How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

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How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Wed Mar 09, 2011 7:42 pm

Recently I've had occasion to submerge a tiny portion of a single toe into the wading pool of artistic recognition. It's been yet another opportunity to witness and experience the various trickle down pressures of our profit centered system on visual artists. In my personal case, I don't resent the immediate vectors of these pressures or suspect their personal motivations, quite the contrary, to a person I appreciate their concern and help, but I can also see how many artists succumb.

I've witnessed friends dumb down their work, taking a knife to its rather profound meaning/narrative until something so diluted and indecipherable is left as to neither offend nor move anyone. They've been rewarded for this activity with great shows in prestigious venues. Meanwhile, the public decries the use of tax money to preserve arts districts and artist works spaces. While that is really not surprising in this age of cuts to healthcare and other basic services, what is surprising is the degree of vitriolic contempt the public expresses for non-business (read non-productive) creative output. The American public actively and joyfully hates artists.

So, who has been or is writing about these issues, with a view that is aware and critical of the system? I don't have an answer for that, but my attention was recently directed to one critic/artist and I thought it might be beneficial to share.

Mira Shorr's essay on Failure and Anonymity:
http://books.google.com/books?id=7-c48RR3UCgC&lpg=PA121&ots=OreeocYugO&dq=mira+schor+on+failure+and+anonymity&pg=PA121#v=onepage&q=mira%20schor%20on%20failure%20and%20anonymity&f=false

contained in her book:
Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture
http://www.amazon.com/Wet-Painting-Feminism-Art-Culture/dp/0822319152


My question for this thread is, how does art stay alive in spite of the pressures of the market? Does it live at all? If you come across any writings about these issues please post them here.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Mar 09, 2011 8:06 pm

Gahh I read a very good essay by a well-known writter on preserving the arts in America a year or two ago. Let me think long and hard about this.

The thread on here about modern art and the CIA had some very good historical / contextual info on the value of art in culture.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby vanlose kid » Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:16 am

Image



Documenting the Heroic Rescue of Soviet Paintings in The Desert of Forbidden Art
By Ernest Hardy Wednesday, Mar 9 2011

Details
The Desert of Forbidden Art
Directed by Amanda Pope
and Tchavdar Georgiev
Opens March 11, Cinema Village

At its core, Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev’s engrossing documentary is a hero’s tale: Archaeologist and frustrated painter Igor Savitsky rescued more than 40,000 Soviet artworks (mainly paintings) from obscurity—tucked away in family closets and under beds, used as patching for roofs—and created a museum in the outback of Uzbekistan to house them. Many of the salvaged paintings are now considered 20th-century avant-garde masterpieces. After being told by one of his art heroes that his own work was rubbish, Savitsky devoted himself to recovering work that had run afoul of Stalin and the government-sanctioned Socialist Realism movement, which ruined not only careers but lives, as is painfully detailed in the film. Using wit and cunning, the obsessive Savitsky was able to con the government into providing funds for the creation and maintenance of his museum of dissident art. Pope and Georgiev let their camera linger on this collection, and create a dense but accessible context that illuminates the deadly political, religious, and historical tensions that made life precarious for the work and its creators—pressures that still linger today. It’s a must-see for anyone interested in art.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-03-09/ ... idden-art/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Deser ... 5270678632


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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby vanlose kid » Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:22 am

Art of Mu Xin survives oppression of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution
By Carrie Golus
News Office

ImageMu Xin, Spring Brilliance at kuaiji, 1977-1979

During the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted a decade (1966 to 1976), artists and intellectuals experienced a level of oppression that is difficult, even now, to comprehend.

In an attempt to survive during this period, artist and writer Mu Xin held low-profile posts and chose not to participate in official life. Even so, he was imprisoned three times, and more than 20 book-length manuscripts and hundreds of paintings that he had produced in secret were destroyed.

