Directory — Arts — Blog Details for "Theory NOW"

Theory NOW

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

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Articles

Stone Summer Theory Institute: 1
2009-09-20 18:03:00
Later today, School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor James Elkins will give a lecture on ?What Do Artists Know?? and launch a week of discourse concerning the imminent (some say over-due) arrival of ?studio-based? doctorates in the United States. Prof. Elkins? talk is first on the agenda for the 2009 Stone Summer Theory Institute conference; seven days of seminars, lectures and round-tables, featuring Sir Christopher Frayling, expert on PhD research and author of a frequently cited essay on ?research into, through and for art and design,? and Roy Sorensen, professor of philosophy at Washington University.(1)I am here because I occasionally reference Prof. Elkins? scholarship in my essays and admire his critical writing. I discovered SSTI last year; the 2008 conference topic was ?What is an Image?? and featured a diverse selection of seminars and readings. When I learned that this year?s conference topic was going to be ?What Do Artists Know?? I decided that I must attend...

Critical Fragments: Autonomy
2009-09-10 22:26:00
?Instead of assuming responsibility for culture in concert with the producers of culture, the state and its political functionaries, citing a strained culture budget, have delegated that responsibility to an antiquated patronage system (which, to make things worse, is often confused with sponsoring). Offensive or aggressive art-sponsoring campaigns, which bring tax benefits, offer a cost-effective means of exploiting artistic production to which many institutions and artists now find themselves compelled to resort. [?] My concern relates rather to the fact that we need to identify the circumstances that surround this situation and to make the complex relationships involved transparent to students engaged in art studies, in order to encourage reflection about the circumstances in which we operate under the influence of such developments.?(1)Artistic autonomy, hard-won since the nineteenth century, has undergone continual erosion in recent years. With the advent of these art-sponsor...
More About: Autonomy , Critical

Derivation & Originality
2009-09-06 02:10:00
Administrator's note: Earlier this week a young artist sent me some images of recent work and asked if I would critique them. My reply was not brief as I spent some time viewing the images and considering my thoughts about them. I share it here because it does provoke an interesting possibility for further discussion about those old puzzles of "originality" and "derivative work."Without revealing too much about the artist or the nature of the work, I can safely tell you that the artwork critiqued is text-based. More to the point, text is both "subject matter" and/or "content." Still, to be discrete I have substituted certain words within brackets (like [words]) and eliminated two short phrases by inserting ... to maintain complete anonymity. Even without knowing who the artist is or specifics about the art I believe readers can access the gist of my argument. Indeed, by removing these critical thoughts and questions from the exacting particulars of a specific critique, to p...

Thrill Value
2009-08-16 17:48:00
?Whether and under what conditions a thing is useful to me, whether and under what conditions it is a good, whether and under what conditions it is an economic good, whether and under what conditions it possesses value for me and how large the measure of this value is for me, whether and under what conditions an economic exchange of goods will take place between two economizing individuals, and the limits within which a price can be established if an exchange does occur?these and many other matters are fully as independent of my will as any law of chemistry is of the will of the practicing chemist. [?] For economic theory is concerned, not with practical rules for economic activity, but with the conditions under which men engage in provident activity directed to the satisfaction of their needs.?(1)Without engaging the endless, age-old debate concerning subjective values, it recently became remarkably evident to me that the relative exchange value of art is directly proportional to o...

Punk Memorial
2009-07-24 16:41:00
Conceptual Art Idea #29:Two battery-powered CD players buried under separate dirt piles; one playing loop of The Ramones ' "Beat On The Brat"(1975) & one playing loop of Sex Pistols ' "EMI"(1978). (For Sam Durant.)
More About: Punk , Memorial

One Blogger to Another
2009-07-07 17:04:00
?Hello!? I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce myself.? I am a blogger and I have recently started a new blog called "Concerning Art".? Its focus is on the arts in their many forms; visual arts, film, literature, etc., as well as being sort of a Los Angeles centric blog, simply due to the fact that I live and work in LA.? I am an aspiring writer and hopefully art history grad student whose always been interested in viewing art and popular culture for an analytical perspective.? I was looking at your blog and was very impressed with its layout and content, as well as its visual appeal.? Please do take a look at my blog, and if you like what you see I would be very happy to do a link exchange with you.? If you do decide to exchange links please also be sure to send me the exact url address you would like me to link to, meaning your blog(s) &/or your website.? Also, if you like my writing style and would like me to quest on your blog or if you would like me to do a blog post ...
More About: Blogger

