SHARKFORUM: OPINION WITH TEETH

Peter Otto @ Devening Projects

2010-03-08T08:35:14Z

Above: Hand of History (Ode to John Heartfield)
oil on canvas, 21.5 x 43 inches

Below: Artist Peter Otto

Exhibition: The Lodger
March 7 - April 9, 2010
3039 West Carroll Avenue
Chicago, IL 60612
(312) 420-4720
www.deveningprojects.com
Exhibition facilitated by Cultural Services in the USA / Consulate General of the Netherlands and Materiaalfonds, Amsterdam]]>

Above: The Signal, oil on canvas, 27.5 x 37.5 inches

Above: Hope and Glory, oil on canvas, 31.5 x 43.5 inches

Above: Limelight, oil on canvas, 31.5 x 43.5 inches

Above: The Melting Compound, oil on canvas, 21.5 x 43 inches

Above: Schimmenveld, oil on canvas, 31.5 x 31.5 inches

Noah Berlatsky: "Artists Write: The Last Shall Be First"

2010-03-07T13:06:21Z

Proximity continues its Arts Theory Column, edited by Mark Staff Brandl, with an essay by Noah Berlatsky: "The Last Shall Be First."

Most traditional economic theory is built around the concept of scarcity -- the idea that there's not enough stuff to go around. In The Accursed Share (1946), famed theorist Georges Bataille inverts this; life, he says, is characterized, not by too little, but by too much. Life is excess -- it pushes onto every bleak rock, every cranny; it spends itself in profligate sexual activity and in the ultimate profligacy of death. And it throws out unneeded economic activity; too much fat, too many children, too much grain in the stores, too many bodies in the street, too much creative energy shaking its collective tuchas on the YouTube videos.

]]>
The bloody Aztec rituals were paradigmatic; the North American Indian custom of potlatch, on the other hand, was, for Bataille, a sinister travesty. In the potlatch, an Indian would give a valuable gift to a rival to demonstrate his own wealth and power. In response, a rival would have to give an even greater gift. This could go on and on, back and forth, and whoever ended by giving the greatest gift would show himself superior. Thus, squander was not in fact squander -- the winner did not lose his gift, but instead traded it for prestige, or rank. Bataille thus notes contemptuously that potlatch "attempts to grasp that which it wished to be ungraspable, to use that whose utility it denied." By turning sacrifice into rank, Bataille believed, potlatch turns, not a part, but the whole of the universe to a servile thing.

...in the modern day, the avatar of Bataille's twisted potlatch is none other than the artist, in all his or her needy, self-deluding, miserly profligacy

Potlatch as such is now practiced in only a handful of places, and (to be remorselessly PC) one has to wonder whether Bataille's anthropological account really did the custom justice. Still, if Native Americans don't exactly recognize Bataille's potlatch, others, I think would. Who, after all, profligately spends time, energy, and resources in a remorseless quest for status and rank? Who grasps the sacred and turns it to the profane ends of thingness? Who wastes, not in the name of a sublime nothing, but in the pursuit of a soiled, excess something?

The answer is clear enough: in the modern day, the avatar of Bataille's twisted potlatch is none other than the artist, in all his or her needy, self-deluding, miserly profligacy. The artist hunkers down with her or his materials, practicing, practicing, practicing, wasting life in the pursuit of an entirely useless form--and for what? Why to be noticed, admired, proclaimed a genius--in short, for rank. True, some artists, the least debased, seek, not some subcultural caché, but simply money. They are guilty only of the typical human failing; the desire to turn bits of life into things; to treat the sacred as a business proposition. Beyoncé and Rod Stewart are no more despicable than, say, Bill Gates, or your average carpenter. But by far the vast majority of artists forswear (relatively) healthy capitalism for the putrid wallowing in essences; they desire to turn life itself "authenticity" into a bludgeon with which to beat their rivals. The Aztecs tore out hearts to offer to the Sun God; artists pour out heart and soul and offer it to Pitchfork reviewers.

That is not to say that all artists are inevitably defiled. On the contrary, if any contemporary figure attains to Bataille's ideal of pure sacrifice it is one particular kind of artist--that is, the failed artist. Note that by "failed" here, I do not mean the artist who has missed commercial success, but has underground cred or aesthetic bonafides, or who is discovered and lionized after his death. On the contrary. When I say "failed" I mean "failed." I mean an artist who profligately, copiously, obsessively works on creating objects that are, literally--by everyone and forever--unwanted. Creators of tuneless songs that never achieve dissonance; of ugly canvases too self-conscious to be outsider art; of doggerel verse too banal for even the high school literary magazine--in them, the excess of the universe is annihilated. Genius, love, life--are exchanged for neither lucre, nor cred, nor beauty, but are instead simply thrown away. Failed art is permanently wasted, and it is therefore sacred. Squatting amidst the gross outpouring of sublimity, the ugly, the thumb-fingered, the clichéd piece of crap, is alone sacred.