Under these conditions, most artists in China stopped creating art as self-expression. Mu Xin, however, continued to write and paint, even though he risked his life to do so. Remarkably, some of the work he produced during this period and immediately afterward has survived and will be exhibited for the first time at the Smart Museum of Art beginning today.

“Mu Xin is really a remarkable case,” said Wu Hung, the Harrie H. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Art History and the College and co-curator of “The Art of Mu Xin: Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes.” Wu discovered Mu Xin in the early 1980s, after the artist had immigrated to the United States.

ImageMu Xin, Prison Notes, 1971-1972 (detail)

“I was struck by the sense of natural beauty in his paintings, which draw upon Chinese and western classical aesthetics and also by the way he dealt with the trauma of the Cultural Revolution,” Wu said. “Other painters dealt literally with this trauma, while he internalized it and produced paintings that were so tranquil and so beautiful.” Soon afterward, Wu organized the first exhibition of Mu Xin’s work, a show at Harvard University.

Mu Xin was born in 1927 in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, to an wealthy, aristocratic family. Like most intellectuals in the late 1940s, he rallied around Mao Zedong’s vision for a new China, but he quickly became disillusioned. Between the Communist victory in 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, his family was dispersed, imprisoned or killed and their estate destroyed.

For Mu Xin, the harshest period came during the Cultural Revolution, when, Wu explained, “every school, institute and factory had its own jail.” From 1971 to 1972, Mu Xin was confined in one of these makeshift prisons, an abandoned air-raid shelter in Shanghai. The conditions in these so-called “people’s prisons” were brutal; inmates were routinely denied food, medical care, exercise, even light.

One thing that was provided was paper, so prisoners could write the forced confessionals known as “self-criticism.” During his incarceration, Mu Xin stole 66 sheets of this paper, covering both sides with tiny, meticulous script and hiding his writings in the cotton padding of his prison uniform.

Mu Xin was certainly not the only prisoner who continued to do creative work in jail––but the fact that the “Notes” were never discovered and that he was able to leave with them intact, is almost miraculous. “I was jailed at exactly the same time,” Wu said, “and I also wrote novels and so on. You wanted to survive intellectually, not just physically. But when I was transferred to a camp, I destroyed my own work.”

The worn, ink-blotched, almost illegible sheets offer a powerful record of Mu Xin’s mental life in prison. “His writings have nothing to do with the real world. They are concerned primarily with fantasy,” said Wu. “They deal with philosophy, literature, ancient Greek art. He lived in harsh conditions, but he was not a slave to them; he was able to transcend them.”

After Mu Xin left China in 1982, several collections of his essays and poetry were published in Taiwan, where he was regarded as an undiscovered genius. His “Landscape Paintings,” 33 gouache and ink works, were created while he was under house arrest in the late 1970s.

Unable to work during the day for fear of discovery, Mu Xin produced the paintings under cover of darkness. “By day I was a slave,” Mu Xin has said of this period, “by night, I was a prince.”

These small works depict imaginary and real sites drawn from the tradition of Chinese landscape in painting and poetry; their titles evoke an ancient cultural past. At the same time, the influence of Western artists is clear, especially Leonardo da Vinci, whom Mu Xin has called “my early teacher.”

Many Chinese artists have struggled with the desire to reinvent modern art while remaining loyal to traditional Chinese subject matter, said Alexandra Munroe, Director of the Japan Society Gallery in New York and co-curator of the exhibition.

However, Mu Xin’s artwork “transcends the East-West polemic that has traditionally framed the debate,” she said. “The fact is that Mu Xin’s painting stands alone in modern Chinese art.”

As a counterpoint to the exhibition, the Smart Museum will present “Exposure: Chinese Photography from the Smart Museum Collection.” This show of six large-scale photographs and photo-based installations features prominent artists such as Rong Rong and Qiu Zhijie.

“The Art of Mu Xin” opens today with a gallery talk at 5 p.m., led by co-curators Wu and Munroe, and a reception until 8 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through Sunday, March 31.

