Brooklyn Rail Article: The Art World on Facebook

The Art World on Facebook, by Sharon Butler

Interesting article.

March Exhibition: Getting Ready for the Prom

Tim Gierschick, Pod, latex and enamel paint on found panel

Getting Ready for the Prom

Phillip Adams, Tim Gierschick, Alexis Granwell, Alex Paik, Nathan Pankratz, Caroline Santa

March 6 - 27, 2009

Opening Reception: Friday, March 6th, 6pm-9pm

[more images on our facebook page]

Clutter

So I think that I want to focus more on discussion on the Tiger Strikes Asteroid blog rather than it being a diary of things we've seen, so I will be posting more about different topics that relate to artists rather than posting music or show reviews. If you want to see posts about that, you can go to my old blog, Watching Paint Dry.

I've been reading Letters to a Young Artist, and there is a part of Gregory Amenoff's letter that I've been thinking about:

"...LET YOUR STUDIO BE YOUR SANCTUARY... When your work leaves your studio and moves into the world, its character changes. One doesn't need to consult a Marxist to understand that art is a luxury commodity. You learn to live with this fact (and find ways of justifying it), but in the studio, things are different... If the marketplace finds its way (siritually) into that studio you have abdicated your essential power. Keep your studio clear from concerns of the marketplace. You might have to dance with the wolves but you can still keep them near the door."

Now, granted there is no marketplace for my work, but i still find myself stressing out about art-career related things while I'm working. I don't paint differently or anything, but sometimes it immobilizes me, and often times it makes me grumpy and less likely to enjoy working, mumbling something about getting ready for my retrospective at my U-haul storage space.

I realize that a lot of artists are perfectly happy to just create and could care less if they show in New York, LA, Berlin, whatever, but that is a choice that they make. I've chosen to try to have a "career" in this horrible game.

What do you guys think? Do you have strategies for clearing your mind of all the stress-clutter that comes with trying to be an Artist?

TEH INTERWEBS N ART

Sounds pretty interesting. You should check it out! More details at the Vox Populi website.

Hey Ladies

My friend just showed me Tucker Nichols' work... I love it. Super smart, super funny. All good things.

Grand Opening in March!

Please join us for the grand opening of Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Our inaugural exhibition, Getting Ready for the Prom, features the work of Phillip Adams, Timothy Gierschick, Alexis Granwell, Alex Paik, Nathan Pankratz, and Caroline Santa.

Getting Ready for the Prom
March 6-27, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday March 6, 6pm-9pm

Magicians and Cartoons

I saw the show at the ICA a while ago, but haven't gotten around to writing anything about it. I think Anthony Campuzano is one of the best artists working in Philly right now, so I think it's great that the ICA gave him a solo show. Dude really deserves it. I'm not really sure that I "get" the work, but he does some amazing things with text. His work really seems magical, which sounds corny, but I really think it's true. He transforms the text just enough so that it hovers right between that line of text-as-image and text-as-word, and there's something really amazing about seeing that. Every time I see his work I want to run home and make things just like his, which I suppose is the highest compliment I can give.



Josh Mosley's video was really nice as well. I'm kicking myself for not taking more advantage of having him on the faculty at Penn while I was there. Stupid, stupid, stupid! His video has a boyish whimsy about it and rides the line between cartoon and art really well. I kind of feel a guilty pleasure when I see his work -- it's like I get to watch an amazing animated cartoon and it's "serious" art! Lisa said it best: "That was a video piece that I actually wanted to continue watching after a minute."

ZOMG animated GIFs!!!!

Jack Sloss, Upside Ground

First off, I love Fleisher-Ollman Gallery for using an animated GIF successfully on their website. I have a hunch that this is the work of Claire Iltis, the Assistant Director, but I'm not sure. Awesome.

Fleisher-Ollman puts on some bangin' group shows -- they seem to have a lot of fun with them and use their excellent collection and connections really well. Rich Text is no exception. Rich Text, which focuses on contemporary work that uses text (duh), is a really varied and satisfying show. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures at the opening, so I can't post any images. Highlights for me include Alex DaCorte's birthday-banner pieces, Anthony Campuzano's Diebenkorn-text hybrids, and Bob and Roberta Smith's giant wooden walls of text. Everyone go see it!

Assisted Viewing and The Frantic Eye

From Art News Blog:

"Prado Museum on Google Earth

Google Earth is an amazing tool that just keeps getting better and it's still FREE. Over the years I have spent hours looking down on our fascinating little planet with Google Earth.