Proximity magazine here.

Poetry of the Week: "Creation Myth" by Mathias Svalina

2010-03-01T16:38:16Z

Mathias Svalina was born in Chicago, where his parents were both chemists. He is the author of five chapbooks as well as five collaboratively written chapbooks. His work has been published widely in journals such as American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Diagram, Jubilat, and Typo. He has won fellowships and awards from The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Iowa Review and New Michigan Press, among others. With Zachary Schomburg, he co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. He currently teaches writing and literature in Denver, Colorado. Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Press, 2010) is his first book.

CREATION MYTH

There was a bunny with a broken leg
& a mink with an empty stomach,

Somehow they coexisted peacefully
& were able to create the world.

When Hollywood heard about this
they sent a team of idea people out to meet them.

]]> that the bunny & the mink uncreated the world.

They drank up all the oceans
& hairdried all the clouds.

They knocked down all the mountains
& flicked the switch that turned the sun off.

They sat together in the darkness
neither one really knowing what to say.

The mink leaned over to the bunny,
put his paw on his friend's shoulder,

said: Well it's been a wild ride
& bit the bunny's throat out.

CREATION MYTH

In the beginning there was a book
but every time a villager read the book
it meant something different to her
than it did to her friend or her mother.

The villagers fought over the correct interpretation.
Mothers ripped earrings from their son's ears.
Children stuffed their parents' mouths with gauze.
Priests bludgeoned bakers. Twins disagreed.

Eventually someone decided to throw the book
down the well, but when she picked it up
a shower of keys fell from its pages,
each key labeled for a particular villager.

There were no locks at that time
so the villagers took their keys home
to their basements & garages & built locks
& locked up everything they owned.

They locked up their houses & bikes first.
Then they locked up their drawers & their pockets.
One villager built a lock for his mouth
& then another built a lock for his eyes.

Years later a team of scientists in white coats
discovered the village. All the villagers
had locked themselves completely still
& only a few sneezes revealed that they were alive.

The scientists radioed in for a team of pickpockets
who stole the keys from the locked villagers.
But even the pickpockets could not be of help
because none of the keys opened any of the locks.

Lamis El Farra Painting Show in the Collapsible Kunsthalle

2010-02-27T20:54:46Z

The Collapsible Kunsthalle (of which I am curator): documentation of the latest exhibition, paintings by Lamis El Farra.

Link here.
]]> .

I saw a man, he danced with his wife in Chicago

2010-02-26T12:01:04Z

]]> I do remember some things
times when I listened and heard
no one saying no, certain
miraculous provisions
of the much prayed for manna
and once a man, it was two
o'clock in the morning in
Pittsburgh, Kansas, I finally
coming home from the loveliest
drunk of them all, a train chugged,
goddamn, struggled across a
prairie intersection and
a man from the caboose real-
ly waved, honestly, and said,
and said something like my name.

"Manna," James Tate

Everything terrible

2010-02-23T23:57:08Z

]]> Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Interview with Hadara Bar-Nadav

2010-02-22T19:39:42Z

This interview with Hadara Bar-Nadav about her book A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight was conducted during the month of February, 2010 by seven poets: Aaron Delee, Dane Hamann, Sarah Jenkins, Joshua Lobb, Christine Pacyk, Lana Rakhman and Virginia Smith.

Q: A number of your poems seem to be inspired by works of art. How does a poem like this evolve? Do you sit down thinking, "I like this piece of art, I think I'll write a poem in response to it," or does such a poem come to fruition in a more organic way--is it only later that you realize the poem was inspired by or in response to the art?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: My collaborations with art are generally pretty organic. There is a Rothko I visit at the Nelson Museum of Art in Kansas City. And as I look at it, words will float up. There are artists I turn to, much like I do certain authors, whose work seems to trigger poems. I worked on a long prose poem about Louise Nevelson's work, and when writing it I immersed myself in her art and writings. I was never sure what would come up--a line, two pages of prose ramblings--but something always did. When I was working on A Glass of Milk, I remember buying a book of Eugene Atget's photographs and one of Cartier-Bresson's that smelled like it had been in a fire; the edges of the pages were charred. The art work teaches me about seeing, about ways of seeing. And often I string together several images to form a narrative of sorts. Visual art reminds me to keep my imagery sharp, to look and look again. I painted for many years, but these days my creative energy is mostly in my poems.

