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Theory NOW

Theory NOW
A discursive site about the relevance of art theory now.

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Articles

Neo Flux
2007-11-29 18:49:00
?The formalist project in geometry is discredited. It no longer seems possible to explore form as form (in the shape of geometry), as it did to the Constructivists and Neo-Plasticists, nor to empty geometric form of its signifying function, as the Minimalists proposed. To some extent, the viability of these formalist ideas has simply atrophied with time. They have also been distorted and bent to conform to the bourgeois idealism of generations of academically-minded geometric classicists. But the crisis besetting geometric art for the last two decades can also be viewed as characteristic of the crises that have beset formalisms of all kinds in the postwar era: those that precipitated the transition from literary formalism to structuralism and from structuralism to the post-structuralist re-examinations that have taken place in the work of such figures as Barthes and Foucault . . . the crisis of geometry is a crisis of the signified. It no longer seems possible to accept geometric fo...
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Mark Cameron Boyd at Galerie Ingrid Cooper
2007-11-20 16:08:00
Administrator's Note: John James Anderson, DC artist and lecturer on fine art and new media at American University, George Mason University and George Washington University has kindly granted permission to re-publish the following review: A little over a week ago I traveled up the Rockville Pike to see Mark Cameron Boyd 's recent exhibition at Galerie Ingrid Cooper . Seldom have I ventured north into Maryland to view an exhibition, and I became a bit dumbfounded to learn the gallery was in the White Flint Shopping Mall. This would be curious, at least.Art in a mall conjures up images of strange poster/prints replicating paintings derived from movie stills and promotional advertising for movies: stuff to hang in a dorm room. But, the idea of selling and purchasing art in a shopping mall makes perfect sense. There is a high volume of foot traffic; people are going there specifically to spend money; and there is no limit to that money to spend. Down the hall a visitor may spend severa...
More About: Erie

Beware the Supplement
2007-11-15 16:48:00
Administrator's note: Due to pressing matters requiring urgent attention I am republishing this post from November 2006.Much of contemporary art needs the supplement of theory to be approached, yet often a particular critical reading of an artist is rendered inaccurate by its theoretical position. Singaporean essayist Lee Weng Choy questions the privileging of ?only one reading? of an artist?s work and suggests that it is the contradictions in artwork that ?make it possible to speak to the work critically in the first place.?(1) I propose that even contradictions within a misguided critique of an artist can open the possibility of a different reading under close scrutiny. If we are to expand the discourse on contemporary art theory, we must question previously held yet problematic beliefs, always at the ready to re-write art history with supplemental critiques based on more stringent or diverse critical perspectives, especially points of view that counteract accepted and publish...
More About: Paul Mc , Carthy , Supplement , Beware

(In)Appropriate Behavior
2007-11-09 19:43:00
If the process of appropriation has its roots in history, its narrative here will begin with the readymade, which represents its first conceptualized manifestation, considered in relation to the history of art. When Duchamp exhibits a manufactured object (a bottle rack, a urinal, a snow shovel) as a work of the mind, he shifts the problematic of the ?creative process,? emphasizing the artist?s gaze brought to bear on an object instead of manual skill. He asserts that the act of choosing is enough to establish the artistic process, just as the act of fabricating, painting, or sculpting does: to give a new idea to an object is already production. Duchamp thereby completes the definition of the term creation: to create is to insert an object into a new scenario, to consider it a character in a narrative.(1)Thus, Nicolas Bourriaud joins the growing legions of critics who continue to solidify Duchamp?s impact on art, especially conceptual art, nearly 100 years after his first readymad...
More About: Behavior , Prop

