Wall Mountables at DCAC

Around DC, anytime that you have an open show (meaning a show without a juror or curator), the local critics tend to immediately savage it. This seems to be a predictable critical analysis somewhat unique to the capital area's visual arts and artists as viewed by most of DC area critics.

Once a year, the District of Columbia Arts Center (DCAC), through a show called "Wall Mountables," allows any and all artists to hang anything they want, so long as it fits within a two square foot space. It's usually one of my favorite shows and a terrific opportunity for artists to exhibit and sell their work.

DCAC will be accepting and allowing artists to hang their work today July 19th 3-8pm, and tomorrow July 20th 3-6pm. Spaces are available on a first-come basis. Details here.

The opening reception is Friday, July 20th 7-9pm. This is a great opportunity to obtain original artwork at very affordable prices. The show runs through Friday, Sept. 7, 2007.

The Beat Goes On

This is what makes creating, editing and publishing a good art blog interesting. Intelligent voices discussing and treating a very difficult question: "What makes good art?"

Recap: On the air, at the Kojo Nnamdi show, WCP art critic Jeffry Cudlin offered a live, on-the-air opinion of what makes good art. A reader then emailed me and asked if I could get Jeffry to put his words into text and Cudlin expanded a bit on his off the cuff opinion here.

Then Mark Cameron Boyd responded with a view of his own, and now Jeffry in turn responds to the points raised by Mark, who teaches art theory at the Corcoran.

1) "The growing specialization of the arts is due chiefly not to the prevalence of the division of labor, but to our increasing faith in and taste for the immediate, the concrete, the irreducible. To met this taste... the various modernist artists try to confine themselves to that which is most positive and immediate in themselves, which consists in the unique attributes of their mediums. It follows that a modernist work of art must try, in principle, to avoid communication with any order of experience not inherent in the most literally and essentially construed nature of its medium."
- - Sculpture in Our Time, Clement Greenberg, from The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance.

In any event, I mentioned Greenberg because obviously nobody buys this position anymore -- at least not the way it came to be framed. There's generally a consensus that Greenberg's arguments for art boiled everything down further and further -- until you reach the Minimalist art that Greenberg couldn't bring himself to accept, despite the fact that in so many ways it seemed like a perfected expression of his operating principles.

Here's the key point: I'm NOT saying that the HOW trumps the WHAT. Does the medium help or hinder? That's exactly the question I'm driving at. Apologies if I wasn't able to make that more clear.

2) Oh, the confusion over talent and creativity. Maybe it's the word "mastery" that's sending you into a tizzy: By quoting Ruskin, I'd hoped to avoid that -- thinking specifically here of On the Nature of Gothic, from The Stones of Venice.

3) As for the relation of the work to manifestos, the necessity of the critic to intervene --- Mark, you more than anyone should know that this is up for grabs.

We can describe how the mechanisms work, how the positions within the discourse seem to relate to one another -- but it's a fluid dynamic.

There's what the artist says in the work through representation, and what s/he says in the work through execution or style -- two kinds of content, in sympathy or not. The what and the how, as you say, and both are important.

There are also statements, and essays, and installations of the work.

The critic tries to determine both the content of the work by itself, and whether or not that can be reconciled with the rest.

It's imperfect; the critic is one voice among many, and s/he attempts to nudge the discourse as best s/he can. Doesn't mean the critic is the final arbiter, just one of many gatekeepers and interpreters -- fallible, human, making arguments rooted in a particular historical moment. So it goes. Doesn't mean that the job's not worth doing, or that it can't significantly add to -- or help sort out--this business of cultural production.

-- Jeffry Cudlin

Cudlin on Miner

Not to make this blog a Cudlinfest, but Washington City Paper art critic Jeffry Cudlin has a really good look at A.B. Miner's solo show at H & F Fine Arts.

Read it here.



By the way, as a devoted fan of the sensuality of the line, which I consider one of the most powerful assets that a good painter can use, or the key between a good drawing and a so-so drawing, I disagree with Jeffry's negative view on the line as used by Miner. It is precisely the palpable sensuality of Miner's ever changing, shifting, dancing line in his paintings and drawings that take them from flat surfaces to a mental place where sex and art live together in moist confidence.

Miner's show at H&F Fine Arts runs through August 4, 2007. Miner has been one of my "buy now" artists for a long time. I get paid to to this sort of recommendation, so take the tip and go spend some Samolians on this really talented painter.

Tolbert on What Makes Good Art?

Bethesda Painting Awards semi-finalist Susan Tolbert opines on the issues raised by Jeffry Cudlin's on-the-air, and off-the-cuff answer to the question "What Makes Good Art?"