Critical Fragments: Documentation
2009-06-30 17:37:00
?Since the mid-1960s, conceptual artists have denied any interest in photography per se. To hear the artists tell it, photography was only useful or interesting to them insofar as it was instrumental in conveying or recording their ideas. Time and again artists describe the photographs themselves as either brute information or uninflected documentation.?(1)As ironic as it was necessary, the photographic archiving of conceptual art provides a test case for documentation as a separate and relevant critical issue. When conceptual artists began to consider what it is that artists do, their consequential investigations lead to exercises in information theory and epistemology, measurements and statistics, actions and situations. All this knowledge produced ?documents? that embodied the art but not the ?art? itself. This premise would become a conceptual dictum of such pervasive and evidentiary power that few academic overviews of conceptual art do much more than re-state this mantra of ?...
More About: Documentation , Critical

Critical Fragments: Anonymity
2009-06-20 16:37:00
?In all respects the traditional artist devotes himself to the good of the work to be done. The operation is a rite, the celebrant neither intentionally nor even consciously expressing himself ? [W]orks of traditional art, whether Christian, Oriental or folk art, are hardly ever signed: the artist is anonymous, or if a name has survived, we know little or nothing of the man. This is true as much for literary as for plastic artifacts. In traditional arts it is never Who said? but only What was said??(1)The necessity of establishing a relationship between an artist and artwork became significantly more focused when paintings became portable. The advent of easel painting signaled the beginning of artworks traded as a commodity that was readily identifiable with an artist. Thus, the identification of individual artists with an artwork recognizable by a subjective style helped solidify the ready exchange of paintings.Clearly the seduction of fame stoked the exchange value of art. C...
More About: Anonymity , Critical

Critical Fragments: Content
2009-06-11 18:51:00
?The seemingly strict separation of the photographic series ? buildings not people, or individuals in private not public spaces ? thus belies [Thomas] Struth?s larger project of separation. By dissociating the various elements of knowledge produced within each archive and reassociating them in a newly formed complex matrix structure, Struth?s matrix multiplies the important piece of information within each image. Multiplied, those bits of information that had once been used to define the subject of the archive can now be reassembled and contradicted to form other constructs of knowledge. This process of reassociation exposes the inseparability of these constructs both within and between images and archives, questioning the archival categories themselves. [?] Acted out by the museum and defined and depicted by these photographs are the operations of archive construction and collecting themselves, and with them, the complex mechanisms behind the construction of knowledge, boundarie...
More About: Content , Critical

Critical Fragments: Style
2009-05-27 20:18:00
?In every work of art, style is a promise. In being absorbed through style into the dominant form of universality, into the current musical, pictorial, or verbal idiom, what is expressed seeks to be reconciled with the idea of the true universal. This promise of the work of art to create truth by impressing its unique contours on the socially transmitted forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. By claiming to anticipate fulfillment through their aesthetic derivatives, it posits the real forms of the existing order as absolute. To this extent the claims of art are always also ideology. Yet it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot, indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in...
More About: Style , Critical

Collage: the Stuff of PoMo
2009-05-13 13:21:00
Administrator's Note: One of my Corcoran College undergraduates wrote the following essay on collage as ?the reproduction and recontextualization of signs.? The student has requested me to list the author's name as ?Yon Zois.?I asked Zois for permission to post the paper here because of its fascinating theories on visual art expressed as ?message? and a novel (if somewhat brutally cynical) depiction of the malevolent inclination of that message. The assaultive aspects of representation are too often critically neglected and Zois suggests interesting possibilities for further investigation of the ?dominant discourse? of media communication. For within the verbal structure of semiotics lies an implicit coercion that Zois reveals to be a profound interpretive mode for considering visual art as postmodern address._________________________________ _________________________?[Collage is] an organization of already organized elements.? - Damien Hirst Quoting others? words in one?s own wri...
More About: Stuff , Jean Baudrillard

Missed Opportunities of Malleable Objects
2009-05-03 15:41:00
Methodologies and ideas about art-making have progressed remarkably since those heady, early years of the beginning of minimal-conceptual art. With respect to its increased visibility and critically regarded prevalence in our burgeoning global art world, postconceptualism, as I have termed it, is in need of theoretical de-acceleration so that we may assess the various substantive theories behind the objects and practices before the dizzying pace of production and the concomitant media valorization would catapult us into empty spectacularization.(1)In my gathering of 21st Century practitioners of Postconceptualism, I have attempted a winnowing of key issues and ideas established earlier in conceptual art. The best of these ideas remain potent enough to generate cultural production that not only emulates the original concept but sometimes (perhaps not often enough) extends and magnifies it in ways that truly focus our criticality. All 17 of the artists selected for the exhibit are ...
More About: Opportunities , Objects

Curatorial Experience
2009-04-23 20:10:00
In seven days Postconceptualism opens. I plan to post running commentary about my immersion in the curatorial experience on Twitter. If readers of this blog care to monitor my random and rambling thoughts on the various events, dilemmas, insights, confessions and revelations that may occur, my username is profmcb.I will be writing more about the show soon. However, given the labor-intensive week that lies ahead it will have to be when the show is hung and my head has cleared after the opening receptions; check back then.Image: 1939 12th Street NW; photograph via cellphone by MCB.
More About: Experience