]]> Q:Additionally, why did you decide to put the notes at the end of your book, rather than with the individual poems? Was it a publishing choice or an aesthetic one?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: I made the decision to put the notes at the end of the book because I wanted the poems to be able to stand on their own. Yes, many of these works were inspired by my ongoing conversations across the arts, but a successful poem needs to work apart from its inspirations and allusions. At the same time, I wanted to honor the works of art that had inspired me, which is why I have an extensive notes section (I love a good Notes section). And for those people who do the work, who appreciate researching the inspirations and allusions, they glean the reward of an extra layer of experience.

Q: Religion is frequently alluded to in your poetry, both in the form of religious stories and in the gematria. How do you find a balance between the stories that have already been told and your own poetic narrative/argument?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: Biblical and religious stories already contain such wild narratives. And there is the long tradition of midrash--the taking of stories from the bible and spinning them, retelling them in a different (often contemporary) light. In several poems in A Glass of Milk, I would start with a religious story and explore it through different lenses, letting the poem ultimately follow its own course. Sometimes I was interested in feminist and/or revisionist explorations of religious narratives, as in the case of "Original Sin," "Egg and Envy," "Fish, Daughter, Reader, Hunger," and "Sacrifice."

Q: What is your self-editing process? During such a process, do you find that you have to go back to a poem and edit it often or do you allow a long interval between edits? What is it that you normally look for or do?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: My self-editing process changes with each poem, but is generally pretty obsessive and exhaustive. I'll work and work until a poem coheres or dies (and then I'll see what I can salvage and start again). Generally I edit for sound, form, and clarity of visual imagery, and then look for opportunities to stretch/push language and syntax. There's also an exciting point when a manuscript starts to come together, and I can edit across a book letting the poems speak to one another. Then I edit with an eye for continuity and surprise, a tension that I hope holds a manuscript together and keeps readers coming back for more.

Q: How tenuous of a thread can you/will you allow to exist that is supposed to link each element in a poem? For example, a reader might not immediately see the connection between each line in a poem because of their precise language, but upon further reading and sifting through the text, may realize the whole. Why do you think this works, this gradual gathering of fragments into a whole?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: Part of the joy for me in reading poems is to discover the connection among lines and across stanzas. In the past, I have mapped my poems on great sheets of newsprint and played with pacing and collage-like techniques. I do like to think of poems as beautiful lines, each line in itself a poem, and that "gradual gathering" you detect fits with this technique, each line building on previous lines and advancing forward--a dance of tensions and associations.

Q: Your poems include a number of characters & many are put into very surrealist settings. Are they mostly people from your life or are many of them fictional? For the characters that are family or acquaintances, do you ever feel like you need to limit how much surrealism you use? Do you feel like it's possible to lose a character's real life identity within surrealism? i.e. they become someone completely separate from who they are in real life.

Hadara Bar-Nadav: The poems contain a mix of characters from my life and stories I've heard or read about. I borrowed my husband's father for the poem "Original Sin." (His father was a butcher, mine was a diamond-cutter, though some of the anxiety I had towards my own father is present in the poem). I'm not afraid to use characters from my life or to invent them/vary them, as needed. I feel no allegiance to telling "the truth" in a poem. Who can say where truth and imagination meet? Poems have their own reality. At the same time, I won't hold anything back that the poem calls forth (if you are afraid, why write?).

Q: I feel that your poetic voice is very consistent throughout your book, despite the many forms and shapes your poems take. Do you feel as though your lyricism flows naturally into different forms or did you have to consciously work to make your voice come through in each form?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: I certainly try to balance voice and form, and believe the best poems function on many levels at the same time. I also appreciate stylistic and formal variety in a manuscript (who wants to read the same poem again and again?). As for consistency of voice, I tend toward concision. And I know the couplets helped me to emphasize concision, which in turn impacts the voice.

Q: The voice in A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight struck me as direct, confident, with few hesitations. Is this a style you recognize in your poems? If so, is it an intended/crafted effect cultivated through revision, or something present from the first draft, which emerges more strongly as your poems are read in sequence?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: The directness of the "voice" is something I recognized in these poems and did work with and for. And I think my tendency toward compression enhances this sharpness and directness. The use of shorter lines and the couplet also intensifies the voice.

The poems in A Glass of Milk are lyric, for the most part, which also was a conscious choice. I wanted a fairly constant "I" in these poems to accompany the reader through the difficult terrain of love, loss, death, religion, gender, and so on. The voice is often hard, even merciless ("Dismissed" still makes me wince).