Tolbert writes:

When Robert Hughes was asked this question by Charlie Rose last year, he had a very short response: Passion and Organization.

Hopper's work fits this criteria nicely. Art stands the test of time, and Hopper is still standing despite the fact that he wasn't a very good painter.

And I always liked Tom Wolf's (the first one) "Slave to fashion, whore to time."

Susan Tolbert

Genetics

Considering that when I was a very young sailor in the Navy I almost drowned twice (ahhh... maybe alcohol had some small part in the near-drownings), I'm not the world's greatest aquatic Campello. Not by far... the genes certainly skipped me and all went to this Campello:

Note the windmill farms on the background? Those are the same types that Sen. Kennedy (who once stated "I strongly support renewable energy, including wind energy, as a means of reducing our dependence on foreign oil and protecting the environment") has been fighting to stop being constructed in Nantucket Sound because it would interfere with the view from the Kennedy compound in Cape Cod.

I think they look kinda cool.

Teaser

When the next exhibition schedule of the National Gallery of Art is announced, there will be a pleasant surprise in it.

Meanwhile, opening on September 16 at the NGA is the first comprehensive survey of Edward Hopper to be seen in the US outside of New York in more than 25 years. Currently at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the exhibition consists of about 60 oil paintings, 25 watercolors, and 14 prints.

What makes good art? Another view...

My good friend, and highly talented artist and Corcoran faculty member Mark Cameron Boyd responds to Jeffry Cudlin's off-the-cuff and elegant definition of what makes good art. Mark writes:

I listened with fairly rapt attention to your WAMU radio broadcast on Kojo’s show last Thursday. As I recall, my good friend Jeffry Cudlin’s improvised “definition” for “what makes good art” was delivered astutely and with the clarity of vision that undoubtedly comes from writing and thinking about art “professionally” as an art critic.

However, his recollected print version (that you published) differs significantly from what he said “off-the-cuff” and "on air." His “recalled” version notably featured Clement Greenberg as a touchstone which would have pricked up my ears if Jeffry had actually mentioned Greenberg’s name “on air.”

Nevertheless, in the printed version Jeffry’s implication is that Greenberg’s theoretical views chiefly concerned “specialization” and I find this is a bit confusing. I respectfully remind my esteemed colleague that it was the “self-criticality” which Clem championed that fully expanded upon his idea that an artist’s medium must “refer to its own method of construction and the characteristics of its component materials.”

Granted, an artist ought to critically consider one’s “method” within a chosen medium but more importantly in the Greenbergian view one must critically assess one’s use and furtherance of a medium; what can be done with one’s method to extend the possibilities of the medium and further the discourse of art?

I also suggest that Jeffry’s framing of the medium question (“Why is this object a drawing, painting, photograph, or sculpture? Why was that choice appropriate, or not appropriate?”) is more a question of “how,” as in “how does the choice of medium help or hinder an artist’s work?”

To open the dialog: does the “how” (chosen medium and method of execution) trump the “what” (idea or concept conveyed) in contemporary art? Duchamp would say, “No,” as would most Postconceptualists toiling in Marcel’s century-long shadow (Martin Creed, Douglas Gordon, Peter Friedl, et al) and I think Jeffry was hinting at this when he writes about un-named young Turks “winnowing out their problem set to a few spare material issues.”

I would like to complicate this line of inquiry even more by mentioning that conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth countered and refuted Greenberg’s analysis by saying that the object is conceptually irrelevant to art. Kosuth also expanded Duchamp’s other idea about the definition of art, when he wrote in 1969: “Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. . . Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art.”

Kosuth effectively shifted the focus from the specifics of a chosen medium to “question[ing] the nature of art.”

What I attempt here is to propose that we are already in a “post-medium condition” (Rosalind Krauss) and that all bets are off on medium-specificity, which would lessen the impact of “why” one made a drawing as a valuable criteria for “quality,” and that art is about the “definition of art” and the ideas that artists try to convey.

To address Jeff’s second qualification for “good art,” which concerns “material mastery,” requires an introduction of the postmodern confusion of “talent” and “creativity.” To equate one’s “mastery” of a medium as indicator of quality (“good art”) tends to misrepresent “talent” as a consecrated “academic” skill that can be “learned” and that “talent” certifies substance.

This is “old school” and currently out of fashion in our post-medium condition. I should cite Thierry de Duve’s words that, “Creativity is grounded in a utopian belief. . . that repeats itself with clockwork regularity . . . from Rimbaud to Beuys: everyone is an artist.” And “Talent. . . is inseparable from the specific terrain where it is exerted, which in the last resort is always technical. . . Creativity, by contrast, is conceived as an absolute and unformalised potential. . . one has creativity, without qualification; one is creative, period.”