Dolls Without Nipples
2007-11-02 18:29:00
Unlike previous female ?body artists? (Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke), Vanessa Beecroft does not to use her own body in her art but prefers using other female bodies for her work. Since 1993, Beecroft has presented various self-initialed and numbered tableau as ?performances.? These notably involve nude or near-nude models and feature accessorized fashion. Furthermore, the models? ?actions? are controlled by Beecroft?s ?orders,? i.e., ?do not move; do not talk, do not interact with the audience.? There are a number of ways to begin a discussion of Beecroft?s work but the emphasized components of nude femininity coupled with fragmentary and fetisihized fashion might raise one particular question: do some female artists re-enforce male objectification of women?s bodies through their sexualized imagery?In many of Beecroft?s performances the models wear high-fashion clothing such as the Gucci bikinis in VB35. This was intensely juxtaposed with a few completely nake...
More About: Nipples , Dolls , Doll

Re-Positionings
2007-10-25 16:03:00
Two recent art items signal an intriguing possibility of a ?re-positioning? by both artists and critics which may also portend a groundswell of reassessment in art discourse. A brief article on sculptor Doris Salcedo?s Shibboleth (in Tate Modern?s Turbine Hall through April 6, 2008) described an installation that ?begins as a hairline crack in the concrete floor of the building, then widens and deepens as it snakes across the room.? In attempting to clarify the ?mystery? of her 548 foot-long work, Salcedo denies the importance of her work?s process, preferring instead to stress her interpretation of it: ?What is important is the meaning of the piece. The making of it is not important.?(1)Which struck me as a rather broad dismissal of the process of artmaking and a disingenuous presumption by Salcedo concerning an artwork?s ?meaning.? Salcedo is also quoted as saying the crevice ?represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of ra...
More About: Position

Chris's Burden
2007-10-18 14:28:00
The threat of violence and destruction is latent in much of Chris Burden?s early performance art and helped cast him as Southern California?s ?bad boy? artist in the 1970s. Working out of his Venice studio, Chris had himself shot with a .22 rifle, nailed to a Volkswagen roof, fired a pistol at an airliner, tried to ?breathe? underwater, crossed two ?hot? electric wires at his chest (above) and assaulted a television journalist by holding a knife to her throat.(1) These are difficult performance art pieces that Burden was keen to present as ?sculptures.? They have a mythic presence in ?body art? yet he has grown reticent to talk about them as he aged, apparently seeking to distance himself from his destructive early work. His evolving sculptural process began to explore the physics of stress and energy (Samson and Big Wheel) with a whimsical fascination with the ?gee whiz? of science. Yet the legacy of Burden?s body art assured that the possibility of imminent and unpredictable ...

Ma Kelly's Boy
2007-10-11 17:57:00
A provocative and seminal artwork, Mary Kell y?s Post Partum Document (1973-1979) is the archetype for the consideration of femininity defined through theory. Kelly?s clear appreciation for Jacques Lacan?s views on the social construction of subjectivity provides remarkable evidence of one female artist?s emergence from the traditional methodologies of her interpretive field - art ? and her search for other possibilities of approach to art.An expansion of the ?work? across 139 objects, drawings, texts and graphs, PPD is conceptual in its scope by challenging accepted ideas concerning the ?object.? Kelly?s time-based project records her son?s entry into the social order at the same time that it disrupts the artwork as singular entity. Taking her cue from linguistic theories (via Lacan) Kelly proposed that femininity is defined through its representational differences instead of essential biological differences between the sexes.(1) Focusing on motherhood as under-recognized labo...

The Matter of Immateriality
2007-10-04 16:13:00
The focus on materiality and the form an art object would or could take underwent a transformative period during the late 1960?s. The work of Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner and Bernard Venet each would explore the tendency of matter to transmit both determinate and indeterminate meanings.Robert Barry?s experiments with gases like argon and helium reveal his evident fascination with the idea that the use of certain materials as ?art? can show us that art need not be visible. If the Modernist ideology suggested that art should be reduced to its materials, its medium specificity (see Clement Greenberg), then artists like Barry were engaging the conceptual dimension of materiality. In creating actions like Inert Gas Series (1969) where he released 2 cubic feet of helium (?a material that is imperceivable?) in the Mojave Desert to ?infinite expansion?(1), Barry points out that visuality is irrelevant to art and art could be as much about invisible physio-chemical constituents. Interes...
More About: Matter , Sol Lewitt , Materia , Ality