Q: A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight was published in 2007. How do these poems compare to what you're writing now? Any changes in style, structure or subject matter that have surprised you?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: After writing A Glass of Milk, with its many tight/spare poems, I became very interested in the poetic series. I enjoy the collage-like effect of the series, its suggestion of narrative progression and its willful expansiveness and sprawl. I also became intensely interested in architecture. I'm from the East coast, with family and friends in NY and NJ. The falling of the Twin Towers shifted my psychic horizon and the landscape I had known since my childhood. I started thinking about poems as architecture--as physical structures with their own weight and three-dimensionality. The poems in A Glass of Milk are acutely aware of their own, and the world's, fragility. In my most recent work, I've been exploring the elegy within the prose poem form. I've enjoyed pushing sound and syntax in the prose poem, elements that can become more pronounced in the absence of conventional line breaks.

Q: There is a great deal of number/math imagery throughout your poetry. Is this something that you consciously began to do (I read the notes at the end of your book), or is this something that evolved? In other words, did you use the math motif before you knew about the Jewish mysticism, and if so how did that change your writing?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: I had never before written poetry about Judaism and wonder if the math part of the poems gave me a kind of indirect access, a remove that I needed to go there. I've known about gematria for many years. And I really like the idea of a secret language within language--that there are other ways of reading and knowing. In "A Number of Things," the number six became the axis on which the poem developed. I composed the poem while simultaneously researching the cultural significance of the number 6 (which has always haunted my family and, I suspect, many Jews who have lost family members in the Holocaust.)

I also have found myself looking to math in some of my more recent work, which is an acute response to grief: trying to solve linguistic equations as if saying something in the right way could release a burden, burst the weight. Poetry and math aren't that distinct for me--the rhythms and stresses and sounds--the desire for language to equal an idea. Poetry, and language is general, is so impossible and inviting!

Q: I was struck by your poem titled "Baba Yaga Loses Her Sisters". I immediately knew the reference, but I would assume that most of your audience would not. How do you handle such allusions? Rather, how much do you mind your audience when writing about culture/literature that they would not pick up on?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: I think a successful poem needs to stand on its own, regardless of the inspiration, allusion, or source. The point is communication--not exclusion. I hope that someone who reads the Baba Yaga poem still can enjoy the word play, imagery, and bizarre narrative of the poem without having to know the tale itself. If a reader decides to do the research and learn about Baba Yaga and her crazy house on chicken legs, then an extra layer into the poem (and into another culture) becomes available.

Q: I was really moved by the poem, "YOU WILL BE EATEN"; do you remember what originally inspired that poem? What gave birth to it?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: I woke up one morning and found that I had been attacked by chiggers in my sleep--those numbers in the poem are accurate; those suckers mauled me! I was struck by how these little animals had made a meal of me, without my even having been aware of their meal-taking. And chigger bites are furiously itchy--they reminded me of my own violability and mortality. The body is one more link in the food chain. My suffering meant their survival.

Q: Although you use many different forms in your poetry, one of the forms you tend to use most in the book is the couplet (two lined stanzas); is there anything special about that form for you? What does this form do for you? Are there any particular pros/cons you see with it?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: I was very drawn to the couplet at the time I was writing A Glass of Milk. I liked the couplet's vulnerability on the page, its spareness, and how it can isolate language, and wanted to explore/exploit it. At the same time, the couplet suggests a couple or coupling. I found the form created an effective tension when I wrote about loneliness and loss. The absence and loss becomes palpable because the echo of togetherness--the couple--is always there. I also enjoyed the creative energy of exploring/exploding the closed couplet form. It gave me a productive limitation to push against.

Q: The majority of the poems in your collection A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight are composed using short lines; however, several of the poems also reveal a departure from the form that seems most comfortable to you. During the initial draft of a poem, does the form present itself to you as a means to experiment, or is form secondary to either the language choices you make or the thematic significance you're going for?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: Whenever I find myself doing the same thing, I try to break the pattern. I'd like to think I push myself in some way in each of the poems I write. Form can never really be secondary--it's tied to the language itself. Surely, I have written poems and then changed the form radically, but then the language always changes with it. In a poem like "Woman with Plum," the prose poem form lent itself to an expansiveness of language and syntax, and the poem grew and grew (I wrote the bulk of it in a single sitting). I also was experimenting with sestinas and villanelles at the time (none of which were very good), and thought I could use the prose poem to play with patterns of repetition that would ring differently in different contexts.

