Two Ideas

Thinking About Public Space

This Friday Diana and I attended a symposium at MIT and listened to a panel speak about various issues within the art world pertaining to personal and public space. Of particular interest to me were topics discussed by the first two panelists. The first speaker took the audience through a brief history of the philosophical thought pertaining to the art medium of television, emphasizing feedback looping and the effect that inanimate television has on biological life. Originally, William Irwin Thompson theorized that the advent of television spelled the destruction of the past and the dissolution of the future by way of the eternal-present temporal setting of television programs and advertisements. Thompson's theory was heavily critiqued because it did not take into account the essential biology and participatory capabilities of human beings, instead treating watchers of television as simply passive relays. Growing out of this critique, video came to be seen as an ecological operator that merged the biological, the mental, and the social in a medium of shared consciousness. The speaker emphasized that video could not be seen either as something wholly different from, nor wholly the same as, the object of the video, and that the presence of television in society must necessarily increase aesthetic perceptions that make up vast, intuitive communities. I responded to these statements made by historical commentators on television with some reservation, particularly to the emphasis on the presence of a feedback loop that inculcates both the television medium itself and viewers of the television. I am more inclined to air on the side of Thompson's analysis in this regard, though admittedly not as extremely as to allow for the logical conclusion that this theory treats humans as essentially non-biological and passive. While I agree that some form of feedback loop must be present, a la advertising and programming catering to an extent to the desires of the viewer, I am highly critical of some of the later critic's thoughts about the positive impacts that television can have, particularly the idea that television creates a shared consciousness. I call to attention the fact that this notion overemphasizes the participatory nature of television in a way similar to how Thompson deemphasized it. Television viewing is most certainly a predominantly passive experience: viewers have little say in what programming is presented, how shows' plotlines develop, what commercials they see, etc. These decisions rest solely in the hands of the networks. True, programs are aired to attract advertisement and thus money into the system, but it must be pointed out that the ubiquity of television today means that even the most seemingly pointless channels may be propped up by advertising. The idea that television necessarily increases aesthetic perception is problematic too, because it does not specify enough what "increase aesthetic perception" details. Maybe watching television gives viewers a new lens to look at television programs critically, but it is important to make note of the fact that the television medium is unlike most other mediums. While television, photography, and cinematography are somewhat interrelated, a well framed photographic shot might not be conducive to a television program, in the same way that some of the camera tricks used in movies might not be. In the end, television is, in my opinion, the most consumer-oriented and least artful of the three mediums, in the sense that there is an overriding conformist aesthetic present in television that is not necessarily present in photography or cinematography; indeed, even sometimes consciously avoided in the latter two. I would even go so far as to say that television offers the least room for innovation of the three, because it is oriented primarily towards entertainment and not necessarily at being the most aesthetically profound art piece as possible, though there are most definitely exceptions to this. I would draw attention to the idea raised by the speaker that "belief" is necessarily a collective phenomenon, and extend this to the statement that television is driven by belief in what is entertaining. In this sense, there is some feedback looping present, but on the whole it is a more one-sided feedback loop than the continuous flow model proposed by some early critics and thinkers about television.
In this sense, then, I am more inclined to agree with claims raised by the second speaker about the destruction of public space in the face of privatized industry. Particularly distressing to me was the presentation of a concept that I had never heard about before, the Alphaville model of communal living. To briefly describe this phenomenon, private development industries have in recent years purchased land in Brazil and Portugal and developed it into highly secured compounds where people can rent or buy condominiums or houses. Alphavilles are surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire, covered with security cameras, and protected by special Alphaville police forces. To me, this privatization of security is extremely frightening - it is the antithesis of the freedom and peace that the builders of Alphaville say are secured by these measures. It rings of the first steps toward a future like that depicted in the Disney cartoon Wal-E, where global corporate megaliths control the entire planet. In a way, the Alphaville concept is a destruction of public space, since the development company ultimately owns all the property therein and writes rules as it sees fit, but in the process this paradoxically destroys private space, or rather makes private space public. I imagine that like in gated communities, Alphavilles have stringent codes for housing ornamentation, lawn care, and other such expressions of individuality. Carried to its logical conclusion given pragmatic evidence, the Alphaville concept will ultimately spell the doom of individuality and the total homogenization of thought, aesthetics, and action under a dubious, profit-oriented hegemony.
"He who would give a little liberty, to gain a little security, deserves neither and loses both."
-Benjamin Franklin

