I feel as though I could be playing hooky at the moment. I’ve got a loaf of banana bread in the oven and I’m doing — nothing. It’s amazing how delightful temperatures above freezing can be. Perhaps I’ll kiss my neighborhood goodbye by taking a walk to the liquor store.
My great indulgence for the day has been watching documentaries instead of getting off my ass and photographing the Walker for an architecture blog. I’ll do it tomorrow morning… when the light isn’t so punchy.
If you haven’t seen it already, Our Daily Bread is an amazing documentary/piece of video art. The film follows mechanized food production around Europe – from salmon fishing vessels in Norway to almond trees in Greece and Italy. Mostly consisting of long shots of workers and machines doing their business to make our lunches possible, the repetitive motions of how we get our food is interspersed with workers having their lunch breaks.
Two favorite moments:
-Workers trying to get bulls to mount cows… and then jumping in last second with a beaker to collect the semen.
-Workers endlessly, tirelessly piling soil around asparagus so that it never conducts photosynthesis and stays white.
The film is available on DVD from NetFlix and here is the trailer:
Check out Mullins’ site for the whole conversation…
I’ll answer question #1 in the simplest possible terms:
Colleen, I agree with your assertion that venues such as 20X200 serve as excellent indicators of the overall state of art sales within the greater entity known as the free market.
Now, I want to complicate things:
I don’t feel that it is ultimately healthy to view art in these highly commoditized terms. To be blunt, the free market is not always good. Reducing images and art objects down to ready-to-buy commodities signifies to me there is NO PLACE left in our culture that isn’t about mass consumption. This is, of course, my personal opinion.
I do not mean to suggest that art is pure or that artists are somehow exempt from global capitalism.
I do, however, want to suggest (like Naomi Klein hints at) that there are some parts of our culture that we can declare as non-commercial. As a culture, we have internalized advertising and the commercialization of… everything that it seems absurd to even suggest the possibility of drawing boundaries.
There are some glimmering hints at how these boundaries could take shape.
For example, photographer Matt Siber’s series, Untitled Project* explores power relationships between text (much of which is commercial) and inhabitants of various urban public spaces. His displacement and re-contextualization (or is it de-contextualization in this case) of text reminds me of the city of Sao Paulo’s banning of outdoor advertising.
…and with that… I give you my two cents on the matter… at least for the time being.
*After thought and aside… wouldn’t it be ironic if Siber’s work ended up as yet another 20 X 200 edition?
I’ve been running around like crazy lately. The process of moving to a new apartment is… more stressful than I remember. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to update this blog as much as I would have liked.
Something good…
I’m beginning to shake off the frigid weight of winter and photograph again, with hopes of eventually building a portfolio of architectural photography.
While that is starting to simmer on the back burner, I am also beginning to expand on the dialog that was initiated with a post on Dec. 05. A post on Elysium, the blog of Colleen Mullins, caught the attention of another blogger… creating a trifecta of discussion about the role of the market in art production.
Check out the first question in the discussion here…
My rhetorical question: when is it OK to move into the less-than-desirable neighborhoods of a city?
After much searching through the various cubes, dirty duplexes, and non-descript condo-turned-apartment buildings scattered throughout Minneapolis, I finally found a place that I would like to call home. As soon as I annouced this to my friends, they managed to point out that I’m probably going to be stabbed, raped, or shot (hopefully all of the above) while waiting for the bus.
However, I refuse to be deterred. This place is perfect for me. Good southern exposure… hardwood floors… older building… I just can’t say no.
*****
Consequently, when apartment hunting, how does one actually identify what areas to look in?
Maybe I’m way way way behind the times… but looking for a place to live this time around, has taken a different form… usuall something along the lines of:
finding apartment on Craig’s List
Using Google Map to see where it is…
Using Google Street view to see if I like the shape of the building…
Using Spot Crime to look up the crime stats for the area…
The amazing blog Archdaily has me convinced that experimentation in architecture is really happening everywhere but the US. Take for example, the Leon de Grief Library Park in Medellin, Columbia. It is truly amazing to me that 15 years ago, I would never have been able to go here because of the rampant violence and other side effects of the “War on Drugs”.
I’ve never been truly convinced that such a thing as the avante garde can exist. However, I find myself calling a transformation of this type, which is in such stark contrast with the past, exactly that.
