I have to fundamentally disagree with you, Assemblagger. Art is first a social construct that we often project retroactively. Mideaval people would not consider what any of us do as art because for them art was the illustration of stories, alpha and omega. The native people of Easter Island would not consider what we do as art because human creativity applied itself in other areas but was never given a field of its own in that culture.
The who and the why come even before the possiblity of what and how, because the frame of art is culturally determined. Why should rhyming words on a page be considered a different project than dozens on the street - who and why. Why is building a robot that draws the results of competing radio shows different from building a robot that will plot the background noise of the galaxy against intentional noise? You're doing it for art and the engineer is doing it for discovery.
When an artist takes a material and makes abstract work the artist has already taken in a set of values that determine the limitations of whats possible. In Western culture those values have been "aesthetics" which is one of the most culturally loaded words possible, fabrication or craft, and raw material.
When I hear critisism of "crapture" it is often really a criticism of that deviation from that cultural norm. I have heard many artists decry assemblage specifically because there was no craft involved. The creation of a visual artifact from pre-existing objects-in-themselves is a different way of thinking about art because it re-defines art as something other than rarefied design.

and getting back to the first blog conversation, kat. i think we may be talking around the same tree. all sculptures, assemblages, have to contend with two basic issues fundimental to their achieving the status of sculputre. the first is material, the stuff from which it's made, [the what] and the second is the treatment of the material, or the how. the other questions [who,where,why] are significant to the meaning of the work, but not essential, by its very nature.
representational sculpture is at one extreem, where the how overwhelms the what, in this case bronze or stone which is homogeneous and 'blank'

when abstraction comes along, the how and the what are pointing at eachother in a formal feedback loop


i see the found object revolution as a dramatic shift in the attitude toward what that is stunning and evidence of either cognitive evolution... or its opposite [a sort of intellectual fetishism]. so the material has taken on a value separate from the inherant... a cultural, quasi-spiritual value. and the what gets a leg up on the how by association and a intangible cache.





i feel that the what's trancendance of the how is pivital, but i'm not convinced that it changes a paradigm [maybe misuse of that word?] the friedman piece is important to look at because it is a great example of material and craft comming meeting and working off each other. ... oop, gotta go. catch up later...

well, i'll weigh in on this one briefly for starters. tech=tyrant is a very blunt view. serra sees technology as a verb, and a very selfish and direct verb at that. that may be a part of why digi or tech art is so crushingly literal. technology, in the case of digi art we're describing, is the tool that carries the 'meaning' of the work [whether it's narrative or otherwise]. mostly, digi work suffers from lack of imagination or literality in that 'meaning'. Serra is saying that art is not specific to some way or thing...

i'm not about to give away any secrets here... but i'd say that the work that satisfies me the most turns technological machines on themselves in a creative way [they are designed to maintain an equilibrium of sorts] and also, the gestures they make, while maybe aggressive, are never mean or literal. the work thereby avoids a simple reading.

wphew that was confusing wasn't it? like i said, no secrets.

I wanted to start a conversation with both of you guys after reading this:

"Technology is a form of toolmaking, body extension. Technology is not art and not invention. It does not concern itself with the undefined, the inexplicable. It deals with the affirmation of its own making. Techology is what we do to the Black Panthers or the Vietnamese under the guise of advancement in a materialistic theology."

Richard Serra, for Art and Technology (LACMA) catalogue, 1970.

Two things:

In 2005, much digital art still is still dealing exclusively with "the affirmation of its own making," and/or a fetishization of whatever is most new. Like much contemporary art, it is strikingly literal. Literal art has a pointlessness to it that is numbing, and at the risk of being called a Camille, cruel.

I think one of the most interesting things about Joel's work is the way it turns Serra's "technology=tyrrany" pocket inside out. What's Joel's secret?

Some random thoughts on sculpture and time:

1. Sculpture that depends on material and abstraction (in the modernist model) unfolds in time. Walking around the sculpture necessarily takes time, and the act of walking around a sculpture animates it, creates a time-based understanding of its form. Serrra's work with film (particularly thinking about Hand Catching Lead) seems to explore this. Caro and Serra both excel at creating a relationship between your body and the piece that challenge time, harness time.

2. A strong, malleable relationship between form and time is very relevant when you can't look at the Times without reading the word Apocalypse. GW Bush is a firm believer in the second coming. Global warming is a reality. New Orleans is a tragedy of biblical porporitions. Megachurches rely on the book of Revelations at the expense of the gospels.

