Once I was in, I would always start with the Renaissance and the Old Masters, where I would marvel at the command of form and texture; then I’d wind my way into Impressionism, getting lost amidst the sea of color; and finally ending up in Contemporary Art, giving myself over to the arresting landscapes of Magritte and Mondrian.

I justified these regular jaunts by saying I learned more in a few hours at the AIC than I would have at school. Which was true.

Now, it’s another rainy, chilly day. It’s early, and I’ve stopped off at Au Bon Pain for coffee (yay for loose change scrounged in my room) on my way to the Art Institute. Except I’m not skipping class. I’m sitting in a graduate art history seminar, where we’re talking about Minimalism.

Life is twisty.

Portfolio site for a local photographer. A functional site can be found here.

In the Poetic Edda there is a legend about Odin, chief of the Aesir and a principle figure in Norse mythology. The legend tells that Odin, in search of wisdom, hung himself from the World Tree for nine days and nights without food or water. At the end of the ordeal he received wisdom in the form of Runes.

In this piece, A Sacrifice Of Myself To Myself, I performed a long-duration work symbolic of that story. Working with Mark Mandrake, a Chicago-based Neo-Pagan priest, I was ritually possessed by Odin before being bound with rope, which was threaded around pipes in the gallery space like tree branches. I was blindfolded, and denied food and water. Using a combination of rhythmic stave pounding, spoken word, and gesture, I was led through intensive trance-work for nine hours, ritually journeying through each of the Nine Realms of Norse cosmology. The result was a union of sacred ritual and performance art in an emotionally intense experience for both performer and audience.

A Sacrifice Of Myself To Myself was performed as part of PANTS ON FIRE, a showcase of performance and ephemeral art by a group of young emerging artists. The show was mounted at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery in Chicago in April, 2011.

A photograph is made when film is quickly exposed to light. Likewise, memory is created when we are exposed to people and the world around us. This performance explores ideas of memory and vulnerability. The body is presented as a sort of photographic medium, exposed to light and life, imprinted with the actions of others and the events of our lives. We are defined by these people, by these events, yet they are transient and leave us holding the weight of their influence. The accumulated effect of people and events on our bodies and our psyches weighs us down and obscures us, pushing us towards personal transformation. The transformation leads us to cleanse, to accept our memories as part of who we are but without letting them define us, the construct our own identity and our own meaning.

In exposure, a collaborative piece with Lauren DeGroot and Emily McCoy, Lauren and I take images of people from a pile on a desk. After applying honey to one side, we apply the photomedia to Emily’s body. She becomes a collage, a patchwork of memory and influence that begins to weigh her down. After a while, she cannot bear this weight anymore, and starts tearing the memories from her body, cleansing herself and rediscovering her own identity.

I will be performing a piece as part of a group performance art show called PANTS ON FIRE. The show features work from a dozen emerging artists in Chicago:

Jesse Sioux Achramowicz
junn
Shayna Cott
Kelly Craciun
James Patrick Gordon
Lauren Humphries
Jesse Kegan
Ellyn Leahy
Kris Martin
Grace O’Brien
Rayme Silverberg
Melody Snyder

The show will be held on April 29th from 7p-9p at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, 1136 N. Milwaukee, just off the Division/Milwaukee Blue Line stop. Admission and beer are both free.

Defibrillator is an amazing new space dedicated to providing studio and gallery space for performance, live, and ephemeral art in Chicago. Like any ambitious arts or cultural project, they’ve been hit hard by drastic cuts in federal funds and private donations, and they need your help. In addition to dropping a buck or two in the donation box at PANTS ON FIRE, consider making a contribution to their IndieGoGo campaign.

Hope to see you there!

Contemporary Art, to me, seems stuck in this sort of phenomenological questioning of form and subject. Since Dada and the Futurists we’ve been making art that questions the meaning and value of Art itself. Sometimes it was specific- Rauschenberg’s and Ryman’s interrogation of painting as a medium- and sometimes it was a broader- Duchamp, et al- inquiry into the proposed meaninglessness of artistic endeavor. The Pop Artists took the ball and ran with it, and Conceptual Art took this idea to its logical conclusion. But absent a further line of inquiry, Contemporary Artists simply created work that commented on previous work. This has created a present conundrum where Art has become an inside joke that only a privileged few are clued in to.

Similarly, New Media Art is, in many ways, still bogged down in the Dadaist quagmire. Early NMA was a response to the aggressive privatization of media and the digitization of cultural forms, in much the same way that Dada was a response to mechanized warfare and the industrialization of image and text. NMA, like Dada, uses pre-existing materials and previous artistic and cultural artifacts to construct a through-line of critical inquiry. The problem is that NMA has become another shade of Contemporary Art with different formal considerations (such as they are). For NMA to remain a viable formal movement, artists must move beyond formal and subjective Dada. At the very least, NMA needs to explore the Surrealist aesthetic for a while.