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/020124/muxin.shtml


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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Thu Mar 10, 2011 3:04 am

Thanks for those Vanlose.

I was aware of the Desert documentary and mused that it probably contains its own pro-US (facade) slant. Regardless these are heartening examples from overtly oppressive systems.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby vanlose kid » Thu Mar 10, 2011 3:51 am

Project Willow wrote:Thanks for those Vanlose.

I was aware of the Desert documentary and mused that it probably contains its own pro-US (facade) slant. Regardless these are heartening examples from overtly oppressive systems.


you're welcome.

re Desert, you're probably right. but the works and the artists themselves transcend that, don't they?

here's an SBS doc i found on youtube re the same:



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ps: here's the Desert trailer.



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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby vanlose kid » Thu Mar 10, 2011 4:18 am

another work saved by Savitsky. the title is fitting: Fascism is Advancing (according to the documentary).

Image
The Bull (1929), V. Lysenko (1903-1950ies), Savitsky Art Museum, Nukus, Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan

source: Karakalpakstan blog.

edit: museum website http://www.savitskycollection.org/

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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby nathan28 » Fri Mar 11, 2011 12:20 am

To throw in my unsolicited opinion...

Some of the most expensive art collections in the world are hanging on the office walls of banks and law firms with just little tiny understated placards that say "Paul Klee" or "Jasper Johns" and people just ignore them. Or, more really, they realize they're next to something with a six figure auction value and have no choice but to ignore it--why the hell haven't they stolen it yet? They could serve the next ten years (a white collar worker in prison with a second-degree-downgraded-to-manslaughter term? sure) and still come out ahead, financially speaking. And my understanding from a few art handlers is that very few of these are display reproductions. They're mostly originals, rotting in poorly controlled environments.

That, and this is maybe off-topic--um, we're in the lounge, right?--but whenever I hear or read someone say something like "what are you going to do with an art degree" I want to kick them in the teeth. "Do you know how much people make in the art world re-selling urinals? Jesus! It's not some 'romantic endeavor', it's a dog-eat-dog hellworld of obscenely competitive people? Hey, have you ever heard of a 'design firm', you know, like the people who draft the mock-ups for rich peoples' sinks? You know that if you work at one long enough you get letters with your name printed on the top? Do you have any idea how much money there is in that? And what about a 'creative' and 'design' department? You know, like the people who decided what your car dashboard looked like? Gosh, it's like there's a solid income out there just waiting to be had!"

My point there being is that so much "art" ends up as everyday design. Doorknobs. Chairs. Etc. Even those damn plastic lawn-chairs mass-produced and sold in wal-mart. Dimes to donuts says they went through more than one prototype and proof, and the actual inventor may be unknown, uncredited and un-royalty-ized, but he or she probably has a steady career of churning out cheap goods for the masses. Etc. etc.

If you mean "high art" IDK. It's hard to know where to draw the line. So much of the DIY stuff has gotten big from what I can tell, usually a placard that says something like "inspired by Japanese animation, French cartoons, urban environments and the death of his mother from cancer" that it's almost like garbage art or readymades are sort of the prototype of a prototype of a prototype. Put another way, the icons on my computer (which were free/ CC licensed) look like this stuff, just abstracted and two dimensional as opposed to a 'sculpture', but the creator had time and enough $$$ to share them.

Image
(link per flickr's policies, I think. don't taze my account, flickr-cops-bros)

I'm not an "artist" though when I was an adolescent I thought about it a lot but got scared away by the total lack of money and b/c I felt like it was just kind of narcissistic. Of course, what I needed was some people to make art with and then I wouldn't have felt that way but whatever. This is all sort of stream of consciousness and I'm currently very distracted by several personal matters so apologies for the incoherence.

Speaking of narcissism only I know what any of these icons do, but I mostly use keyboard shortcuts anyway.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Fri Mar 11, 2011 4:59 am

nathan28 wrote:To throw in my unsolicited opinion...