Chekhov's Paradoxical Play

Last night I attended a showing of Chekhov's play The Seagull at Huntington Theater with no real expectations, either positive or negative. I had heard of the writer through the ether, though having never read any classic Russian literature, such names as Chekhov or Tolstoy were (and mostly still are) enigmas to me. I supposed that the genre must differ from the German postwar neo-romanticism of the time, but this notion was based more on weak geographic and ideological anecdotal evidence than on any firm convictions or knowledge. Immediately I was struck by the set design, especially the forest setting of the first two acts. The faux birch trees were arranged perfectly so as to give the viewer the sense that the scenes were taking place in a domesticated countryside, and the background's brightening and fading added to this naturalistic impression, denoting the passage of the day as the action of the play wound on. The costume design was immaculate - the viewer was instantly and definitively reminded of the turn-of-the-century bohemian, sportsman, or countryside gentry. Further, each character's persona was epitomized by their clothing. Arkadina's overdone dresses and hairstyles bespoke the vain woman who desperately wishes to return to glory days; Medevenko's typical Victorian suit was as quiet, timid, and wishing as his personality; Nina's varying modest attire brought to the fore her background as the only daughter of wealthy parents, even though in the play it is insinuated that they completely neglect her; Dorn's jaunty boater hat seemed to be the last remnant of his Don Juanian youth. The set- and costume-design seemed to be part and parcel of the theatrical realism that characterized the period, but the writing was anything but realistic. Chekhov makes tongue-in-cheek reference to his contempt for his contemporaries' efforts to display real life on stage in lines delivered by Konstantin in Act I, and while on the surface the characters' conversations seem to be centered around mundane drivel, especially the lines spoken by Arkadina, hidden within them is a nuanced symbolism that carries throughout the play. The first two acts run like a comedy, but underneath there lurks the ever present threat of impending tragedy, which ultimately wins the day, albeit in a watered-down victory. The Seagull's content walks a fine line, simultaneously realistic and symbolic. In the end, the viewer is left to wonder about the fate of the characters. Unlike some tragedies, the play's undercurrent of nihilistic thought is never brought to the fore until the last line of the play, and it is up to the viewer to decide if the multitudinous unrequited loves and seemingly stagnant lives that Chekhov characterizes point toward a pessimistic or realistic outlook. This ambiguity is furthered by Dorn's final line spoken to Trigorin, that Arkadina should be surreptitiously removed from the scene so as not to have to witness the aftermath of her son's suicide. Does this say that we should gloss over life's woes, or that it is not prudent to brood on sorrow? Ironically, the eponymous seagull is only obliquely referred to after Act II, and the viewers must decide for themselves which of the characters is supposed to represent it. Judging by the failure of most of the characters to "fly" in the way that they wish, I would say that all of them are epitomized by the slain seagull.

"Contemporary" is a Mere Convention

This Saturday I visited the Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston. Already partial to new developments in art and the trend away from tradition, I was drawn in by the unique architecture of the building from the outset. The pieces inside of the building were just as thought provoking as the facade, but I quickly saw a pattern being developed. Each piece and the building itself picked a specific, very small piece of the grand total of the "traditional view of art" and performed variations on it. Descriptions of the works always took note of exactly what the artist was trying to accomplish, whether it push the boundaries of the paint medium or to redefine a way of looking at some phenomenon. Every piece had a very specific point, whether it was aesthetic or contextual. The building itself was no more than a modernist, minimalist interpretation of classicism, balancing stark and solid geometric forms with an impending sense of dis-harmonic construction. Like new age sculpture, the ICA itself was built to tread the visual line between old solidarity and new fragility. The pieces inside were purpose driven, and often a very distinct historical aesthetic would come into play to achieve that purpose.