Postconceptualism
2009-04-11 19:47:00
Postconceptualism addresses art theories as posed by the original conceptual artists in a selection of contemporary artists. Artists selected for this show individually approach many significant issues of conceptualism, albeit through their own unique visions. 12 of the 16 artists in Postconceptualism have studied art theory with Mark Cameron Boyd at Corcoran College of Art + Design and many have exhibited work with Fernando Batista. Together, Boyd and Batista believe this exhibition presents 21st Century artists whose work extends conceptual art and continues its impact as Postconceptualism. Conceptual art questioned the traditional role of the art object as conveyer of meaning. The subsequent dematerialization of the object results in artists exploring impermanent media and creating ephemeral experiences in time and space. Mooskoo addresses intangibility by making fragile works that reduce concepts of ?painting as object? to the fragility of paint minus its support. Ke...

Of Durational Context
2009-03-29 21:23:00
The creation of art encompasses procedural, perceptual and contextual stages. The procedural stage is the move from conception to action, through both intellectual and physical processes, to ?make? art. An object may not materialize, however, and immateriality returns focus to the concept. Yet even the most conceptual of art often includes instructions, supplements and wall text that are a result of the thought process. Whether one begins with a concept or not, thoughts occur that move one to action. One?s initial stage of procedure and process may also include improvisation as a working method. Beginning with no idea is an idea in and of itself; improvisation can also be conceptual. In improvisational methodology the artist is cognizant of his actions, as the work at hand changes rapidly through chance, accident and randomness. Improvisational work thus engages in a hybridization of perceptual aspects within its procedures. It is arguable whether ?art? occurs during its ...
More About: Context

Further Discourse on the Hollow
2009-03-23 14:22:00
Administrator's Note: Given that blog comments are sometimes overlooked, I wanted to post this one by Diane Blackwell for her insights and further discourse on last week's essay on The Hallowed Hollow .Your article touches on two subjects, minimalist theory and the debate between art and artifact. It is stating that Robert Kusmirowski?s sculptural version of Ted Kaczynski?s, (a.k.a. the Unabomber) cabin is a minimalist sculpture because the viewer is denied an understanding of the inside and can only understand the piece ?through its obdurate wholeness.? If the artistic cabin were to be considered a minimalist sculpture, it would have to be read objectively as a large cube in the form of a boarded up cabin and the interior would be merely the space formed to support the exterior walls. The viewer would be pleased for the opportunity to have the experience of an abstracted, self-explanatory, in this case cubed object. Its wholeness would be in its solidarity.The wholeness of Kusmiro...

The Hallowed Hollow
2009-03-10 16:48:00
In his assessment of a current fascination with ?dark matter,? Stephen Marche ?creates? a parallel perception of two quite different sculptural ?objects.? Noting the recent Newseum exhibition ?G-Men and Journalists? and its inclusion of the infamous ?Unabomber?s cabin? among artifacts on view, Marche tells us that Ted Kaczynski attempted an unsuccessful legal maneuver to block his actual cabin from being shown at the Newseum. Marche mentions that in Kaczynski?s legal papers (hand-written) he stated that his cabin?s exhibition appears to violate the ?victims? objection to publicity connected with the Unabom case.?(1) Marche goes on to say: ?Kaczynski did not, however, object to Robert Kusmirowski?s sculpture ?Unicabine,? which the New Museum in New York was showing at the same time, even though it was an exact replica of his cabin.? (Italics are mine.)Needless to say, I find this an odd bit of pop cultural detritus. Even more unfathomable is the idea that Kaczynski, as reported ...
More About: Hollow

30 Years of Obscurism
2009-03-02 17:48:00
Image: "A Chronological History of Aart & Obscurism" (1979); original document written by MCB; © 1979-2009 by Mark Cameron Boyd.
More About: Years

Theory Notecards
2009-02-18 18:30:00
As a continuation of participatory practice, my first volume of Theory Notecards (2006-2009), initiates ?owner-specific? participation:?The blocks represent text-bisected versions of the same notecards I use to teach art theory. Participation is owner-specific: buyers of the blocks are authorized to decipher the bisected text and attempt to ?complete? my notations. My bisected text is written in Conté and protected from erasure by fixative. All individual blocks will be reunited for a future exhibition to share the actions (or non-actions) of individual block owner-artists.? I have now launched Theory Notecards ON-LINE for purchase. This is not a solicitation: I expect that few fellow artists or former /current students will buy blocks (although 7 blocks were purchased by fellow artists - this indicates their comprehension of my concept and willingness to support it, and for this I am grateful). I am keeping you apprised of my pursuits and trust you will understand my motives ...