*****
It’s a slow and steady day at work and I find myself drifting back and forth between work, my sketchbook, and this time-sucking blog. My mind is wandering and I’m curious if it’s not too late to start looking at photography in a completely different capacity. I love architecture. I love photography. Why on God’s blue earth haven’t I concluded that I want to be an architectural photographer?
Making art, being critical, and exhibiting the results has turned into such a narrow path that I feel like its a revelation to just simply want to make photos of buildings, built environments, and architectural interventions. That’s it. That’s what I actually want to be doing… right now.
This was posted on Tuesday, January27th, 2009 in Art, Culture, Images
After a long weekend of phlegm, I’m back in action. I was riding in my buddy Mike’s car on an errand at work and the topic of cool new ads and the Walker’s hosting of the British Advertising Awards came up.
What does it mean when the most interesting parts of a society’s visual culture are advertisements? I’m asking this in lieu of both the Brit’s advertising foray’s and also the Adicolor series from Adidas. For the most part, there seems to be a distinct lack of products (aside from the following VW commercial) -but- these ads seem to go beyond the touchy-feely, emotional adverts of the 90s.
Lets take for example the Cabury advert of a Gorilla playing the drum sequence in the Phil Collins’ song “In the Air Tonight”. The advertisment has nothing to do with the crappy chocolate from Cadbury… but… I can’t stop watching the ad. Taken a step further… apparently the studio that owns the rights to the song has prevented it from being included in versions of the ad posted to You Tube. So, the gorilla ad runs… without Phil Collins.
The result is something akin to a piece of video art you could find in any white cube gallery. (Embedding has been disabled… you’ll have to… click)
A different side of the coin: What happens when a social fabric (in this case a city) decides to openly reject advertisements? The city of Sao Paulo, Brazil decided last year to ban outdoor advertisements. Photographer Tony de Marco has been documenting the city’s empty billboard structures…
From Tony de Marco's FLICKR
My next question: If visual advertisements are banned – how have the advertisers retaliated? Is all advertising product placement? Word of mouth? Do people “randomly” break into the Coke jingle in order to sell soda?
Zen Habits has a great article about being pigeonholed. I feel like the art world demands that artists brand themselves through their work… this little article has a great take on how to recognize when you’re being pushed to be one way or another based on surrounding circumstances.
I’d also like to add that the Minnesota Martini at the Longfellow Grill is amazing.
Americans are either in their cars, in their homes, or in shopping malls.
The sense of public space in the contemporary American city is so exceptionally abbreviated it seems that I am able to pass to and from work without ever really having to navigate a truly “public” place. I get up in the morning, and pass from my house to an abandoned street of private homes and get onto a bus that systematically seals me off from the public sphere passing outside. When I arrive at work, I migrate upwards into the sky-ways and am deluged by an array of private interests and intentions – starting with some corporate architect’s premeditated control of my movement and ending with the various retail establishments that pull me in to spend money.
There is never a sense of openness, possibility, or social exchange in the mock public environment I’m surrounded by. I guess I’m comparing this to the various public spaces I’ve spent time in – The Zocalo area in Mexico City or Central Park or the Museum Plein in Amsterdam. There is something that is distinctly lost when public space is mutated and downsized as it is in Minneapolis. Supposedly there is a new public space opening up – Target Plaza… next to Target Field… next to the Target Center.
Does it bother anyone else that we are so willing to have our open forum spaces co-opted by a corporation’s private PR interests?
With the above thoughts in mind, I intend to actually start doing some work again (keeping in mind, I can’t really make any prints until this time next year). A couple of goals for this project/direction:
Research the history of the corporate sponsorship of art, architecture, and the public sphere.
Photograph the spaces that constitute public space, in its abbreviated and shrunken state.
Intervene in the dialog between the accessibility and inaccessibility of the public and private, corporate and free.
In the last two years, I’ve seen many episodes of the television show “Family Guy” and have to say, I’ve enjoyed every single one. I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit this – as I like to point out that I don’t watch television and generally avoid many of the institutions of popular/mass-mediated culture. Being an overly neurotic creature, I can’t let myself enjoy something without analyzing it to death.
Today’s question for y’all is Family Guy -or, more specifically: what is the relationship between Family Guy and Postmodernism. Does the TV series represent the epitome of the postmodern concepts of intertextuality, opposition to meta-narratives, deconstruction, and “death of the author”?
