
A large-scale interactive and/or generative and/or networked installation, performance, tool or art object. Again, students will be graded against their artist statements, on technical abilities, conceptual frames, creativity and both interactive and visual aesthetics. Undergraduates will show complete and working software, budget, and sketches for the full installation. Graduate students must set up the full installation somewhere in Kenilworth as part of their final critique.
Of course, as with all my classes, there are consistent discussions around the aesthetics and ethics of our work. The readings for undergrads are:
- “Action, Reaction and Phenomenon,†Rhizome.org (free online) (2008)
- Katherine Hayles: Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments (available via Muse) (2002)
- Philip Galanther: What is generative art? Complexity theory as a context for art theory (available from CiteSeer) (2003)
- Nathaniel Stern: Interactive Art and Embodiment (introduction) (2013), made available by the instructor.
- “The Aesthetics of Play,†from The Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, by Katja Kwastek.
Grad students do additional readings and context-based work, and are additionally required to read (and we discuss):
- Rethinking Curating, MIT Press
- Interactive Art & Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance, Gylphi Press (the whole book, not just the intro)
- Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, U Minn
It is SUCH a fun class, with great work, and a high satisfaction factor as I watch my students learn to think differently: about technology and data, about art and aesthetics, about interaction, relationality, and ethics. AND, while I’m on parental leave, I’m very excited to see what new dimensions Jessica Fenlon can add to the class and program. I’m working on getting her in at UWM – and look out for a feature on her work on this blog in the coming weeks…
Here’s the Interactive and Multimedia Art syllabus, in Word format. Enjoy art, teaching, and learning!
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Sketching: The World After Us, speculative media sculptures
This blog post is a sketch – something I will occasionally do about my own work, or with others. It will always be a thinking-with of new materials and ideas, with this one coming out of the writing of my forthcoming second book (Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics), chats with colleagues and peers and specialists, playing with media objects, proposing a fellowship (I didn’t get), and more. I welcome feedback! I imagine this particular proposal being a years- and perhaps decades-long project, with this first exhibition being produced over the next two or so years… The images are very recent experiments!
THE WORLD AFTER: US SPECULATIVE MEDIA SCULPTURE
What will Digital Media do, after us?
Galaxy (yes, the phone)
The World After Us will be a new series of media sculptures that materially speculate on what our devices – phones and tablets, batteries and displays, etc – might become, over thousands or millions of years. Through research, experimentation, and craft, I will try (and likely fail) to turn phones into crude oil, coal, or other fossil fuels – and put the results on exhibit, in beakers and tubes. I will attempt to mimic geological time, as pressure and heat – through chemical interactions or specialized machinery – on laptops and tablets, then display where that potential lies, as petrified-like LCDs or mangled post-exploded batteries, on pedestals in a gallery. I hope to turn “dead media†computers into efficient planters for edible goods, food for mold, or seeds of their own growth – and show both those experiments, and their results, as videos and sculptural forms. I will also turn ground phones into usable supplies, for example ink and paper, and put them to use in these new forms. The final outcome will be an internationally exhibited body of work, and catalog. It is impossible for humans to truly fathom our planet on an Earth scale, or conversely from the perspective of bacteria. But we can feel such things, through art and storytelling – making our aesthetic encounters both conceptually and ethically vital toward new futures. At stake, whether in our everyday interactions or on a larger scale, are the (digital) relationships between humans and the natural world on the one hand, between politics and commerce on the other.
The World After Us will be a traveling exhibition and catalog, beginning in Milwaukee, and shown in several other spaces internationally. It asks:
What will digital media be and do, after us?
What will my laptop, or phone, look like in a million years?
How will our devices weather over time?
Can we artificially weather our devices, to sense and feel this?
Torch phone (yes, literally)
These are not rhetorical questions. But they are more speculative than they are able to be answered directly and correctly. And with this research project, I will speculate and experiment, wonder and wander, with our materials. I will (safely) mix phones in blenders, press laptops under steamrollers, break down tablets with borax. I will soak iPads in chlorine and sludge, cook iPhones like cakes, inject the Apple Watch with spores and mold. Torch, grind, freeze, flower. Highlight, amplify, ironize, intervene. Resiutate, speculate, wonder, and propose.
Can we use biofuel processes or hydrothermal liquefaction to turn a phone into fuel?
How might a laptop make the most efficient planter, or bed for life?
What would a tablet made of carbon, instead of plastic, be and do?
What does a joule feel like?