Now Google has made it even more compelling for artists to download as they're opening museums up and taking us inside. No longer content with looking down on art museums from above, they have zoomed in on paintings hanging on the walls. They have gone in armed with some amazing technology too, revealing every crack and brush stroke on each painting."

Pretty cool stuff. I really hope that other museums jump on this and let Google photograph their pieces. The detail is pretty amazing, and, since I'm not going to Spain anytime soon, it's the closest I can get to the real thing for a while.


As I was looking, it struck me as odd how different my experience of the paintings felt when I was forced to view it through the lens and controls of GoogleEarth. I realized that when I look at a painting, my eye jumps around really quickly from place to place, zooming in and out quickly. It felt really weird to have to laboriously slide the zoom control, and to manually "scan" the paintings in such a cumbersome way.

Obviously people don't really look at paintings like that, but it made me think about how we look at paintings --have our collective eyes evolved over time? Sitting in front of a computer for long periods of time and constantly multitasking, my eyes jumping back and forth between my two monitors, between different browser tabs, IM, poker tables, GoogleReader, etc -- does that affect how I see paintings?

I think it does, but I'm not sure exactly how. Wil made a great post a while back that had a bunch of interesting articles that I am going to re-read. I'll post more thoughts later.

I'm starting to suspect that my job as an artist is to somehow trick people's frenetic, ADD, Web 2.0 eyes (mine included) into slowing down and looking at my work.

Also, did you know that women see as much as 30% more colors than men???? WTF? Why am I cursed?

Visual Pop Songs

Paul Klee, Fire in the Evening

People often chuckle when I tell them that I really like Paul Klee, but I think that he is a very underappreciated painter. Maybe I just relate to him because he was also a fairly serious musician throughout his life and was influenced heavily by musical ideas like rhythm, harmony and structure, especially in his abstract work. I love the playfulness and whimsy of his geometric abstractions, and have been especially loving the structure of paintings like the ones here. I love how he was able to take a structure that is so simple and dry -- start with a block and keep dividing it into two -- and turn it into paintings that are full of life and charm. Sometimes all you need is a good verse and a good chorus to make magic.

Paul Klee, Monument in a Fertile Country

New Museum

I was really looking forward to seeing Mary Heilmann's work in person -- her work looks great as jpegs and is right up my alley. But sadly, I was super disappointed at the surfaces. The acrylic really kills the painting surface and makes them feel really lifeless and her hand seems really lazy to me. I did like the pieces where her hand was less evident, like some of the ceramic tiles, but overall, huge disappointment. I wanted to like her so much :(


The Elizabeth Peyton show was surprising in a couple of ways. First, I was surprised at how crappy our Philadelphia Museum's Peyton is. I used to like Peyton a lot, but I guess from only being exposed to the Philly Museum one over and over again, I kind of stopped liking her. I was also surprised at how object-like the small paintings on board were; the surfaces are coated in a super thick oil ground and the frames themselves are pretty deep. It was interesting to compare her hand to Heilmann's -- some might call Peyton's hand lazy as well, but I think there is a grace in Peyton's hand that I really like. Finally, I was surprised at how bad the paintings became when she stopped working from photos and worked from life instead. Her brush strokes almost seem to become trapped on the figure she is painting and doesn't wander and have as much fun as in her earlier work.

Morandi

I finally got to the Morandi show. It was smaller than I expected but that was fine; they probably would have stuffed the show with more crappy early work if they had more space. It was a Thursday morning, so it was me, a bunch of old ladies who would go on and on about how they "love the pallettes" and a few school groups that would whizz by every once in a while, the majority of the kids texting.

It's the first time I've seen more than 3 Morandis in a room together and I was a bit concerned that they would all sort of blend in together. But, they didn't. I had a lot of fun looking at all of the still lives, especially the later super-reductive ones. Morandi is surprising to me because every time you go back to look at a painting that you think you know, you notice another great moment or idea in the painting. I love how his work really slows your eye down, how you get trapped within his little painting world, his deliberate and graceful hand, the way his colors and their relationships slowly reveal themselves. A ton has been written (much more well written) about him, so I'll leave it there. It's going down to the National Gallery after the Met, so I'll probably see it there too.

The Poetics of Space

Before Thanksgiving I went to see the Michael Edward Smith show at Jenny Jaskey Gallery. The show's closed now, but I thought it was one of the strongest shows I've seen in Philly this year. The show was divided into 2 separate-but-together installations, but I was most attracted to this arrangement above. I think it was more successful than the other side of the gallery because, well, it was more fun to look at. I literally had to crouch down to examine it and felt like a kid looking in a tide pool, a little snapshot of Smith's larger artistic world. Anyways, hope everyone saw it.