I actually did solicit opinions.

nathan28 wrote:If you mean "high art" IDK. It's hard to know where to draw the line.


I wouldn't call it "high" as I think that's the market talking, but I was making the assumption that a certain form of creative output, one not strictly in service as style or design to some other purpose, but that is reflective and intended primarily as communication, contains an inherent value. I suppose I carry some of the core biases of my time and culture.

nathan28 wrote: I'm not an "artist" though when I was an adolescent I thought about it a lot but got scared away by the total lack of money and b/c I felt like it was just kind of narcissistic.


That's not an uncommon opinion any longer, but would you consider a novelist, an editorial writer, or a musician to be narcissistic? If not, then what does that signify about visual art, is it failing its audience in some way?
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby vanlose kid » Fri Mar 11, 2011 11:48 am



Anna Akhmatova (Russian and Ukrainian: А́нна Ахма́това; June 23 [O.S. June 11] 1889 -- March 5, 1966) was the pen name of the modernist poet Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (Russian: А́нна Андре́евна Горе́нко; Ukrainian: А́нна Андрі́ївна Горе́нко), one of the most acclaimed female writers in the Russian canon.

Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935--40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterised by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry. Her writing can be said to fall into two periods - the early work (1912--25) and her later work (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output. Her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities and she is notable for choosing not to emigrate, and remaining in Russia, acting as witness to the atrocities around her. Her perennial themes include meditations on time and memory, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of Stalinism.

Primary sources of information about Akhmatova's life are relatively scant, as war, revolution and the totalitarian regime caused much of the written record to be destroyed. For long periods she was in official disfavour and many of those who were close to her died in the aftermath of the revolution.

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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Canadian_watcher » Fri Mar 11, 2011 12:20 pm

Project Willow wrote:
nathan28 wrote: I'm not an "artist" though when I was an adolescent I thought about it a lot but got scared away by the total lack of money and b/c I felt like it was just kind of narcissistic.


That's not an uncommon opinion any longer, but would you consider a novelist, an editorial writer, or a musician to be narcissistic? If not, then what does that signify about visual art, is it failing its audience in some way?


this is very thought-provoking.

Daily, as I sit and paint, I often think of how powerful music is in comparison to visual art. It's so much more immediate. Fiction writing, in terms of immediacy, seems to lie in between visual art and music. Yet what makes this so? It isn't about the effort required, since looking at one piece of art takes less time and involvement than listening to a song does and much, much less time than reading a novel or short story does.

In other words I don't think it has to do with how much time people have to invest to appreciate it. I think that one reason (one among many) for the disparity of appreciation between visual art and the other two media I've mentioned might be accessibility.

You can listen to a recording of music and get pretty close to the same experience you can get hearing it performed live. With fiction writing there is only one way to partake, no one ever gets a 'live' experience of it, really. With visual art - at least for me - there is a tremendous difference between seeing the original piece hung for display and seeing any type of reproduction of it. Scale is just one reason for this. Colour is another. Depth. Detail. Environment.

it would be interesting to see if appreciation for visual art (that which is termed fine art, anyway, not design) would increase if people had more exposure to it in a forthright way. Bringing it into schools - not off in a gallery but right there, in the hallways. Bringing it into malls in the same fashion. I dunno.. I just wish everyone could stand in front of the 'real thing' now and then, and feel that power. It's amazing.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby nathan28 » Fri Mar 11, 2011 12:21 pm

Project Willow wrote:That's not an uncommon opinion any longer, but would you consider a novelist, an editorial writer, or a musician to be narcissistic? If not, then what does that signify about visual art, is it failing its audience in some way?



Actually, yes. I don't really feel that way anymore but seriously I have a problem with money and financial stability, I skip meals regularly when I feel like I "can't afford that because I need to buy new brake shoes" (I can) them, so actually being an underemployed artist would be a huge problem. Also when I finished high school trying to take art classes was remarkably difficult, just at a practical level. That's not an excuse--I'm not complaining--that's how I felt at the time.