Conceptual Process
2007-09-27 22:59:00
Is Card File by Robert Morris the ?first ?purely? conceptual work of art??(1) At least two art theorists have weighed in on this 1962 artwork?s self-reflexive character and its ?predominately linguistic nature?(2) that continues the inexorable attack on objects, ?seeming to parody the modernist obsession with the autonomy of the art object.?(3) The 44 index cards contained in the file document the ?steps the artist followed in the conception and making of the work?(3) by using another system of representation, i.e., language. The linguistic advantage would be thoroughly exploited by others fairly quickly (Yoko Ono, Mel Ramsden, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, John Baldessari). Yet Card File subtly introduced another art concept that would remain somewhat dormant for a few years before erupting as process. That the form of Card File is fully manifested through the process undertaken by Morris in its conception and making is clearly the essential element of the work. We understa...
More About: Process , Conceptual

A Stretcher Named Desire
2007-09-20 17:04:00
Whether it was Ad Reinhardt?s space as the ?elimination of color,? or the anticipatory and subtle ?presence? of Anne Truitt?s monochromatic slabs, the art being made by ?late Modern? American abstractionists of the heady 1950?s had a bold breakaway feel of ?the last advanced painting.? But a 23-year-old New Yorker named Frank Stella would shrink the gap between the literal shape (of the stretcher) and the ?depicted? shape within the painting?s framing edge. It was his brash and impassioned consideration and heroic pursuit of an interdependent image to object that would stress the relationship of image and object as a unified thing.Stella accomplished this simply through process. In his mind, the older ideas ?about relational painting, i.e. the balancing of the various parts of the painting with and against each other? were ?problems which had to be faced.? His ?solution? was to eliminate ?illusionistic space out of a painting at constant intervals by using a regulated pattern.?(...
More About: Etch , Stretch

Transaction Voided
2007-09-13 17:20:00
?Having rejected nothingness, I discovered the void. The meaning of the immaterial pictorial zones, extracted from the depth of the void which by that time was of a very material order. Finding it unacceptable to sell these immaterial zones for money, I insisted in exchange for the highest quality of the immaterial, the highest quality of material payment ? a bar of pure gold. Incredible as it may seem, I have actually sold a number of these pictorial immaterial states . . . Painting no longer appeared to me to be functionally related to the gaze, since during the blue monochrome period of 1957 I became aware of what I called the pictorial sensibility. This pictorial sensibility exists beyond our being and yet belongs in our sphere. We hold no right of possession over life itself. It is only by the intermediary of our taking possession of sensibility that we are able to purchase life. Sensibility enables us to pursue life to the level of its base material manifestations, in t...
More About: Tran , Ansa

Villeglé's Re-contextualized Meaning
2007-09-06 21:53:00
The mid-Twentieth Century work of décollagist Jacques Ville glé (often in collaboration with Raymond Hains) provides a glimpse into appropriation as both technique and art movement. Forgetting for the moment 1980?s appropriation art (Levine, Kruger, Pettibone, Sturtevant, et al., after the seeds of citation sown by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Johns), Villeglé?s earlier ?use? of posters torn from Parisian walls signaled a bold intervention into the ?social order? that further disrupted the fragile aesthetics of visuality that were under siege by the 1950?s. Abstract expressionism had already peaked in the New York School and other ideas about how to extend abstraction were undergoing intense analysis in multiple quarters. The ?unconscious? mark or the random incidents of chance were notable art theories of resolute effectiveness but were beginning to lose their avant garde sheen. Meanwhile in post-war Paris, Villeglé had already begun to relocate his ?art practice? into...
More About: Meaning

A Conceptual Act
2007-08-24 21:30:00
During the long dog days of Summer '08, dominated as they have been by Richard Serra?s retrospective and Martin Creed?s self-conscious ?Stylistic Conceptual Art? (classification courtesy of Professor Joseph Kosuth) at the Center for Collegiate Studies, one virtual footnote might have escaped your surfdom. ArtNet?s German site first picked it up, and condensed a brief English mention of an artist rights law suit which poses that intriguing question, ?Where does the copyright protection of a work of art begin??Briefly, a conceptual artist named Ayse Erkmen has claimed that Berlin-based conceptual artist Peter Friedl had stolen her idea of using a taxidermied giraffe in an art installation. Friedl?s piece, The Zoo Story, made it to Documenta 12 this summer so Erkmen began legal proceedings to prohibit him from using an ?idea? she claims to have had in 2004. Erkmen apparently ?conceived? a plan to ?borrow? a stuffed giraffe - and other stuffed animals from the Qalqiliyah Zoo in P...

