ARTIST OPPORTUNITIES: PS

I know many of you have been reading and sharing Artist Opportunities May 2013, and hopefully you’ve been reflecting upon the tragic fact that I hardly needed to exaggerate in order to make my satirical point. I’m sure many of you encounter their real world counterparts very frequently. However, Gallerina Butthurt* writes to say: “It’s easy to mock, but I don’t think anything is achieved by attacking places that are under pressure already and try to help artists.”

Firstly, au contraire ma petite pomme de terre. It is easy to mock (and fun), but I hit close enough to the nerve that it gave you a guilty sad, didn’t it? Secondly, many of the outfits I have in my sights are doing anything but helping artists. They’re helping themselves to artists’ money. Many of them are just plain old nasty con artists and psychos.

But to help Ms. Butthurt out, I shall take the liberty of offering my positive advice about how not to be one of those places.

* Not her real name, nor even the pseudonym she’s hiding behind, but apposite.

1. Nobody needs another new art magazine full of impenetrable artspeak gobbledygook or another pseudo-professional online aggregator of shallow, glib reviews, reposts from better blogs, and listicles or slideshows about your favourite art. There are already numerous people doing that very well (or at least extensively). What are you adding, except your snout to the trough?
2. If you want professional work for a professional situation, pay me. This is also applicable to exhibitions, festivals and the like. I have done and will do things at reduced cost or no fee, but this is pro bono work. Pro bono has nothing to do with U2, luckily. It means “for the good”. In other words, there may be (and in fact I know there are) situations in which myself and/or other people can benefit from being involved in a project in ways that don’t involve money. Sometimes I do favours for people because I like them, or I believe in what they’re doing, or just because it’s absolutely no loss or bother to me if I help them out. This doesn’t give anybody license to take the piss by assuming I’ll always work for free and that providing content for them never costs me anything. I can’t pay my bills with kudos, good company or “great exposure”. Or, as it’s summarised brilliantly in this article: “We don’t do it for the money. But we won’t do it without the money” See also: Should I work for free? A Note to You, Should You Be Thinking of Asking Me to Write For You For Free

WHAT THE DUCK?

‘Rubber Duck’, like its maker Florentjin Hofman’s other work, is daft, kitsch, intellectually undemanding and entirely uncool. Yet its value, I think, lies in precisely these attributes. When was the last time the work of any artist celebrated on the front cover of Art Review or Frieze aroused general excitement, civic pride, despair at the prospect of it going away, or “limitless amounts of joy”? This last comment is from a discussion at the governmental level about the widespread positive fallout from Hofman’s avowed attempt to spread this joy. I certainly don’t think art can be or should be uniformly subjected to tests of popularity or popularism, but I also think that somebody except the artist and their friends should care about and connect with an art work.

Until recently the 16m tall duck was floating between Hong Kong island and Kowloon. Although described by the artist as a contemporary art work, which it is, the duck was brought to Hong Kong by a shopping mall as a promotional stunt. It’s very healthy that absolutely nobody seems at all interested in the sponsors and that the artist and his duck have gained far more publicity and kudos than the mall.

I say “until recently” because the joy came to an abrupt end when this happened:

And it happened amid accusations of cigarette attacks by mainland China’s notoriously uncouth, vulgar tourists, the enmity of “duck haters” (yes, really) and various other conspiracy theories of the kind that run wild on Sina Weibo and its ilk whenever they get going on any subject even tangentially involving relations between Hong Kong and China. The most likely genuine explanation is environmental stress from the wind and waves, although the eventual face-saving Chinese style explanation was planned maintenance, i.e. “no, no, it’s not a PR disaster, we meant to do it.”

People had been coming from hundreds of miles away to see it, with a collateral commercial impact on everyone from street hawkers with yellow bath ducks (almost certainly made in neighbouring Shenzhen, the world’s factory) to hotels offering “duck view” hotel rooms. Rubber Duck’s untimely demise left many locals as jocularly or genuinely distraught as the Weibo user who wrote ”Don’t die! I still haven’t had the chance to make a pilgrimage and come worship you, big yellow duck.”

Now let’s try to imagine anybody apart from their friends who work as curators or at art magazines giving a single, tiny fuck about the joyous arrival or the sad premature departure of absolutely any of the formulaic work done recently by critical young darlings like Haroon Mirza, Karla Black or Elizabeth Price who can apparently do no wrong…

…

…

OK, put down your pens, time is up. Anything? No, me neither.

SOUZOU: OUTSIDER ART FROM JAPAN

The Wellcome Trust, London, 28th March–30th June 2013

Shoichi Koga, Seitenmodoki (Ganesha (Nandikeshvara)-oid), 2006.

Having seen this great exhibition of so-called Outsider Art– i.e. art by untrained people in care– I’m more convinced than ever that there’s either an absolutely massive number of respected contemporary artists running around with serious but undiagnosed mental illnesses and learning disabilities… or going to art school, having an MA or a PhD, knowing the right people in the art world, being shown in the “right” [sic] galleries, and being spoken of and approved of in high level critical discourses around contemporary art all signify absolutely bugger all about an artist’s talent or ability in most cases. Because there’s basically no difference between much of the work in Souzou and much of the work to be seen in contemporary art galleries and art fairs all over the developed world. Except possibly there’s a slight difference in the sense that some of the Outsider Art is much better because it completely lacks the cynicism, arid conceptualism, dated Modernist concerns, condescension and sneering pretensions of the Frieze brigade.