Q: Which poets have inspired your own writing? Which do you continue to return to with the feeling that you still discover something new? Who are you reading right now?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: When writing A Glass of Milk I was reading Alice Notely, Larissa Szporluk, and Mary Ruefle, among other writers. Ruefle reminded me I could laugh in poems, and I liked playing with the edge of where humor and loss meet. I also was reading Paul Celan (my constant) and French surrealist poets--Breton, Jaccottet, Eluard. When I was writing the poems for A Glass of Milk, I had become a docent for a small museum and was taking classes in art and art history. I painted for many years, so the "text" of visual art is in my work too.

As for writers I return to, Celan, of course, and Lucie Brock-Broido. I admire her elegance and sound play, and her deft handling of the materiality of language. I'm also obsessed with Emily Dickinson and am working on a series of Dickinson-inspired prose poems.

Loosening the House

The typewriter is feminine in French.
I grow larger every day.

Down the hall mother and father
silently shrink in their sleep.

Porcelain bones, cartilage
abandoning their knees
and there go the ears and eyes.

I dream that they die
and think about them flatly.

My arms blast the windows,
my head ruptures the roof
(I crown the tight red sky).

A poodle licks my ankles;
ice tinkles, bells.

Her metal heart and chain
operatic in the metaphoric world.

There's death in the trees,
little ghosts of yawn and plastic.
Snakes in the leaf piles.

Milk leaking from the eaves.

Egg and Envy

To be chosen, perceived
singularly

against all those teeth,
millions of miles of want

muttered into the sky.
Desire, an illness:

one breaks,
one wins, twin

born without a twin
(one crushes, and lives).

Every voice, a hiss
with my name inside

and God in the rafters
hissing too. All my life

the chosen one, a lie
the great book told

along with floods,
doves, a plucked rib

and a woman converted
to salt. In Truth,

choking on it,
my clotted mouth,

my face a blanket of skin,
generic, unchosen, storyless.

Somewhere between anonymous
and hiss, hiss.

Hadara Bar-Nadav's book of poetry A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (MARGIE IntuiT House, 2007) was chosen by Kim Addonizio as the winner of the 2005 MARGIE Book Prize. Recent publications appear or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Chelsea, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Verse, and other journals. Born in New York, she currently is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She lives in Kansas City, MO with her husband, the furniture designer Scott George Beattie.

Shaun Belcher: Alice and the Curious Curatoriat

2010-02-22T12:40:46Z

Belcher plunges into the world of the semi-professional art guru - or the 'curatoriat', as he has termed the ever growing army of art school graduates working not as artists, but as facilitators to art activity in their cities. With his ever critical eye he asks what the growth of the 'curatoriat' means to the individual artist...

When did it happen? When did the power structure in the arts shift so fundamentally away from the practicing artist and into the hands of a new breed of art school trained curators or as I have re-designated them 'curatoriat'? The growth industry in 'curatorial' courses like the MA at the Royal College of Art reflects a far wider shift and a worrying one for us poor artists at the bottom of the arts funding pecking order.
Read the rest here on axisweb.org
]]> .

Dawoud Bey: Trying to Make A Difference at CAA

2010-02-21T17:50:46Z

Dawoud Bey writes: Published here are the remarks I gave during my opening Keynote Address at the College Art Association Conference Convocation here in Chicago on Wednesday evening. My remarks were preceded by an awards ceremony in which a number of individuals were given awards of recognition and distinction for their work. Most notable for me were the awards given to Emory Douglas, Barkley Hendricks and Suzanne Lacy, since each has figured in the formation of my own history as an artist in some way. Gratifying too was the award given to Holland Cotter, often the only art critic at the New York Times to consistently note the presence of artists of color in his ongoing criticism and reviews. You can see the full list of awardees here:

http://www.collegeart.org/awards/2010awards

My remarks, "The Art World and the Real World: Bridging the Great Divide" follow:

]]>
I would like to dedicate my remarks this evening to several people whose lives and work made a strong impact on me at different points in my life. From each of them I think there is much we can learn about how to conduct ourselves meaningfully in the world. To John Coltrane, who became my first artist role model. John Coltrane, through his brief life and enduring music exemplified how a sense of commitment and vision could be brought spectacularly into the world through ones art form with both power, creative and intellectual rigor, grace and a never ending adherence to mastering the challenge of craft. Coltrane once said, "I want my music to be a force for good." To my late friend, the poet and performance artist Sekou Sundiata. Sekou lifted his well crafted words off of the printed page and found a new voice and power by bringing those words together with music and then continuing to find ways to insightfully enlarge the scope of his craft and bring his presence and concerns to ever larger audiences through the stage and recordings. Sekou reflected through his work a place for personal experience, cultural specificity and the power of the word to transform lives. Finally, to Alma Nomsa John. If you're not from New York, and spent time in the Harlem community in the 1960s and 70s you have probably never heard of Alma John. A registered nurse and community activist, she worked in the Harlem, NY community for many years. Wherever she spoke Alma John always ended her remarks with these words: "If you know teach, if you don't know learn. Each one teach one. Each one reach one." These three individuals to me suggest the ways in which each one of us has the power and ability to transform the world around us.

