Ah, the magic of the internet. I just learned that an elementary school classmate of mine, Natacha Diels, is currently the creative director for Ensemble Pamplemousse, an electro-acoustic avant-chamber group in New York City. I'm very impressed, and a little bit jealous. From the snippets I've seen, I bet their music is very interesting to see performed live. Perhaps I'll get the chance someday.
Pamplemousse is the French word for grapefruit. I know that because Natacha's mother came to our class and taught us some French. I remember learning the word pamplemousse; I'm pretty sure Natacha was there, too.
If you're interested in other music like this, I won't be of much help. But check out Basilica, based in Bloomington Indiana, directed by my friend Ben S. Jacob.
It's difficult to get one's head around the sheer volume of objects in our lives that are produced in China. It's a bit like trying to imagine the number of hydrogen molecules contained in the sun. But we don't need to count the hydrogen to know that the sun comes up every day.
It's a little easier to grasp China's global economic impact by examining it one niche at a time. Take Dafen, for example. Dafen is a suburn of Shenzhen in China's Guangdong province where the bulk of the world's paintings are made. Here is an image to help bring that idea home:
Dafen raises all kinds of questions in my Western mind:
Is this a sweatshop? Does that make the purchase of these paintings unethical?
Are they feeding a public hungry for the same old, same old thing?
Why do people want reproductions that they know are reproductions? (Oh, yeah, because they can't have the original.)
Does Chinese culture have any appreciation for original works of art? (Some answers to this question can be found in Philip Tinari's article on Dafen for Art Forum, October 2007.)
Are the paintings forgeries, reproductions, imitations, products, or art objects?
What exactly does or does not qualify as an art object?
Is art a commodity? Should art be bought and sold? How often, for how much, to whom? How expensive does an object have to be before it's considered art?
Are the Dafen painters artists? (These ones certainly are.) Do they have talent as well as skill? Does it matter for what they're doing?
If I learn a bit of the language, do they have any job openings? Might they subsidize a few oil painting lessons?
Dafen's customers are shopping for paintings instead of prints, and reproductions (of public domain works) rather than forgeries. A quick Google search for "Dafen oil painting" yields a variety of digital storefronts through which one can browse works sorted by artist name, subject, style, or size. No one is trying to fool anyone here. I don't seem to be upset about an art industry that shuns originality. In fact I enjoy anything that contradicts the twentieth century artist-as-lonely-genius mythos.
The Dafen example calls the nature of originality into question. It's a common conception in the Western world that artists create original objects, and the objects speak are an expression of the artist's individuality. We generally think if the artist isn't creating something from the heart, it isn't really art. But I don't consider myself an originator. I have never been good at creating images out of thin air. (After several years in art school I learned that the out-of-thin-air idea is a myth. Using models and references will make your art, whether abstract or realistic, better every time.) I absorb information from all around me, process it, filter it, and send it back out in the form of drawings and paintings. It's been a long time since I was interested in trying to come up with the "next big idea." I can tell you this: if American art education was more concerned with technique, skill, and discipline rather than expressing individuality, we might be a little cozier with the Dafen model. Like it or not, their paintings are very well-made. Whether or not you want to call it art is up to you.
The classic short film Powers of Ten encourages us to step out of our immediate physical and temporal frame of reference. Any activity that breaks us away from our half-second-unit information-heavy attentions nowadays is a healthy one. Looking at an image, for example, is a great way to allow yourself a long moment.
Bill Viola is another artist whose work demands that we slow down. If you are lucky enough to be in an art museum that has a Viola in their collection, do yourself a favor and stand in front of it for at least two minutes. What at first appears to be a still image will be revealed as a super-slow-motion moving picture -- a long moment. (Here is Bill Viola at Wikipedia.)
Also out this week is a trailer for the documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. While watching the abovementioned clip from Koyaanisquatsi, I heard a snippet of the score and thought, "Gosh, that sounds like Philip Glass." Sure enough, it is. You'd have thunk I went to college.
Finally, if you're looking to step way way way out of your current temporal perception, look into the Long Now Foundation. Among other projects, they're building a 10,000-year clock.
This video, which came to me via bOingbOing, shows us an experiment staged by Klara.be, a Belgian cultural collective. In the above scenario, a Luc Tuymans painting is removed from its gallery context and placed on an ordinary street. Only 4 percent of passersby stop to look at the painting. The purpose of this experiment may have been to slap us with a shockingly low number to demonstrate how underappreciated art is. But other voices in the video seem to contradict that. One representative from Christie's maintains that art is context-dependent, so we shouldn't be surprised when interest in art plummets outside the gallery:
"...art is usually defined by the intention for it to be a work of art, and the context in which you see it." (quote from the video)
That's the central problem with art after the twentieth century. As soon as it became okay to make any object into art (or no object at all), our culture lost the ability to determine what is art and what isn't. (I see that as an inevitable, not a negative, development.) Plus, with so much visual culture (advertising, cinema, television, internet) saturating our attention, it can be difficult to tell if an image is intended for our quick consumption or sustained contemplation. That's where context comes in: if the image is in a magazine, we know it's okay to flip the page. In a museum, we know we're supposed to stop and consider.
This experiment neither surprises nor discourages me. I already know that as a painter, my impact on human history is extremely small, and that's okay. I chose a path and have worked hard to perform well at it -- that satisfies me. Tuymans himself seems reconciled to his role in visual culture:
"I don't think that art can change the world. That's not what art is about. Art is about creating images and passing on ideas." (translated quote from the above video)
I agree. Art is a form of communication. One piece of information passed between two entities is all that's needed for a successful communication. If just one person stops to look at a picture I made, then I've done my job. My success is not measured by a certain number of eyeballs. Every creation matters, and every viewer matters.
Snip from the interview, in which Gloeckner talks about how she teaches art students:
...the classes change from semester to semester, but no matter the topic, the basic principle underlying my "method" of teaching (developed in just two years) is that a properly prepared artist/creator must simply know everything. Not just how to draw, but how to see. Not just how to use a computer program, but what the word "penultimate" means. And the shape and orientation of a goat's pupil. And where Kentucky and Chile are, at least approximately. The only way to know everything is to learn how to think, how to ask questions, how to navigate the world. Students must learn how to teach themselves to use new tools, how to talk to unfamiliar people, and basically how to be brave.