Matthew Ritchie, The Salt Pit
An abstract landscape opens before our eyes in The Salt Pit. Ritchie uses marker and oil paint to create an effect of great depth, and the forms he chooses at once hint at biology. The minimal palette of colors is very neutral, and the rusty copper belongs to the same family of metallic colors that the accentuating greened copper can be placed into. The viewer is directed by the abstract forms and color densities to focus the gaze slightly to the lower left of the center point of the piece.

Lisa Yuskavage, Motherfucking Rock
This work evokes such sensuality that it is almost rendered cartoonish. The exaggeration of the curves of the breasts could be considered to be the height of desirable, but the colors and the abstraction of the female face seem to say otherwise. The soft shades of the surfaces of the skin are almost realistic enough to evoke the feeling of a Renaissance portrait, but the naked form and exaggerated features are certainly more modern conventions. The figure's posture is questioning, inviting us to ask her more about herself. 

Alice Neel, Margaret Evans Pregnant
As stated by the ICA description, Alice Neel wanted to defy norms and depict a female form that had heretofore been almost wholly ignored by the art community: the woman in pregnancy. This somewhat abstracted portrait's strongest trait lies in the colors that Neel chose to depict her subject. She defines light and dark areas not with traditional blacks, browns, and whites mixed together - she takes the Van Gough approach and uses purples, blues, yellows, greens, reds, and other colors of the spectrum not traditionally used for shading. She synthesizes traditional portraiture and impressionist color choice.

Peter Chan, Untitled
This is the only piece that I reacted to overwhelmingly negatively. The only comment to be made is to take note of Peter Chan's unorthodox canvas, the cover of an eviscerated book. Unlike other paintings that were both conceptually and aesthetically enigmatic, which serves to draw the viewer into the work, this work was almost solely conceptually enigmatic. It asks the viewer to think about the relativity of the question "What is art?" with its tongue in its cheek.

Summer Wheat, Banka and Borth
Summer Wheat's methodology was to push the boundaries of painting into sculpture; to accomplish this, she used as many different ways of applying paint to the surface being painted as possible, including icing bags as well as knives and brushes. Banka and Borth is a successful blurring of painting and sculpture, as the actual form of the paint adds two layers of texture to the piece. Whereas in many paintings texture is implied, this artist seeks to both imply and explain texture with one medium.

Summer Wheat, Forever Calvin
I did not react as positively to Forever Calvin as I did to Banka and Borth. I disagreed with Wheat's heavy application of paint to the left side of the work, because it was distracting. Forever Calvin is, in my opinion, an over-application of an initially great idea. Wheat sought to blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture in her works, but here failed to succeed at producing something that can be classified as a decent attempt at either.

LaToya Ruby Frazier
Though I was initially partial to Frazier's work upon first viewing because she explored the aesthetics of a neighborhood of Pittsburgh, my hometown, as I continued to look through the exhibit I became more and more disenchanted with her photography. While some of the shots were admittedly huge accomplishments with framing and formatting, others seemed to lack this direction completely. Frazier's pictures seemed to swing between a very disciplined, technical aesthetic and a very undisciplined aesthetic of randomness. This work belongs in the former category, and is a very interesting blend of progressive, related and "collaged", unrelated images bound by superfluous similarities.

Nick Cave
Before anything can be said about Nick Cave's merit as an artist, one must first acknowledge his ingenuity as an inventor, recycler, and engineer. The chaotic work is so much to take in that upon first glance the viewer is forced to confront the reality of the amount of time that it must have taken to assemble the sculptures. This sheer magnitude of effort is reminiscent outsider art, particularly Salvation Mountain in the Southwestern United States.  Upon further inspection, one finds that Caves work is reminiscent of entangling branches or roots. The viewer is presented with an airy ecosystem of birds and flowers made strictly of metal and enamel that is not beautiful or artful in-and-of-itself, but because of the effort that must have been expended by the artist to bring the piece to fruition.