There are a lot of professional activities that take place at this conference as you very well know. And since I've been asked to give these remarks this evening, I'd like to ask you to join me in asking yourselves why you are here, what do you hope to accomplish and why these events and indeed an organization like the College Art Association matters; why the annual gathering of this community matters. What this gathering could mean for you beyond what you know you came for.

There are a number of definitions of community. Among them "community" is defined as:

• a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals

• a similarity or identity : those who share a community of interests.

• joint ownership or liability

I happen to be one of those who came of age in the late 1960s. And if you are my age, you probably heard a phrase in the 60s that was something of a call to arms, a defining statement. For me, when I first heard it I knew I had been given my marching orders for life. That statement was, "You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem." I believed it then and I still believe it now. Of course, you don't get to my age and still see things in absolute terms, but this statement is one that I think can be used as a meaningful compass for all of us, as it suggests that all of us indeed have the ability and the power--the responsibility--to continually reshape the world that we live in. Everyone in this room tonight has the ability to make a difference, to change the world one person at a time.

Too often we think that the ability to make a difference is work best left to people like my Hyde Park neighbor and our president Barack Obama. Or maybe you think it's the responsibility of college or university presidents, provosts, deans, museum directors, department heads, or other people who are "in charge." Maybe you think the heavy lifting of "making a difference" is something we assign those folks to do. It's a very convenient way of letting ourselves off the hook, a very convenient way to avoid considering how we are going to make a difference while we browbeat the chosen few about the slow pace of progress. Or maybe you've grown cynical and feel that nothing can really change for the better, so why bother to do anything beyond the bare minimum required of you.

I've been teaching for some thirty-four years now, starting at a number of community based institutions in New York and continuing to various colleges and universities. The past eleven of those years I've taught at Columbia College Chicago. And at Columbia we have a credo that I think speaks to what I have been talking about. That credo is that we teach our students to "author the culture of our times." That is something that I believe in deeply and it's something that I encourage each of you to buy into; to consider how through your own work, through your teaching, your writing, your research, the exhibitions you curate, the students you mentor you are indeed authoring the culture of the times that we are living in and teaching others to do the same.

And in spite of the ambivalence and depression that I know some of you are starting to feel as the political season has moved from one of campaigning to the much harder task of governing , I believe we are still in a moment of profound change as a society, one that is forcing each of us to acknowledge that our fates are in some real ways a common one. But fiscal crisis or no, I believe we are always in a moment where each of us can choose to change the world one person at a time.

I have been somewhat perplexed recently by the fact that while all of this major social, political and economic upheaval is taking place all around us, the art world--from all outward signs- still appears to be the same place it always was; quietly tightening its belt perhaps, but still predicating its existence on a set of exchanges that often seem completely out of synch with what is dramatically and traumatically taking place in the larger world. The seeming disengagement of the art world at this moment of seismic change does not bode well for our survival as a community, with the exception, perhaps, of those fortunate enough to find a rare place at the already crowded and increasingly shrinking table of excess and privilege. The art world is often presumed to be a rather liberal place. But--to be sure--it contains more than its fair share of those who are invested in re-inscribing art and culture itself as an arena of privilege and exclusion. Too often these acts of exclusion have left us as a community ever more isolated from the larger social community. It is that larger community that has the potential to embrace our work and make it imperative, giving it a much deeper and sustained presence in the fabric of society.

To see what happens when we isolate ourselves from that larger social community, we have to look no further than the "The Culture Wars" of the 1980s. The so-called "Culture Wars" were, to my mind, a toxic combination of two things: it was the culmination of increasing social, cultural and fiscal conservatism on the one hand, and the increasing sense of insularity with which certain segments of the art community and institutions began (or continued) to function on the other. The two combined created a kind of social "perfect storm," which Jesse Helms and others on the conservative right expertly and successfully exploited. And sadly a whole lot more people than those on the right's immediate radar paid the price by the wedge that was further driven between the art world and the larger community. This struggle between civic discourse and engagement versus a kind of absolute aestheticism and social elitism was embodied by public art projects like Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc," a 120 foot long and 12 feet high length of Corten steel that effectively bissected the Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, blocking immediate access to the building for those who worked there and impeding access to those in the vicinity.