On another note, Jenny is looking to open a live/work studio space in the same building as Vox. She's charging a dirt cheap rate, so if you are looking for a studio space, send her an email. You can even specify how much space you want if you are one of the first tenants!

Business Week Article

My friend Tayyib just posted this Business Week article from 2001. It's a funny "career" we've chosen, eh?

Portrait of the Artist in Red Ink (Thane Peterson)
What do talented painters and teen basketball stars have in common? For most, big dreams and little paychecks

Recently, high school basketball phenoms Kwame Brown, Tyson Chandler, and Eddy Curry made headlines when they were picked for three of the top four slots in the National Basketball Assn. player's draft. It was the ultimate hoop dream come true: Eighteen-year-old high school seniors suddenly becoming multi-millionaires for playing a game.

Yet, physically gifted as these athletes are, what were the chances that they would succeed so gloriously? Of the millions of kids who play high school ball, only a tiny fraction of 1% can make a career of it. The odds of becoming a wealthy professional artist aren't any better. I'm not talking about graphic and industrial designers and other people with more of a commercial vocation. I mean painters, sculptors, and art photographers -- the people whose work you see hanging in art galleries and museums....

[Read the rest of Thane Peterson's article]

Ravished By Color

I picked up my copy of Air Guitar again recently and have been thoroughly smitten. Dave Hickey's writing is the complete opposite of the dry, pretentious garbage that I've forced myself through way too many times. I love how he weaves his childhood and everyday experiences into the context of what he is writing about. I guess some would call it narcissistic or self-absorbed, but I'm more on the side that this is a more honest way of writing about the experience of art and that a cold and clinical approach kills the work.

In "Pontormo's Rainbow," Hickey talks about being "ravished by color," and how when art abandons color it becomes trapped by language, history and representation. Color, he writes, is "...a respite from language and history," and, in a funny way, it feels like his writing brings color back into the boring black and white realm of art criticism.

Baroque

I caught the Rob Wynne show at Locks Gallery (top floor). The downstairs show was a complete snore-fest, but I dug a lot of Wynne's work. The show was all over the place, consisting of sculpture, photography, embroidery, books... you get the idea... but In general, it kind of felt like an Illinois era Sufjan Stevens -- Baroque sensibility, kind of poppy, riding the line between sentimentality and irony. I especially loved the drawings of butterflies and octopi that combined girly beading with lovely little line work. The drawings on vellum thing has been getting kind of old, but I still liked 'em.

I'm not feeling very coherent today, so I guess I'm done.

My First Art-Love

My first art-love was classical music. After starting out on piano (duh, I'm Korean) I moved on to violin (duh, I'm still Korean). Even though I wasn't that great, I was good enough to get into youth orchestras and was perfectly happy hacking away in the back of the 2nd violin section. For a while, all I listened to was classical music. Yes, I know. It's hard to believe that I was that cool.

Classical music was my first introduction to having a real and deep relationship with art, and also an introduction to how art can really transport you. It also taught me how art can help validate being human, how creating is an invaluable, life-affirming human trait. You listen to Beethoven, and you're like, "Yeah! We can do it!" Ugh, that sounds lame, but whatever.

Anyways, I'm realizing more and more how important this experience was for me as an artist. Classical music is essentially abstract music, from the abstract notation that you have to learn to read, to the abstract structures like symphonies, fugues, etc -- even "sound" itself seems so abstract. And yet through such abstract materials people like Bach and Beethoven were able to create something so specific in terms of how it sounds and how it emotes.

I guess I'm just realizing through my work and through thinking that I'm way more interested in the abstraction of music than I am the history of Western Modernist abstraction, and I think the work is starting to reflect it more and more.

The "Grosse Fugue" from Beethoven's 13th String Quartet is one of my "desert island" pieces. Sorry that it gets chopped up.

WYSIWYG

First, a disclaimer: I suck at evaluating photography and have huge gaps in my knowledge of the history of photography. I can spot a Gursky when I see one, but that's about it.

That being said, I loved Paul Salveson's work in WYSIWG, the group show up at Jenny Jaskey Gallery right now. Obviously, I loved the fun little formal tricks in the work and I also loved the low-fi zine quality of the work. "WYSIWG" is kind of a nod to an era of 14.4baud modems, Windows 3.11, and dot matrix printers, so I thought that Salveson's work fit in perfectly with the title.