Putting Hospitable back into Hospitals

Saturday Danyele, Diana, and I walked down Beacon Street to see the hospital district, galvanized by talk about implementing patient-made art installations. We first walked into Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, drawn in by the elegant lobby we could see behind enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. The building was beautiful, and we began taking pointers from the interior design; we were trying to distill by observation what exactly made the space work so well, because we agreed that it did work very well. The natural earth tones of browns and creams were complimented by pops of bright reds, dark greens, and subtle blues. Forms of abstracted flowers gave the furniture that was composed of soft curving lines curving lines a an natural character, as though they were objects of natural instead of man-made origin. More floor-to-ceiling windows allowed a lot of natural light to illuminate the space, and what artificial light there was was emitted by soft, white-light bulbs, a welcome difference from the harsh orange fluorescent light that one usually encounters in hospitals. Overall, the "au natural" motif of the interior design helped to combat the sterile artificial aesthetic that many hospitals are forced to adopt because of the technical nature of the healing arts. As we walked through Dana-Farber, we noticed many spaces that could be very easily converted to places where patient-made art is exhibited. Many of the walls were already hung with art, but art (not very good, in my opinion) done by professionals. Other spaces practically begged for adornment and were left bare. After taking pictures and looking around the Institute, we went to the information desk to try and find ways to make contact, and ended up leaving with several promising fliers about patient artwork seminars being conducted by the MFA and other art-related organizations. After Dana-Farber, we visited Beth Israel Medical Center's East Campus, which was much less well endowed. We only walked around the lobby, but what we saw was promising. We were immediately filled with ideas about how to address the clumsy mix-and-match aesthetic we saw with patient-oriented art, which would fit right in with Beth Israel's current "Human First" add campaign.

This is one of the sights in Dana-Farber that is asking for patient art.  Behind it is the Dana-Farber patient information center, which makes it an ideal location.

This wall, opposite pictures, could be better used for patient art as well.

This space is directly in front of a cafeteria in Dana-Farber. The wasted wall could be utilized by a patient-made mural. There are several large sized, framed artworks hanging in the cafeteria (one can just be seen in the right of the picture, in the background), so placing one here would not stick out in the slightest.

The blank wall to the left of this staircase leads to a main artery of the Feldberg Building. Some attempt at all could be made to liven it up, and we believed that a few well-chosen patient works could do just the trick

Are they really "human first"? A cool way to demonstrate this could be to collage patient pieces around the ads. Danyele, Diana and I also came up with the idea of having some patients paint ceiling tiles to bring some color to this drab, clumsily interior-designed hallway. 

Hopefully Not Half-Ass

A very aggravating sickness afflicted me this weekend, and a fever and cough drove me inside for the (I hope you'll understand, Prof. O'Donnell). However, I can still continue with the narrative of street art, in an albeit unconventional way.
This Wednesday there was an awesome snowstorm and we received probably 6-10 inches of snow. BU cancelled classes for the day, and being adult college students, many people decided to head to the Esplanade for a huge snowball fight and snowman-making extravaganza. When went out to see the remnants of the battle, pictured above, I was amused by the variety of snowmen that I saw. Some conventional, some unconventional, they all have a unique style that is surprising, given the generally limited materials (snow, carrots, sticks?) that a builder usually employs when building a snowman.
I tried to make it out and see the city, but only managed to get as far as Ruggles Bus Station on Northeastern's campus to photograph a mural hanging at the south end of the bus station. Before I could make a full tour of the campus, I had to flee the wintry conditions and nurse my cold.
Since I was stuck inside because of the damn cold and my damn cold, I decided to flesh out the idea that the snowmen are completely spontaneous art pieces, not necessarily created by artists. Essentially, the ice hotels of Scandinavia and China are built by professional snowman-makers! Boston's paintbox program follows this model, as many artists are able to participate.
Digging through the pictures on my computer, I ran across shots I took in Italy, this summer. Not only did thinking of warmth make things seem a little brighter, I also discovered that I had some very well documented instances of spontaneous "layman" art from my trip abroad. We never found out what or who was behind the stickers, but all over Florence street signs were altered with amusing, simplistic images. Additionally, I ran across some really cool graffiti and tag; Europe is a graffiti haven, and the contrast of rebellious new art to stately old architecture is something to behold, an aesthetic of precariously balanced opposites.