It's more my anti-romantic streak, really. And I don't think it's thought-provoking, really. All that crap about quests for meaning and 'authenticity' etc. that makes every single person sound like Joseph Campbell and the Bolligen Foundation and that whole faux-Hegelian nonsense, which is really, really the other side of "corporate". Paul Mellon was funding all those books. There just has to be a way to back away from all that horseshit. I'm just very averse to "meaning" if it isn't extremely byzantine, referential and ironic. Syriana and Magnolia are two of my favorite movies and they're about as transparent as video game code. But god help anyone who talks about "journeys" (like they're Col. Kurtz going off into the jungle (of the id (to ship more heroin back home for their corporate masters))) "into the self" "of the hero" etc. etc. [insert additional stock criticism of bourgeois consciousness here]

That said I have no issue with "art therapy" or even putting that stuff on display.

There's definitely people who let their narcissistic wounds get into everything they do (David Brooks, I know you cry yourself to sleep every night, alone, on a pile of money, but still alone) and usually we call them "hacks" or "paid by the word".
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Sat Mar 12, 2011 12:20 am

Canadian_watcher wrote:I think that one reason (one among many) for the disparity of appreciation between visual art and the other two media I've mentioned might be accessibility.


I agree, but then again I'm not certain. We are constantly inundated with provocative imagery, most of it attempting to mold our behavior or persuade in some way. The ability to create and disseminate images is more widespread than it has ever been and it can occur with great rapidity. I can imagine that these factors might limit the effectiveness of a project to bring art back to the people, at least in some cases. Maybe we'll eventually come full circle back to needing the museum or gallery to set pieces in special environments where quiet contemplation is encouraged or even required. Or perhaps technology makes an artist out of every one and drawing a line somewhere between the output of some and all others will again mainly serve market forces.

nathan28 wrote:All that crap about quests for meaning and 'authenticity' etc. that makes every single person sound like Joseph Campbell and the Bolligen Foundation and that whole faux-Hegelian nonsense, which is really, really the other side of "corporate". Paul Mellon was funding all those books. There just has to be a way to back away from all that horseshit. I'm just very averse to "meaning" if it isn't extremely byzantine, referential and ironic. Syriana and Magnolia are two of my favorite movies and they're about as transparent as video game code.


Magnolia is one of my all time favorites as well, and there's probably no mystery as to why. There's really not a whole lot of mystery to my own work, if you know the back story. I like to think humans are like that as well. But I believe you've touched on a problem the art world has with audiences. Most artists have stopped talking to them. The artists I know carry out discussions with imagined curators and collectors, with academics and critics and each other, all people with special knowledge. This claim is nothing new, however, it was made long ago. Then it was ridiculed in painting projects and performance art, so I don't know why I bother to repeat it, except that the whole process went on outside of the awareness of the general public, as far as I can tell.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby vanlose kid » Sat Mar 12, 2011 11:20 pm

don't know how to say this, PW, but i think the answer's in your own posts.

i think they pretty much say what i'd say in reply to the OP which is that you distinguish between art and the "business of art".

your artist friends who make art that pleases a certain clientel, they remind me of the artists who went along with the Stalinist program. not in that they're cruel or whatever, but just that they stay in line.

as you yourself say, they're pretty far from people's lives and the everyday. it's no wonder they don't get the attention and praise they feel they deserve from the rabble.

then again, if people took you to heart, it'd take another 150 years before they "art world" woke up to you. you can't have both, i guess.

but you can survive, i'd say.

the fact that your art doesn't pay might actually benefit your art more than you know, precisely because no one's paying you for it.

besides, what else are you going to do? what you do is necessary to you, it ain't a job or career.

you're an artist.

do what you have to do.


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edit: apologies beforehand if that comes off as boneheadedly trivial and stupid.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Sat Mar 12, 2011 11:50 pm

^ I always appreciate your contributions. I'm a fan you might say. :basicsmile
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