Depending on your allegiances, “talent” can either be learned, taught or does not exist. Again, this is old hat, supplanted in the 1970’s when “critical theory” appeared (linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, et al) and as Duve notes, “theory entered art schools and succeeded in displacing – sometimes replacing – studio practice while renewing the critical vocabulary and intellectual tools with which to approach the making and appreciating of art.”

To be sure, Jeffry’s “definitions” are muscular, workable points for a discussion of “what makes good art.” But we are on unstable grounds if we mingle academia with Kantian judgment and mastery with metaphysics. I do agree with Jeffry’s last point concerning the artist’s “positioning” of themselves within the history of art.

However, he falls short of fully fleshing his “professional” responsibility in all this when he writes simply: “The task of the critic is to determine whether or not this positioning -- an argument made by the artist, and amplified, tweaked, or otherwise refined by the curator -- is valid.” Again, to ramp up our discussion, we might ask Jeffry to elaborate on the obvious (possibly covert?) power of art critics in “positioning” not only the individual artists but wholesale art “movements” within the grander scheme of “art history.” This obviously implicates the “written” version as more “manifesto” than improvised erudition but clarifications are needed for public consumption and understanding, in any case.

Best,

M. Cameron Boyd

www.markcameronboyd.com
theorynow.blogspot.com

Plan Ahead for Friday: Hirshhorn After Hours

Hirshhorn After Hours is an annual series of late-night events for locals interested in contemporary art, culture and music. Programming is presented throughout the museum and outside on the plaza. Exhibitions include: Takeshi Murata's short hallucinogenic films in the Black Box space for new media in the lower level; a last chance to see the lobby exhibition "Directions—Virgil Marti and Pae White" closing on July 29, and photography by Wolfgang Tillmans on the second floor.

Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 at the door. Cash bar and dancing outdoors on the Hirshhorn's plaza. Detailed ticketing information at this website.

WHAT: Hirshhorn After Hours featuring musical performance by Great Noise Ensemble in collaboration with the opening night of the Capitol Fringe Festival.

WHEN: Friday, July 20, from 8 p.m. to midnight

WHERE: Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the National Mall (Independence Avenue at Seventh Street S.W.) in DC.

Haga Click

Essential differences

The Baltimore Sun's art critic is photographer Glenn McNatt, and he does a nice job in writing this piece on the Sondheim Prize and its latest prizewinner, Baltimore painter Tony Shore, who also came down last year to Bethesda to win the 2006 Bethesda Painting Awards.

In this Washington Post article, Michael O'Sullivan pointed out some key differences between Baltimore's Sondheim Prize and the DC region's Trawick Prize, focusing mainly on the exhibition venues for these two important prizes - the Sondheim is exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Trawick at the Creative Partners Gallery in Bethesda. O'Sullivan was correct in calling out this difference, but as the Sun's article points out, there are several other key differences.

For one, the Sondheim Prize is deeply interwoven and part of not only the city of Baltimore itself, but also of a major city wide art event: Artscape. The Trawick, which preceded the Sondheim by a few years, is run by the Bethesda Urban Partnership.

According to Baltimore's promotion office director Bill Gilmore, this year's Sondheim award was underwritten by the France-Merrick Foundation, a local philanthropy, and by gifts from local businesspeople. "The annual cost of the competition, including the award and the costs associated with paying jurors, mounting exhibitions and printing publications totals between $50,000 and $60,000, he said."

WOW!

The Trawick is totally underwritten by an annual endowment from Bethesda businesswoman Carol Trawick of $10,000. The total prizes total around $14,000 and the other funds are gathered from entry fees and from a $1,000 donation from Bethesda's Fraser Gallery for a "Young Artist Award." All costs associated with mounting the Trawick exhibition, including paying the three jurors, come from this pot, which I suspect is around $20,000 all together (I don't know the exact figures). Furthermore, although they have been approached, and called out here and in other places to add more funds to the Trawick, all the major businesses located and working out of Bethesda have essentially ignored the call as far as I know. I guess Lockheed Martin, and Comcast, and Marriott, and the Discovery Channel, and EuroMotorcars, and Chevy Chase Bank, etc. can't afford it.

Gilmore said this year's contributors included Walter D. Pinkard, a founder of the France-Merrick Foundation, and Amy Newhall. Bill Gilmore also stated that "Pinkard, Sandy Hillman and Nancy Roberts have also pledged to help raise an initial endowment of $500,000 to fund future prizes." And so the Baltimore people with the connections and the deep pockets to make the Sondheim Award become a yearly event have become involved.