Some of the artists in Souzou don’t know, don’t care or perhaps even can’t comprehend how their work is received and understood outside of its original and intensely personal therapeutic context. It doesn’t effect in the slightest their ability to make art that connects with people; art that it beautiful, art that is well-crafted, art that in some way says something to us about our own lives, feelings and thoughts, art that expresses something of the artist’s soul for other people to share, art that is special and desirable enough for somebody to want it on their wall.

ON NOT DOING ANYTHING THAT DESERVES A SNEER

In the following quotation from William B. Irvine’s book on Stoic philosophy A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, substitute the phrase “the art world’s approval” or “art world status” for every instance of the phrase “social status” to understand my purpose in posting this. My emphasis.

“Stoics value their freedom, and they are therefore reluctant to do anything that will give others power over them. But if we seek social status [the art world's approval] we give other people power over us: we have to do things calculated to make them admire us, and we have to refrain from doing things that will trigger their disfavour. Epictetus therefore advises us not to seek social status [the art world's approval], since if we make it our goal to please others, we will no longer be free to please ourselves. We will, he says, have enslaved ourselves.

If we wish to retain our freedom, says Epictetus, we must be careful, while dealing with other people, to be indifferent to what they think of us. Furthermore, we should, in other words, be as dismissive of their approval as we are of their disapproval. Indeed, Epictetus says that when others praise us, the proper response is to laugh at them…”

“… Marcus [Aurelius] agrees with Epictetus that it is foolish for us to worry about what other people think of us and particularly foolish for us to seek the approval of people whose values we reject. Our goal should therefore be to become indifferent to other people’s opinions of us. He adds that if we can succeed in doing this, we will improve the quality of our life.

Notice that the advice that we ignore what other people think of us is consistent with the Stoic advice that we not concern ourselves with things we can’t control. I don’t have it in my power to stop other people sneering at me, so it is foolish spending my time trying to stop them. I should instead, says Marcus, spend this time on something I have complete control over, namely, not doing anything that deserves a sneer…“

Any of this ringing any bells, artists?

ONE OF THESE IS ART: CHRIS MARKER / REDDIT CREEPSHOTS

CHRIS MARKER, SELECTED WORKS 1957-2011, LOUISE BLOUIN FOUNDATION, 9 OCTOBER–3 NOVEMBER 2012

Dozens of furtive, objectifying, fetishistic pictures taken of women in public places without their knowledge or consent apparently constitutes an art exhibition to some people. Except when they’re on Reddit in the currently super-controversial Creepshots (i.e. the place where men post furtive, objectifying, fetishistic pictures taken of women in public places without their knowledge or consent) in which case they’re just weird fapping material for a few, but exceedingly problematic and distasteful to nearly everybody else. I will again state my belief that not everything an artist does is necessarily art, even if they themselves claim it as such. I will also recommend not looking at the parts of Reddit where things like Creepshots– and far, far worse– are nurtured and validated.

This exhibition at Artinfo/Modern Painters oligarch Louise Blouin’s art space in west London– in the contemporary silo gallery style, and therefore consisting mostly of white paint, cavernous wasted space and the flinty eyes of sullen gallery maids peeping out above oppressively high white cuboids– was presumably in the pipeline long before Marker snuffed it earlier this year. But one can’t help thinking that Passengers (AKA Creepshots) being flagged as his last work possibly indicates that if he’d lived he might have had the sense to think again about showing work that could literally be printouts from Reddit, both in terms of subject matter and the (very low) quality of the images themselves. There’s also some truly horrible Photoshop work to be seen on the prints of images he took in North Korea in the 50s; pretty clearly, he didn’t ‘shop them during the Korean War, so again somebody seems to have been making bad decisions on behalf of an artist who’s obviously no longer in a position to police how his work gets shown.

I’m actually a huge, nerdily knowledgeable fan of Marker’s films and installations. Static pictures on walls seem almost irrelevant to any survey of his work. La Jetée, his most famous work, drives this point home. It’s made of still images, but it’s the montage and the journey through time diegetically and structurally that makes these still images work. As contextless still individual images, most of them have little relevance , interest or meaning. Obviously the mainstream art business is still for the most part about having things to hang on walls, even if the artist is primarily a film maker or a performer, and so film makers and performers who want to get on make token things to go on walls, and so other artists have to do the same, and so it goes on. This exhibition is absolutely dominated by still images, a perverse state of affairs for an artist who expressed himself most and best through moving ones. An installation plonked almost as an afterthought near the doorway gives a glimpse of the real Marker with intensely edited and exquisitely structured fragments from silent movies and old stock footage, but Blouin is apparently of the orthodox view that we don’t deserve seating or any other form of comfort to experience long-form video art.

Seriously, people, the room must be at least 20m x 20m. You have space for a few damn chairs.