R.I.P. Max Roach (1924-2007)
2007-08-19 21:42:00
"Max Roach treads that fine line between anticipation and reaction which distinguishes the true accompanist. His playing on this track is a wonderful example of how to interact without being obtrusive, at the same time commenting on virtually every phrase that floats by. Each component of the drum set can be brought to the forefront to accentuate any of Roach?s sophisticated patterns. Moreover, there is the pure joy in swinging and pacing the solos that is unique to his playing at this time".- from Loren Schoenberg?s liner notes to Savoy Records? The Genius of Charlie Parker.
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SONDHEIM SEMIFINALIST EXHIBITION
2007-07-12 15:22:00
Artist's Reception: Thursday, 19 July, 2007.Image: MCB working on A practice that definitively involves presence; © Copyright 2007 by Mark Cameron Boyd.
More About: Exhibition , Fina , Semifinal , Exhibit

IN THE STUDIO
2007-06-29 17:52:00
Currently at work on two new pieces for my contribution to the Sondheim semifinalist exhibition. Progress reports HERE.
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READER /FEEDER
2007-06-16 00:36:00
?. . . a particular duration of an action occurring in a particular space.? TEXT: M. Cameron Boyd WRITING: Rachel FickSOUND: Brian O'DonoghueCHORDS: Scott BoydSaturday, 23 June, 20076-8 pmMatrix Building1529A 14th St. NW, WDC
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Performance Simulacra: Reenactment as (Re)Authoring
2007-06-01 00:18:00
It has now become an urgent matter to re-assert the original focus and conception of performance as a contemporary art practice. Current essays concerning the "cultural phenomenon of reenactments" express a somewhat relaxed critical approach to performance art, proposing that it is capable of "challenging and reassigning the authorial agency of the (re)performed works."(1) As such views proliferate through contemporary art's discourse, I fear they may whittle away at performance art as first presented in the 1970?s and eventually erode its ontology as an art practice. As a practice, performance art is characterized by the ephemeral yet is distinctly marked by two features that also qualify as criteria for evaluation: duration and presence. As I have previously written, "The performance act is time-based certainly, and thus expresses itself in the duration of those actions by the performer(s), and our focus is on the physical body (presence) of the performance artist(s)."An ar...
More About: Performance , Perform

The Bedazzled Syndrome
2007-05-21 22:23:00
Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?- John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten) to the audience from the stage, 14 January, 1978.News that graffiti artist Banksy now commands low-six-figure prices at Sotheby's should come as no surprise, given that art historical precedents have long established the ?outlaw? artist as a worthy commodity. Rebellious artists are never more desirable than when they toil in the shadows and, as a recent New Yorker article on Banksy attests, struggle mightily to maintain that anonymity. We duly revere our reclusive artists, from Duchamp to Dylan, and will forgive their obsessive reticence to discuss their art, particularly if they happen to be geniuses. I have neither the time nor the inclination to unpack Banksy?s aesthetic value here, but urge other critics and art theorists to delve into his street-art interventions that utilize a distinctly Surrealist, yet re-cycled juxtaposition for their effect. Instead, I wish to spotlight how Banksy?s near sadist...
More About: Syndrome