As far as I know Ms. Trawick is the only backer of the Trawick Prize, although I suspect that the Bethesda area has more millionaires and multi-millionaires than all of the rest of Maryland added together. Where are they in pledging anything to the Trawick?

"We're certainly a lot closer to being an annual prize than we were a year ago," Gilmore said. "We kicked this off on a leap of faith last year and we have received some real support from people who have stepped up and said we want to help ensure the future of the prize."

That's the real difference: Baltimoreans have stepped up while Bethesdians (whose city for all intents and purposes is part of the Greater DC region) have not.

Elvis as a Nun

Below is one of my charcoal and conte drawings from a few years ago. It's a rather large drawing, about 40 inches by 30 inches. It is titled "Elvis and Buster Keaton, disguised as nuns, attend a Dan Flavin exhibition." It was sold many years ago.

"Elvis Presley and Buster Keaton, disguised as nuns, attend a Dan Flavin exhibition"
Charcoal and Conte on Paper by F. Lennox Campello

Tony Shore wins Sondheim Prize

Baltimore painter Tony Shore, a graduate of the Baltimore School for the Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the 2006 winner of the Bethesda Painting Awards, has won the $25,000 2007 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize.

Shore is currently on the faculty of the Foundations Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art and is the founding Director of Access Art, a youth art center in Baltimore's Morrell Park neighborhood. He is represented in Baltimore by the C. Grimaldis Gallery and (as far as I know) unrepresented in the DC area region.

Shore was somewhat of a surprise winner of the 2006 Bethesda Painting Awards. He paints large works on black velvet, which have been described as straddling "the fence between high-class and lowbrow."

You can see the exhibition of works by the winner and all other finalists here.

Congratulations to Tony Shore!

What a great definition, she said

During our radio talk last Thursday, someone called in and wanted a definition of what makes good art. On the fly, Washington City Paper critic Jeffry Cudlin came up with a terrific answer, and when Kojo asked Gazette newspapers critic Dr. Claudia Rousseau for her definition, she exclaimed (referencing Jeffry's) "what a great definition, I love it!"

Someone later on emailed us asking for the definition, and Jeffry graciously enough regurgitated it as best he recalled. I have posted it below... this is not a manifesto or otherwise anything but a terrific off-the-cuff answer:

1) How apt is the choice of medium?

For Clement Greenberg, art was all about specialization. He wanted work in any given medium to refer to its own method of construction and the characteristics of its component materials: Painting was about free-flowing or staining pigment in a resolutely flat pictorial space; sculpture was about volume and movement through three-dimensional space; literature was really about words, rhythm, meter.

Of course, Greenberg's brand of formalism died out in the late '60s. Now that we live in a cross-disciplinary, multi-valent art world, contemporary artists tend less and less to be specialists, winnowing out their problem set to a few spare material issues. Instead, they're typically trained as generalists who work from project to
project, idiom to idiom.

But this can't mean that the choice of medium doesn't matter. Instead, that choice becomes terribly important: Why is this object a drawing, painting, photograph, or sculpture? Why was that choice appropriate, or not appropriate? What about the history or physical properties of the medium seems uniquely bound up in the content of this work?

2) Does the artist show enough material mastery?

Economy and clarity are virtues: No artist needs to show the viewer everything they're capable of in a work, lavishing their object/project with bells, whistles and flourishes.

If I go all the way back to John Ruskin--why not?--he stated that the artist should work until the idea has been made clear, and go no further; he warned against work in which the only evident merits were "patience and sandpaper".

And, again, if we're going to accept this idea that an artist might make a photograph, or a painting, or a video, then how skilled do they need to be in each? Skilled enough to demonstrate some empathy with the materials, and to achieve an appropriate level of fit and finish--one that doesn't distract from the content
of their work, but instead enhances it.

3) How does the artist position him or herself in relation to history?

Every artist is making claims about the relation of their work to both that of their immediately present peers and to the canon. Every artist essentially chooses their grandparents, cobbling together selective (possibly arbitrary) genealogies out of the
past few centuries of artistic production.

A contemporary painting is almost always an argument--for what painting ought to be generally, and for how we should position the artist within this imagined genealogy.

The task of the critic is to determine whether or not this positioning -- an argument made by the artist, and amplified, tweaked, or otherwise refined by the curator -- is valid.

Choice of medium, material mastery, historical positioning: my big three.

Jeffry Cudlin

I'd like to open a dialogue and invite comments to the above definition. Email me and I'll post them.