Complaints arose almost immediately from those who worked in the building and now had to take a long detour around the piece to get both in and out of the building. Serra remarked at the time that, "The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes." To those who questioned whether this was an appropriate public work Serra responded, "Art is not democratic. It is not for the people." (Less anyone interpret these remarks as "Bey bashes Serra," I want to be clear that as much as I do find Serra's work to be very significant--I went to New York to see his exhibition at MoMA twice--I am talking about this particularly piece at that particular site at that particular moment in history.) Throughout the long and heated controversy surrounding the piece advocates from the arts community framed the issue as strictly a first amendment one, dismissing those who objected to its placement as no more than a group of philistines, uniformly and foolishly unappreciative of the hulking steel object gracing their midst. At the final public hearing before the piece was dismantled 122 artists, curators, art administrators, critics and museum people testified passionately on behalf of keeping the piece where it was while 58 people who worked in the building spoke against it and were vilified by their overly aestheticized neighbors.

This is, of course, only one example of a moment in recent history when the art world was enlarged caught in the crossfire of cultural and social outrage on the one hand, without looking at any of the broader social implications and nuances. Is that art world any different today than it was twenty years ago? What world do we believe we are teaching our students to enter into? In the twenty odd years since the Serra, Mapplethorpe, Serrano and NEA controversies we have experienced--via burgeoning technology--an even more extraordinary proliferation of visual culture in our collective midst. What is the place of visual art and intellectual criticality in this kind of culture? How do we talk to our students about the differences between visual culture and art making? How do we teach our students to be both critical producers as well as critical consumers of visual culture? How can we teach our students to make work that cuts through the overwhelming detritus of consumer driven visual culture and make work that has the ability to touch and by extension change lives. How do we teach our students that--like John Coltrane--their work too can be a force for good?

Are we as artists and institutions engaging in the work of forging meaningful dialogues with our communities and various constituencies in ways that they previously hadn't? Are we ready to rethink the notion of institutional prerogative, privilege, and exclusivity, or is the current institutional climate as insular as ever? I have a strong feeling that how museums and cultural institutions answer these questions will determine whether they remain viable or end up in a state of crisis, or worse yet, shuttered as has happened to more than one institution recently.

Some of you, of course, have been working and teaching out of a framework of inclusiveness for some time, leading our students by example towards a more holistic art practice, one that makes the world your studio and acknowledges that everyone has a potential place in the conversation. Others have been involved in this work for a long time from the institutional vantage point. I invite those of you who are still laboring under the belief that we can each survive in exquisite isolation to reconsider.

Failure to acknowledge the profoundly changing social landscape and to devise a new paradigm with which to engage and to instead ignore it is an act of profound arrogance and willful ignorance that we cannot afford. For too long young artists have defined the art world as a kind of place where one attempts to do the most elaborate or provocative tap dance for the highest bidder. The art world that students are hoping to enter often appears to be little more than a place for the production of endlessly proliferating expensive and provocative objects, supported by a shrinking marketplace of commerce that attempts to keep its game face on lest anyone know that the game has pretty much changed in deep and intractable ways.

How do we then define the work that we do in our respective fields, in all of the arenas that are represented here tonight? As educators how do we teach our students (and ourselves) to think about what makes their work meaningful? How do we go about making what we do matter not just inside of the institutional space of the college, university, museum or gallery, but outside of it as well. How do we take charge of making sure that our work and ideas have meaning and purpose beyond the institutional walls? How do we make our work meaningful and imperative in a changing and destabilized social landscape? How do we teach our students that their work can be meaningful in ways that are not simply about trying to feed the market economy and that there are other economies and contexts where their work finds a place to be deeply meaningful and transformative? How do we teach our students to envision their practice as something that is deeply embedded in society, not separate from it? How do we teach our students that their work can and should have a much broader audience than simply the art world proper? How can we teach our students (and ourselves) to be participants in a broader social conversation, a conversation that concerns the many and not just the self-preoccupied few? This I believe is the challenge for those of us who teach and those of us who hope to continue to find a meaningful place in the world as members of this art community in the broadest sense.

Those of us who teach should always seek to remind our young artists in training of their connectedness to the world and to encourage them to devise ways of engaging in forward looking practices that both demonstrate a deeply held set of personal beliefs, individual attention to the rigor of their discipline but also a clear sense of how those concerns might deeply impact the world they are living in. We should also encourage our students--in the strongest possible way--to form communities of support and to be actively engaged as both citizens and artists in the communities in which they live. We should also be encouraging them to form communities amongst themselves, since contrary to historical myth no individual ever made significant strides on their own. The myth of the lone genius is really the erasure of that person's community in order to create a mythic isolated "genuis." Certainly there is no honor in teaching students that their only job is to make their work and to then wait for someone to shower rewards upon them.