In this milieu, critical inquiry is the prevailing vector along which new work is justified. But critical inquiry isn’t enough. We’ve asked all the questions, and we’ve said everything that needs to be said. We are, all of us, beating a dead horse.

Can we please talk about something else?

Bad Art doesn’t say anything.

Mediocre Art makes statements.

Good Art asks questions.

Great Art provokes responses.

What I still haven’t figured out yet is what constitutes the Best Art. My original idea was that it engenders understanding, but I feel like that’s too broad a property to assign to such a narrow field.

Thoughts?

The semantics are important, but they’re also distracting. They lead us towards over-specification, such that we have curious definitions such as “New Media As Metadata” and “New Media As Distribution Platform.” This approach leads to results that are obscure, oversimplified, and ultimately off the mark.

I suggest that moving away from technology, distribution, and ontology is key to understanding New Media- what it is, what it’s doing here, and what it wants with us. New Media, as is commonly conceived today, can be understood best as a phenomenological construct, wherein form and content reflect a reevaluation between artist and audience.

Before I go on, I have to cop to a critical bias that I harbor. It’s not terribly uncommon or controversial, but it’s contested enough that I need to disclose it. Accordingly, Art refers, broadly, to a complex system of communication and emotional connection between an artist and an audience by way of the work the artist produces. The relationship between artist, work, and audience is, traditionally, an ordered sequence of events. During the development of the work, the channel of communication and connection exists between the artist and the work, and the audience relationship to the work (which is, ultimately, the filter between artist and audience) is either irrelevant or nonexistent. This dynamic persists until the work is finished and released into the wild, at which point artist and audience roles are reversed- the artist’s relationship to her own work is irrelevant or nonexistent, and the relationship between the work and the audience becomes the main flow-channel.

With “old media,” or the kinds of media associated with classical fine art (oil painting, marble sculpture, etc.) this dynamic is ordered and sequential. The artist creates the work, the work leaves the artist’s hands, the audience discovers the work. With “New Media,” however, the dynamic is less reflective of a sequence and more adequately described as a feedback loop. The artist making decisions, the work developing, and the audience engaging and critiquing all happens asynchronously. Sometimes even simultaneously. This loop cycles through often in the same shared time, and often (though, with the increased sophistication of networked technologies, not necessarily) in the same space.

Although the development and spread of digital and networked technologies lends itself well to this new dynamic, technology itself is not a necessity for its emergence. Indeed, performance and performative art, devoid of the need for technological and formal competency thresholds, lends itself naturally to work where this feedback loop develops. Arguably, one of the hallmarks of performance art (and, perhaps, live art in general) is the capacity for the artist’s labor, the piece, and the audience come gather in an intimate space and time where all three develop together. Digital and networked technology, for its part, slots nicely into this new paradigm, as the increasingly-sophisticated opportunities for computer mediation support the feedback loop naturally and reveals new vectors for interaction, collaboration, and intervention.

Having taken a phenomenological, rather than technological, approach to an understanding of “New Media,” we have, perhaps, arrived at a description that is defensible against both Time and Critic. In all probability, this definition will be rendered obsolete soon. However, with the new technological and critical paradigm that New Media operates in, if this definition is made obsolete, we should at least know about it right away.

Recently, BoingBoing compiled eleven years worth of posts into one giant XML file and released it into the wild. I wanted to try to have a bit of fun with the data. Overwhelmed with the sheer scope of the data, I wanted to convey this sense of scope visually with a sort of Wall of Text.

Using MCavallo’s OpenCloud library and some code from Golan Levin, I wrote this Processing sketch that reads the XML data and uses the text content from the titles of the archived posts to generate this huge text wall. My output is one giant TIFF file.

You can see the full size file here. You can also grab a zip file of my project (including the XML file) here.

His definition is as follows:

-A piece must be intentional. There must be artistic intent behind the composition.

-A piece must be communicative. It must carry a message.

-A piece must be useless. This is possibly the most contentious part of the definition (and deliberately so- if the proposal isn’t a challenge, what’s the point?). The idea is, roughly, that there shouldn’t necessarily be a practical component behind the piece, and/or the composition of the piece must be executed by useless means. (I think he can explain this better than me.)

This sparked a three hour long discussion last night after dinner about what constitutes art, whether there’s such a thing as bad art, the artist’s role in society, her dialogue with (and obligation to) the audience, and rhetorical content.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this definition. Comment here, or ping me on Twitter.