The Bedazzled Syndrome
2007-05-21 22:23:00
Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?- John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten) to the audience from the stage, 14 January, 1978.News that graffiti artist Banksy now commands low-six-figure prices at Sotheby's should come as no surprise, given that art historical precedents have long established the ?outlaw? artist as a worthy commodity. Rebellious artists are never more desirable than when they toil in the shadows and, as a recent New Yorker article on Banksy attests, struggle mightily to maintain that anonymity. We duly revere our reclusive artists, from Duchamp to Dylan, and will forgive their obsessive reticence to discuss their art, particularly if they happen to be geniuses. I have neither the time nor the inclination to unpack Banksy?s aesthetic value here, but urge other critics and art theoreticians to delve into his street-art interventions that utilize a distinctly Surrealist, yet re-cycled juxtaposition for their effect. Instead, I wish to spotlight how Banksy?s near s...
More About: Syndrome

Curatorial Practice, Pt. 3
2007-05-15 23:42:00
Two contemporary art exhibitions in Washington, D.C. might provoke our further consideration of the implications of curatorial practice, particularly if undertaken by artists themselves. Generally speaking, contemporary art?s curatorial efforts are, for the most part, initiated by persons trained in either institutional settings or from the ?vantage point? of art history. However, these recent exhibits were mounted by artists who define themselves by their art practice, rather than as curators, and this ?difference? appears to project an ?insider?s? point of view concerning contemporary art. In the case of Supple , the show itself consisted of ?abstract? work of varying degrees of effectiveness from (for the most part) proven entities, i.e., established artists with commercial gallery representation. Concomitant discourse that has issued concerning Supple mostly neglects the ?objects? in favor of either lampooning or publicizing a controversial ?live installation? by a young arti...
More About: Practice

The Database
2007-05-11 01:25:00
Administrator?s Note: This week?s post, the last of this semester, is by Randolph Williams and it focuses our attention on theories of the narrative as related to New Media.?In computer science, database is defined as a structured collection of data. The data stored in a database is organized for fast search and retrieval by a computer and therefore it is anything but a simple collection of items.?Lev Manovich, believes that the database form has replaced the narrative as new media favors this form over others. New media is defined through objects borne from the computer age. This database form is problematic because it creates a rift in the way human culture has previously stored information. Previously, humans have constructed ways to store and display information that allow a viewer to gauge its significance within its context. The new media database not only allows for information to be pulled out of context, but also allows for information to be altered at any given moment. A c...
More About: Database , Taba , The D , Base

Repo Pop Cult
2007-05-06 10:11:00
Administrator's Note: This week I have decided to re-publish portions of a previous post that I wrote on the "interpellative address" of media as a "metonymic factor in post-conceptualism.". . . In our reading of Laura Kipnis?s "Repo ssessing Popular Cult ure" this week, she paraphrased Peter Burger ?s Theory of the Avant-Garde, in which he goes to great pains to split the origins of Modernism into two oppositional components. On one hand were the original aestheticists, who developed an art of ?purity,? where form was the ?supreme? content, an art that possessed ?autonomy from the concerns of everyday life.? Rising up against this were the ?original? avant-gardists, with their brilliant use of ?shock? and contestatory manifestoes, seeking to return art to an engagement with the people, to ?rebel against the enforced social impotence of art determined by institutional status.?. . . Marcel Duchamp first exhibited his bicycle wheel as a ?readymade? in 1913, before the start of World ...

Repo Pop Cult
2007-05-06 10:11:00
Administrator's Note: This week I have decided to re-publish portions of a previous post that I wrote on the "interpellative address" of media as a "metonymic factor in post-conceptualism.". . . In our reading of Laura Kipnis?s "Repo ssessing Popular Cult ure" this week, she paraphrased Peter Burger?s Theory of the Avant-Garde, in which he goes to great pains to split the origins of Modernism into two oppositional components. On one hand were the original aestheticists, who developed an art of ?purity,? where form was the ?supreme? content, an art that possessed ?autonomy from the concerns of everyday life.? Rising up against this were the ?original? avant-gardists, with their brilliant use of ?shock? and contestatory manifestoes, seeking to return art to an engagement with the people, to ?rebel against the enforced social impotence of art determined by institutional status.?. . . Marcel Duchamp first exhibited his bicycle wheel as a ?readymade? in 1913, before the start of World ...

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