Behold what I called "The Spirit of the Esplanade." The builder of this snowman made it extra grand by forming it around a tree. This snowman stands over six feet high, and was the largest I saw that day. Unfortunately, the builders did not flesh out his backside: behind the snowman is flat and almost barely built up. The face seems to be enigmatically happy, and the viewer wonders what the point of the truncated branch that sticks out of the Spirit's chest is supposed to be.

It is almost impossible not to laugh at this snowman, probably the most original that I have ever seen. It is interesting to note that there were no freestanding snowmen not of the classic shape (snowballs stacked on top of each other, largest on the bottom and smallest on the top), and there were no snowmen that were built around an object that were of the classic shape. Even "The Spirit of the Esplanade" shouldn't be considered a true "classic" snowman, because it is not actually snowballs stacked.

If only the maker of this snowman had had a scarf and hat to donate, it probably would have looked like somebody was sitting on the bench. Almost human size, it is interesting to note the way that the builder proportioned the body. The legs and shoulders seem to belong to one person, the torso to a second, and the head to a third. I wonder if the builder had thought about realistic proportioning at all during the building process, because obviously they wanted to be amusing and unconventional.

A traditional type of snowman, its builders chose to place him at the head of a small path on the Esplanade, and being five and a half feet high, the snowman was formatted well to the setting. In fact, all of the snowmen seemed to be ponderously placed, each having enough space between them so that each was isolated and yet still standing in relation to all of the others. I did not see any groups of snowmen built that day. It seems odd that a large group of people would gather for a combined event (snowball fight and snowman building) and not one flock of snowmen would be built.

This is a wall fixture in Ruggles. It is reminiscent of East Asian Art, with a graffiti type bent to it. The size leaves a little to be desired, and I think that the fixture does not use the full wall the way that it could. Additionally, it is the only piece of art in the entire Ruggles Station, so it seems to be an orphan of sorts. My biggest criticism centers on the artist's choice to have a flat, defined edge at the top of the piece and an ambiguous edge at the bottom. The organic form would have made more of an impression if it had been allowed to extend over the top of the wall and cut off the view of some of the window.

All of these are reiterations of the same idea, but the sheer variation of ways that that simple idea can be reiterated is amazing. These are only five examples, but I have about 40 of these pictures on my hard drive. I do not think that these were placed by one tagger, because the styles vary across the city. My friends and I were unable to decide how exactly the decals had been applied, but most of us came to the conclusion that they were stickers. It is interesting to note that the signage of Italy is more conducive to this type of alteration, because it is comprised more of symbols than of words. In the United States, one rarely finds signs in cities without some text on them.

I'm not sure who Mors Henek is, but his mural is huge - the face is approximately five feet across and seven high. Mors is placed on the landing of a long flight of outdoor stairs climbing a hill, so he is very imposing. I'm not sure if it was artistic choice or an unfortunate mishap with materials, but I did not like that the right eye was defined while the left was obscured. Had Mors been depicted according to a more realistic focus, it would be logical that the eye nearer to the viewer (the left) should be in-focus and the other should be blurry.

Almost surely done by a professional artist, this is the most aesthetically pleasing piece of graffiti that I have seen in person. It is interesting how the artist chose to format the bird in the Z shape, an intentional choice, I think - the artist name appears to be Zadol. I would especially like to know how Zadol was able to give the bird's eye the all-important shine that makes it look three-dimensional, because as far as I can tell this piece was accomplished with spray paint.

Dirty this boy is. The style of this graffiti particularly caught my attention, because it looks almost like a stencil. In fact, each line is a separate stroke made with the paint can by the artist. I wonder if the tagger had a paper for reference, or if he freehanded the work. Ironically, Dirty was placed in a corner that was home to the various effects of some absent homeless person, and probably marked the place where they performed the same act.

