FEEL ROMANTIC/NO ART STATUS II

"When you say 'who wants to live with something' it sounds very collector oriented...Which is not how I think about work. I think that all the works are not something that I would want to look at all the time, and I think that's what makes interesting art to me. And I think there is something about duration, there's something for me about the fact that the photos are going into an exhibition-that's why it's so hard for me to make projects for printed matter, part of my practice is the fact that something would be taken down."

-Elad Lassry

I've been thinking a lot about success lately, what it means, how it relates to the practice of art-making.

I was reading an interview with Elad Lassry (a currently successful art-maker) in the most recent ANP Quarterly. I guess you'd call him a conceptual artist, but contemporary art is fairly specific and pedantic about labeling movements (it is discussed in the interview, for instance, that Elad is not part of the "New Conceptualism" movement) so who knows? Many of the ideas discussed ("the image," "the death of authorship") fit well with the abstraction I've built in my head to represent the social system of the contemporary art scene. These ideas elevate photographs, images, readymades, sculptures, etc. to something other than their quotidian selves. It seems like a game about knowing rules that are constantly shifting. It reminds me of fashion, how nothing has an absolute value, just a relative one according to what the conventions of the moment are.

This dialogue is what art has become, every successful artist engaged unwittingly (wittingly?) in a performance to keep themselves and their work "relevant." duh, duh, duh, duh, duh... Here's one of Lassry's photograph-objects:

"It's not that they're not stand-ins-they are-but part of what the work deals with is this potential of subjecthood, this slim potential for the unknown that leaves this need for other objects to enter, so all of a sudden there has opened a space to more than one headshot, because between them there are these multiple possibilities that became relevant to me." -E.L, again

I have a romantic attachment to particularity. I cling to the mid-twentieth century notion that language can't describe everything. Or this character I'm playing who is invested in having an ethos thinks so. It's tricky.

This is a performance for myself, a framing device for me.

The point is, though, why make a conceptual work? Is it to leave an artifact of the time you spent thinking? Is it a way to engage with a physical space and include others in the process of making sense of it? There's little more that I get from Lassry's images than: "huh - this confirms my expectations and prejudices." Or is that reductive bullshit? What do I do with it? Why are conceptual works usually just "profundity" in the form of a punchline? The art world seems so insular, making an object-that-is-incidentally-a-photograph-and-may-or-may-not-be-a-reference-to-the-history-of-art-and-objecthood-in-general seems like a cop out, a way to have something to sell and promote that is also critical of that side of things, less a spiritual practice than a way to have your cake and eat it too. But there's a support system of artists and patrons that facilitate that kind of work. I'm not a part of that world: bitter gripe, bitter gripe, bitter gripe... I tweeted this after the Portland Publication Fair:

"I'm a sucker"

I am a very self-indulgent maker. While the work I'm creating does engage with the concerns of culture, I'm less interested in participating in the social aspect of art than in using art-making as a tool to fill time, give me focus and goals, help me understand my surroundings and find "meaning" in things (or at least have epiphanies).

I received an e-mail from someone calling themselves "not-cf" saying:

"If you put Which Episode, Spiderman, Jesus, SS/BW, et al. in a book, please let me know. Sum uv #1 draw i eva c"

I know not to take this very seriously, but I also know that if I make more comics like those pages, folks would be interested in what I'm doing. Why should I give a shit? Why do I do this?

In the comics community the strategy of making ugly work that is quasi-conceptually challenging doesn't seem to work. I won't make money drawing comics (luckily, I like my day job) so why make objects out of them? Isn't online dissemination the best way to have your art seen by the greatest number of people? Do the strips need a specific context? Do I need anyone to see what I'm doing? Do I need to participate in a social system of trading?

Alright - I'm getting sick of this: too earnest, too earnest, too earnest. Here's a list of other things I might've discussed:

Manny Farber

succe

can't get away from didacticism but feel like I should just be making images that look cool

"the image"

EC comics and conceptualism

this tweet about this:

Readymade vs cartoonist's style

Internet vs physical distribution

Self vs "mediated" self