GlassWeekend ’07

Since 1985, GlassWeekend, a biennial event, has brought together to New Jersey the world’s leading glass artists, collectors, galleries, and museum curators for a three-day weekend of exhibitions, lectures, hands-on glassmaking, artists, demonstrations and social events.

GlassWeekend events are held at Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, home of the Creative Glass Center of America and the Museum of American Glass.

WheatonArts is located in Millville, New Jersey, 45 minutes from both Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and less than three hours from New York and Washington, D.C.

I'll be checking it out this weekend.

Come On Irene Eileen

Yesterday at the Kojo Nnamdi show, someone named Irene called in with a question or comment, but by the time Kojo got to her phone call, she had hung up (we had tons of calls by the way, most of which Kojo could not get to because of time).

There was a second or two of dead radio silence, and then (trying to be funny) I sang into the mike: "Come On Irene," a-la-Dexys Midnight Runners style from their famous song.

For all you music geeks emailing me, yes, yes, I know it's Eileen and not Irene. I was trying to be funny!

Come On Eileen by the Dexys Midnight Runners.

(Come on Eileen!)
(Come on Eileen!)

Poor old Johnny Ray
Sounded sad upon the radio
He moved a million hearts in mono
Our mothers cried and sang along and who'd blame them?
Now you're grown, so grown, now I must say more than ever
Go toora loora toora loo rye aye
And we can sing just like our fathers ....

Come on Eileen! Well, I swear (what he means)
At this moment, you mean everything
With you in that dress, my thoughts I confess
Verge on dirty ......
Ah, come on Eileen!

(Come on Eileen!)
(Come on Eileen!)

These people round here wear beaten down eyes
Sunk in smoke dried faces
They're so resigned to what their fate is
But not us, no not us
We are far too young and clever
Go toora loora toora loo rye aye
Eileen, I'll sing this tune forever

Come on, Eileen! Well, I swear (what he means)
Ah come on, let's take off everything
That pretty red dress .... Eileen (tell him yes)
Ah, come on! Come on Eileen!!!

Come on Eileen! Well, I swear (what he means)
At this moment, you mean everything

Come on, Eileen, taloora aye
Come on, Eileen, taloora aye
Come on, Eileen, taloora aye
Come on, Eileen, taloora aye
Come on, Eileen, taloora aye
Come on, Eileen, taloora aye

Go toora loora toora loo rye aye

Come on Eileen! Well, I swear (what he means)
At this moment, you mean everything
With you in that dress, my thoughts I confess
Verge on dirty ......
Ah, come on Eileen!

Come on, Eileen! Well, I swear (what he means)
Ah come on, let's take off everything
That pretty red dress .... Eileen (tell him yes)
Ah, come on! Come on Eileen!!!

Come on Eileen! Well, I swear (what he means)
At this moment, you mean everything

Come on Eileen! Well, I swear (what he means)
At this moment, you mean everything

The video is one of the great armpit videos of all time. See it below

Bethesda Art Walk

Today, Friday, July the 13th, is the second Friday of the month and thus it's the Bethesda Art Walk with 13 participating art venues and with free guided tours.

From 6-9PM - go see some artwork!

Wanna go to nude body painting and drawing party in DC this Sunday?

July marks the 4th annual A Celebration of the Figure exhibition at MOCA DC and the 5th anniversary of the Figure Models Guild.

In addition to the regular figure drawing sessions at MOCA, there will be bodies painted several times during the show.

And there will be a body painting event on on Sunday, July 15 at 1PM led by DC's body painting goddess Adrianne Mills.

Bring your camera because an open photo session follows each painting.

Call them for details and times at 202.342.6230 or 202.361.3810. The event is free and open to the public.

Wanna go sketching on the Mall tomorrow?

"Quick Sketching People and Places on the Mall" is a four-session drawing instruction series presented by the Smithsonian Associates where students work with the media and subjects of their choice under the supervision of an experienced artist who is himself an avid sketcher. Dates are Sat., July 14—Aug. 4, 10 a.m., so hurry!

Details here.

Call for Art

The Third Annual Metamorphosis Art Show has a call for artists.

Details here.

Baltimore Studio Spaces

The Baltimore Sun tells us that

Artists seeking studio space in Baltimore will have a new option to consider this fall when the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower opens for its first tenants.

Renovation work is nearing completion on a $1.25 million conversion of the landmark tower at 15 S. Eutaw St. from municipal offices to studios for painters, sculptors, photographers, graphic designers, writers and other artists. The first two floors will have a cafe and gallery space.

Read the article here. More information about the studios and the application process is available from the Office of Promotion & the Arts at 410-752-8632.