Those of us who are practicing artists should ourselves be ever mindful of the need to continue shaping our own practices in less insular ways, believing that art's transformative capacities are available to anyone who we can put our work in front of and no one is less deserving of the experience of that work than anyone else.

Those of us who are writing, teaching and otherwise shaping and presenting past and present history need to be mindful that history traditionally has always been a place of selective exclusion as much as it has been a place for selective inclusion masquerading as historical fact. I was reminded of this not too long when I found myself at dinner with a couple of young curators and their patrons. None of them knew the work or name of a single black artists that I asked them about, all of whom I confess had emerged before the 1990s. None of these rang a bell for these young art historians and museum workers who are charged with mounting exhibitions and writing publications that document the expressive work of our time. And these were not obscure or marginal names...to me anyway. If one is going to do this work, one has to be willing and able to do the serious job of excavating history, not merely recognizing the already recognized and hitching your wagon to them. There are still histories waiting to be told and written, and the subjects are indeed hiding in plain sight. One has to believe that the work of bringing others into the center of the discourse truly matters.

If we can encourage our students to live an inclusive and mindful life through their work we leave them better prepared to function broadly in the world. Over the many years I have been teaching I have seen my students go on to receive all sorts of honors, from the Rome Prize to the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize to name a few. But my greatest joy lies in knowing that I was part of a process of helping them each to find their voice and to realize that their voices mattered and could reshape the world in which they live in meaningful ways.

This is what we as a community should commit to: The empowerment and transformation of each individual who comes in touch with our work in whatever form it takes. If we do this, we will be able to say--as I think we would all like to be able to say--that we are truly functioning as a community, one that seeks to be as inclusive and reflective of our many histories as possible, and one that seeks to replace privilege and elitism with the realization that everyone is capable of what Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to as "painstaking excellence." That, quite simply, is the responsibility that I believe all of us in this community called the College Art Association share."

Dawoud's blog is here, from where I took his remarks:
http://whatsgoingon-dawoudbeysblog.blogspot.com/

Known knowns

2010-02-20T15:05:21Z

]]> As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know. ~ Donald Rumsfeld

Short Video Interview with Brandl in CAA on Columbia College Blog by Barbara Trinh

2010-02-16T10:58:50Z

Barbara Trinh says, "While I'm sitting waiting for a session to begin, my curiosity was sparked when a man in front of me was enthusiastically speaking about comics and his art on the T-shirt he was currently wearing. Instead of handing someone an ordinary business card, he hands them a button with his contact info on the back. That is because Mark Staff Brandl (http://www.markstaffbrandl.com/) is no ordinary artist. He is interested in comic/ sequential art, painting, and art history. His installations are described as 'walk in comic books', a mixture of installation and comic books that are 12 ft tall. In the video, Mark tells us about himself and his experience at CAA."
Barbara Trinh, BA Candidate from the Film & Video Dept

]]> .

Orange Crush is now available

2010-02-07T11:18:40Z

Dear Sharks, the new book from Sarabande is now available! Graced with a painting by Yves Tanguy.

You can order here

Read poems from it here and here

"A sweet fever of a voice lures us into pictures of bone bonnets, whip stripes and dead girls. These poems freeze time. Simone pulls absolute beauty and light from these dark moments. I'm in and hooked."--Tim Rutili of Califone

Post-Hysterical: Timeline, Comics and a Plurogenic View of Art History

2010-01-24T16:19:26Z

A 55 minute speech, with images, by artist and art historian Mark Staff Brandl. Originally presented at the CAA (College Art Association, art historians organization) annual conference, as well as at the Kunstschule Lichtenstein, in 2010. It concerns description and criticism of the standard conceptions and models of fine art history and the history of comics, while offering a new one model for conceiving of and teaching these histories.

]]> here (mpeg4).

Direct Download here (higher quality mpeg4)

Direct download here (Ogg video)

Portrait of my Mom

2010-01-23T18:17:59Z

Alicja Czuchajowska, Woodridge, IL, 2009

Altermodernism, etc.

2010-01-19T13:44:17Z

In my opinion, 'Altermodernism', like Nicolas Bourriaud's other word coinage, 'Relational Aesthetics,' sounds great, but is, when elucidated, too much of a collage of ideas others have been presenting for some time. --- And I see none of it in the art he chooses. The art in the shows he curates is always the same-old-same-old: Consensus Correct 'trendies.' So it comes down to an attempted, forced, reactionary return to Modernism at best and a fashionable neo-PoMo at worst. Neither possibility is promising.