Graffiti: The New Impressionism

As a Millennial influenced incessantly by pop culture (whether I want to be or not), I find it very difficult to understand the viewpoint that graffiti is not art - yet, at the same time, I can see to an extent where the other side is coming from. By this I mean that I understand a property owner's concern for their own property's safety. If I lived on Bay State Road, I would surely not want a tagger to spray "Sploog" or some other nonsense on my wall. However, if a tagger created a piece that looked even half as cool as the above incarnation of the beloved Boston Terrier (I prefer to think that he's Rhett, and not anybody's random dog), I would probably feel obligated to pay the person. It seems very difficult to deny that Rhett is art.
In the history of any artistic craft, be it architecture, painting, or sculpting, one can readily discern the competition between innovation and tradition; this is the tectonic region in which new forms of expression are born, mixing a little of both. It is very often that the artist who intuitively melds these competing desires (the desire of the artist versus the desire of all the other artists) is considered to be a seminal one.
So can graffiti really become a seminal form of expression, having as large an impact on culture as Impressionism, as my title suggests? I think so.
 In my view, the debate over whether or not street art can be called such has arisen because of the way that the artists themselves do their work. I would seek to more clearly define the terms "graffiti" and "tag". Such a method might not eliminate the question at hand, but then again, will we ever have a perennial definition of what art is? Probably not.
First, we must define these terms; but in order to do that, we must look at the art that covers the urban landscape that we inhabit for purposes of discerning the intent behind the work. From observation, it seems logical to conclude that there are three main reasons why an artist makes the decision to break the law and "vandalize" a piece of property that they do not own, namely: aesthetic preference, attention seeking, and message communication.
Obviously, any piece of graffiti is born of any combination of the three, but we can use this idea that all graffiti is based on one of these three ideas to help define the word "graffiti" itself. By my definition, graffiti is street art that favors aesthetic preference and/or message communication over attention seeking, whereas tags are street art that favor message communication and/or attention seeking over aesthetic preference.

This image is a perfect representation of all three of these desires, and helps to visually explain what I mean by "aesthetic preference". In the above shot from Google Images, there are tags and graffiti commingled. Obviously, the only piece of graffiti on this wall is the Banksy piece in the middle, the image of "FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS" and the workman who pasted "CANCELLED" over the message. All the others are tags. It would be very difficult to argue that graffiti is not art: it has a composition, a message, a subject, etc., all hallmarks of a real piece of art.

However, the tags are a different story. Whether it reads "ORGA", "Mo Fuck", or is simply a heart shape, the trait that makes tags, tags is the lack of composition, which is to say lack of aesthetic preference. Tags are floating images without context, the tagger wants the viewer to appreciate the art for its own sake - the problem is, tags often cause the viewer to say, "I could do that."

This is, I think, the real way to split the umbrella of street art into two categories. In fact, it is from this distinction that I coined the aforementioned traits of street art. The taggers, among other reasons like having to move quickly to avoid patrols of pigs waiting to bust them for vandalism, do not favor aesthetic preference because they do not have one, or at least not one strong enough to form the basis of an entire composition. Although this sounds like a somewhat foolish way to divide graffiti and tag on the surface, it becomes more intuitive the more it is thought over. We do not call a child's drawings "art" because the child has no conception of "art", whereas we do call an adult's drawings that look like a child's "art" because the artist who drew them has at least some conception of "art". In the same way, most people could perform a tag, but very few can call themselves a street artist.

Abstract art is a prime example of this. Upon viewing, many who do not understand art say, "I could do that. It looks like he dribbled paint on a white canvas." From experience, I can say that these do not know what they're talking about. Abstract art seems simple, but in the end it all comes down to formatting. You can tell an abstract piece done by an artist from one done by a person dribbling paint on a canvas because the former displays composition whereas the latter does not.

Ultimately, I think that graffiti (not tags) can be considered the Impressionism of our era: it breaks social norms, it breaks artistic norms, it has influenced the way an entire generation perceives art. One need look no further than the success of Shepard Fairey's "Hope" campaign poster for Barrack Obama in 2008, or the wild rise to prominence of his OBEY clothing line. His style is firmly rooted in graffiti, and is prime example that not every street artist is a street rat.

Shepard Fairey's mural in Northeastern dorm International Village. The mural was created in 2009 for the front entrance of the building. Notice the blend of aesthetic preference and message communication... and the fact that Fairey's name appears in the composition not once.