3. And I hate the phrase "media savvy", but how does this influence how we all see the world? On one hand, I see a greater tolerance for structureless information. On the other, I see a great push to create narrative out of chaos (reality TV shows, spinning pundits, all kinds of zealotry). Is part of this End Is Near business a push to understand via narrative? Would a non-narrative arrangement of time help?

4. And does all of this armageddoning have the potential to invigorate the modernist model? Make it more relevant?

You seem to be talking about sculpture in which the materials physicality is either the point or transcended to point to narrative, but I think this is a really narrow axis. Deb and I were talking about a different axis that might yield some interesting ideas to explore.
I'm just going to restate your post in case I misunderstood it. At one end you're talking about David, which is basically narrative, illusionistic art, the same tradition that birthed Western painting

and at the other end is modernist sculpture, with a heavy Greenburg influence:


To me, this is the reductive axis of modernism, that you take the old, narrative tradition of Europe, in which the medium was primarily a means to creating the illusion, and then flipping and redefining that tradition so that the theoretical "essence" of the dicipline as defined by its media becomes the focus. In Greenburg's terms that was pigment on a flat surface for painting, and possibly material in space for sculpture. What interested me about Deb's work situation is that she's alongside a lot of guys from the modernist, essentiallist tradition, but the artists in the current show don't actually work with that set of values. The ones who are more representational have a readymade framework that we can all understand their work through, but the folks working more in the "ready made" tradition of Duchamp, say, are getting pressed into a framework (modernism) that isn't really applicable.

The axis I was talking with Deb about has material culture on one end (modernism with it's focus on the essential qualities of being material in space) and object creation in which the objects as ready mades are essential to the way the object is art.



Tom Friedman's soap is a good example of what I'm thinking of. It's not great formal sculpture. Cast it in bronze and it's a doorstop. What makes it is that it is soap and human hair.

Out of the three of us, I would say that only Deb works in the first axis. I think you work closer to the material end of the second axis and I work closer to the ready made end.

But this is a first thought outloud.

phew! well that was ordealious! now i'm on and i'm secure and such. let's get to the meat.

talking about sculptureV. everything-else-that's-realy-in-the-world. had a good conversation with deb that left me thinking.... there are two classes of sculpture: the first is classical, in that it is made of some medium and is meant to trancend that medium. Donatello's David for example http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/classes/ah111/L17/17-40.jpg
Then the other class is modern, in that it is a thing [ogject being too touchy a word] that is what it is. Lichtenstien's Modern Sculpture with Black shaft:
http://www.thecityreview.com/f00ph2con3.gif

so, differences. the classical tells you what it is and what attitude it has toward itself and the world beyond its materiality because it is fundimentally narrative. the modern is caught in a simple loop of constantly reminding itself and the world that it is what it is, grounded to its materiality. craft is a strong player in all of this, and has the power to direct the meaning or intent of the sculpture... Donatello V Rodin, for exapmle... or Judd V. Calder. in the modern, craft gains more weight and power because it is the only part of the work that can tell a story [in this case, the story is about the making of the sculpture]

la la. going back to work now!

xoxo joelski

phew! well that was ordealious! now i'm on and i'm secure and such. let's get to the meat.

talking about sculptureV. everything-else-that's-realy-in-the-world. had a good conversation with deb that left me thinking.... there are two classes of sculpture: the first is classical, in that it is made of some medium and is meant to trancend that medium. Donatello's David for example http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/classes/ah111/L17/17-40.jpg
Then the other class is modern, in that it is a thing [ogject being too touchy a word] that is what it is. Lichtenstien's Modern Sculpture with Black shaft:
http://www.thecityreview.com/f00ph2con3.gif

so, differences. the classical tells you what it is and what attitude it has toward itself and the world beyond its materiality because it is fundimentally narrative. the modern is caught in a simple loop of constantly reminding itself and the world that it is what it is, grounded to its materiality. craft is a strong player in all of this, and has the power to direct the meaning or intent of the sculpture... Donatello V Rodin, for exapmle... or Judd V. Calder. in the modern, craft gains more weight and power because it is the only part of the work that can tell a story [in this case, the story is about the making of the sculpture]

la la. going back to work now!

xoxo joelski

Hey all, I'm in! It worked like a charm...

We should review something.