Geological time and Earth size, decomposition and regrowth: these are concepts we can comprehend rationally, but they are impossible to truly fathom. I propose that we can feel such things, aesthetically and thus ethically, if we substantiate future potential, artfully, in objects and installations. My experimental project will do precisely this. It will take the form of between eight and 15 objects or installations that might be: beakers of coal- or oil-like matter labelled with the device they once were (ie iPhone 7); laptops growing spores and mold, propagating life in new and different ways; participatory machines that take our energy and convert it into media; new designs for carbon-based phones, which will more easily decompose over time; prints made entirely of media devices: image, ink, paper, etc… These objects will be accompanied by the stories and experiments that produced them (text, image, video), as well as an essay which mediates the research as a whole.
Some relevant reading (not including my not-yet-released book!):
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Artist feature: Shane Walsh, Milwaukee-based painter (UPDATED!)
ROCOCO BEATBOX, Shane Walsh
Shane Walsh is a friend and colleague I used to share an office with, and we’ve even shared a beverage once or twice (OK, twice. Once hot, once cold). He is a teacher and artist I respect greatly as a peer at UWM – he is in Painting and Drawing, while I mostly teach in Digital Studio Practice – and so I feel like this post has been a long time coming (er… well, I only restarted my blog recently, but you know what I mean).
That said, Shane’s work is kind of amazing.
Something often coveted but almost never fully realized in contemporary art – and especially painting – is a balance between abstraction and representation, a way to play out affective tones and modulations, or gestures and resonances on the one hand (think Rothko, Pollock, or Twombly), while still engaging with perfect mimetic copies of the real world on the other. Where and when do you play between easy recognition and subjective internalization? And Walsh’s attempts at this question are smart, funny, and overall, extremely effective.
Shane Walsh, recent work (2017)
What looks like photocopies, or smeared ink, or a photoshop “find edges” filter, or cut outs, or watercolor, or dozens of other media… is always paint. In other words, Walsh is producing what appear to be abstract images in pen and pencil, frivolous gestures with machinery, and / or coded or other media forms; but each is actually painstakingly and perfectly representational: of one medium (actually, several of the aforementioned) by another (paint). The results accomplish a strong and strange duality, where I am moved, first, by the compositions and what they feel like, and then again by their histories: the craftsmanship and irony, the detail with which Shane paints faux frivolity, the performance that is both the painting and Shane’s practice, and overall the core history of Painting’s (yes, it’s a capital “P”) continuous forms, all at once.
Walsh’s newer work is all in black and white, calling even more attention to the early 20th century’s obsession with photographic influence on painting (as material and practice), as well as to early video art, lithography, and “the office,” but his earlier works in the trajectory, too, show a similar old/new, abstract/real, celebration/critique tension that is humorous and charming, while never losing site of how painting is and always will be at the center of every discussion of critical art, contemporary or otherwise. So when Shane paints sculptures, or digital art, or what look like geometric paper landscapes, they are always with a self-reflection on who he is, how he works, and what is at stake in “representation,” or the lack thereof, when working with his medium/discipline.
His newest black and white work, above, feels even more like “traditional” abstract expressionism in its gestures and forms, without some of the grids from his last few shows. But on closer inspection (left), we see what seems like it must be the photoshop line/paint tool, what should be a dry brush, a scraper, paint drippings, ink, watercolor… but all of them are, we learn, laboriously crafted by Walsh – representationally rather than gesturally. These are not performative – e.g. created by an embodied performance – but performances themselves: masks, pretense, a “playing at” of gestures, with paint.
I visited Shane’s studio today, and got to see some of his newest, in-process work (right, and below). Walsh has – after some feedback and constructive critique from several peers – decided to venture back into color, and, with his kind of work, this is much harder than it at first sounds. While the artist wants to continue his exploration of media forms and how they think-and-feel-with-paint, the style he works in, once colorized, could easily be misread as decorative arts, or Pop art, or Typography and graphic design. There is, of course, nothing “wrong” with these genres and movements, but they are not part of Walsh’s inquiry into form, performance, and information, and so… I’ll admit I had a bit of a blast brainstorming around new possibilities of where he might go instead! Could Walsh continue his black and whites, then layer them with construction-paper-like color? Make photocopy-ish paintings, as before, then paint on top like a coloring book, or make them look like splatters and drips? Reference printmaking, like woodcut, litho, or lino “key” blocks, and etched or screened “color” blocks around them? Shane has a lot of work, and far more potential, in front of him. It’s going to be so cool.
What happens in that space between affection and reflection, between what we sense, and how we make sense? How do our media and materials impact meaning-making in our everyday, and overall? Where do we per-form, where is there already form, and how do we in-form each other across these spaces? If what we feel and see is always already a part of who we are and what actions we take (and why), then when do aesthetics become ethics, and what are the implications in that question?
These questions are not idle ones, and Walsh invites us into them with skill, intelligence, beauty, and a bit of fun.
Shane Walsh shows with The Alice Wilds in Milwaukee, and has studio space in Walker’s Point, Milwaukee, and Brooklyn, New York.
UPDATE: here’s the completed work from above!