Sondheim Semi-Finalists
2009-02-12 19:14:00
2009 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Semi -Finalists Seth Adelsberger, Baltimore, MDAlzaruba, Baltimore, MDBDC (Baltimore Development Cooperative), Baltimore, MDLisa Blas, Washington, DCRachel Bone, Baltimore, MDJessica Braiterman, Beltsville, MDTravis Childers, Fairfax, VAMary Coble, Washington, DCR.L. Croft, Manassas, VAAlyssa Dennis, Baltimore, MDLiz Ensz, Baltimore, MDLeslie Furlong, Baltimore, MDRyan Hackett, Kensington, MDChristian Herr, Lancaster, PAJason Horowitz, Arlington, VAJessie Lehson, Baltimore, MDKim Manfredi, Baltimore, MDKatherine Mann, Baltimore, MDBaby Martinez, Washington, DCSebastian Martorana, Baltimore, MDLisa Moren, Baltimore, MDEllen Nielsen, Baltimore, MDLouie Palu, Washington, DCMolly Springfield, Washington, DC

Oppositional interaction
2009-02-01 22:43:00
Adminstrator's Note: The following is a comment about my "Theory Notecards" installation by RiseInRuin. In addition to its intriguing take on my piece, what makes his/her view even more interesting is that he/she lives in Chicago, has not seen and may never see my Hamiltonian Gallery installation in person. A testament, perhaps, to the "power" of a concept? Regardless, I post it here, with RiseInRuin's permission, [as is, no corrections] in hopes of generating further discussion."I like this. Interactivity, it seems to me, is a process contingent upon varying degrees of opposition. Even if someone were to take action by not acting in any physical way, the words on the block would alter in correspondence to the non-physical-actor?s agreements and disagreements. The dissimilars in that relationship would strengthen each other through the power of thier(sic) disparity. The similarities of the relationship are only similar because of the context of mutual opposition. It is a play o...
More About: Interaction

Theories & Documents
2009-01-26 23:47:00
"The materials I used to make these works are blackboard paint, pastel and Conté crayon on 4"x6" birchwood ?blocks.? This is the first volume of the series that was begun in 2006 and completed in 2009. The blocks are bisected text versions of notecards I use to teach my contemporary art theory course, Theory Now.This series continues my exploration of participatory art and for this particular series participation is ?owner-specific.? That is to say, only the owners of the blocks are authorized to engage in participatory acts upon the works. There are two possible actions you can take as an individual owner of the block(s):you can decipher the bisected text written in Conté crayon (protected from erasure by fixative) to ?complete? my notations; or you may elect to do nothing to the block (which is an ?act? in and of itself)My concept for this series is for all of the individual blocks to be reunited at a future date to exhibit the actions (or non-actions) of the individual owners...
More About: Theories , Documents

Advantage: Process
2009-01-15 13:32:00
Adminstrator's Note: I am sharing my first contribution for The Microwave Project, a blog-community experiment organized by Washington, D.C. artist, Rachel Fick. This post was in response to an earlier one on ?Loss Creation? by photographer, Victoria F. Gaitán, in which she wrote about how ?Not knowing can be a creative blessing.? My ?Microwave? posts will be monthly on the 13th - - - so bookmark ?Microwave Project? and visit for daily postings from painters, photographers, filmmakers, writers and critical thinkers.?Some inventors have a goal in mind and work persistently toward it. Others stumble across solutions to problems they weren?t trying to solve.?- - sign in children?s area of National Museum of American History.In past work, I have used a ?kitchen sink? approach and ?found objects? to make art. Possibly it?s a creative phase that every visual artist goes through, although the improvisational aspect of this methodology suggests allegiances to music, particularly to jaz...
More About: Process , Sol Lewitt

The "Obscure Aartist"
2008-12-31 16:05:00
Before 2008 ends, in anticipatory celebration of an anniversary, I want to publish a paper I wrote in 1979 . ?Aart and Obscurism: First Arguments? outlines a view of art and art making informed by conceptual art and seeking to advance its tenets. Of necessity, this theory of art was sub-cultural and germinated outside of the established ?art world.? My personal position in the established art world at the time was that of ?outsider,? and that perception obviously colored the tone of my paper, which moves from accusatory statements about commercial galleries to an exposition of my theory concerning a mode of art practice I called ?aart.? My terminology reflects artwork made ?outside the realm of the prevalent system? without ?artistic validation? provided by the dealer-collector-museum hegemony. As contestable rhetoric, the paper is still a fair read, and re-reading it thirty years later, I am struck by a couple of revelations, one of which is that not all that much has changed in...
More About: Obscure

More articles from this author:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6