Screengrab AFC

I have an interview with Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects up at Rhizome. The teaser below.

Two years ago Caitlin Jones observed in NYFA Current that net artists working in multiple formats were increasingly finding venues to show. Today, the art world is still figuring out how to manage the practicalities of dealer and artist relationships. I spoke with Aron Namenwirth, of artMovingProjects, in an effort to better understand the challenges, and solutions, digital media presents to contemporary galleries with a focus on New Media. - Paddy Johnson

One topic that’s come up on Rhizome’s blog is the rematerialization of art (the idea, according to Ed Halter, “that innovations such as the flat-screen monitor, the digital print, and the editioned DVD, have helped transform immaterial forms like video and net.art into a new generation of physical, sellable objects”), so I wanted to talk to you about this a little. Is it critical to display new media art in the gallery?

I think new media art, like old media, needs a physical place for critical and social discourse. On the computer screen in the privacy of your home, you can do research, and email other professionals on the merits of a piece, but it’s not the same as looking at it in a real space, walking around it, and experiencing it. A lot of new media work requires interaction, and that interaction is mediated by the spectator and the user together.

Tom Moody, OptiDisc, 2007 (Installation at artMovingProjects)

It seems to me that there’s a lot to be said for going into a space, and experiencing that work with someone else too. A dialog can occur, that, as you mention, is more spontaneous. Which I think can be important for new media, particularly because the bias of the medium is “cold.”

Of course, the beauty of some new media art projects is that you can view it anytime you want online.

Right, which presumably has its pluses and minuses for dealers. I know you have been working on a contract between the artist and gallery. I thought maybe we could discuss some of these details a little, because I imagine they’re really important to both artists and dealers.

Sure. The contract I’ve drawn up is an agreement between the artist and artMovingProjects. It’s binding for the life of the working relationship between artist and the gallery, and that’s actually how the document starts. The stipulation is for one piece of the artist’s oeuvre — and that’s what’s so different about it than other gallery contracts. Typically, the contract between the artist and the gallery represents all the artist’s work, and ties the artist to the gallery. In this case, the artist is free to work for many different venues simultaneously, which is a real plus.

Well, there are examples of independently working artists in traditional mediums that seem to do okay, but it is very rare.

Yes, and this is very specifically tied to the intellectual content. It stipulates that the artwork will only be sold with permission of the gallery at the agreed piece in perpetuity….With editions, and video, the dealers typically increase the price of the edition as it is sold, and I feel that that’s not such a great idea in the short term because it creates undue pressure on the collector. Also, part of the contract stipulates that any deals the artist makes outside the agreement involving others will not be supported by the gallery without authorization in writing. Further, should the artwork be sold without permission in writing this will end the relationship between the artist and the gallery.

To read the full piece click here.

Dan Levenson at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Image courtesy of the artist

You’ll have to excuse the sparse posting on Art Fag City over the last two days. I’ve been working on a couple of long form pieces, one of which is now up on ArtCal Zine. The interview I conduct with artist Dan Levenson of Little Switzerland may not be quite as exhaustive as his investigation of gallery and artist branding, but with close to 2000 published words, I feel I’ve at least given it a shot. A teaser below:

“This is hilarious” I told artist Dan Levenson, pulling out a thong ornamented with the floral Little Switzerland gallery logo. The sale of t-shirts not to mention exhibition branded lingerie falls considerably short of common within fine art circles, though so do corporate identities with no tax id numbers, bank accounts or regular hours of operation. Without knowing Little Switzerland’s background as a conceptual art project about the branding and marketing of art, it might be just as easily confused for a front of some nefarious business enterprise.

Those familiar with the artist’s activist efforts during MoMA’s grand reopening however, would not make this mistake. Protesting the museum’s raise in admission price from 12 dollars to 20 in 2004, Levenson’s FreeMoMA.org campaign consisted of a wearable human sized currency, extended protests outside the museum, and informational fliers describing the problem. Since the high profile days of FreeMoMA, Levenson has continued creating work that addresses similar ideas, while maintaining lighthearted approach. “I have an interest in all the ways art work is disseminated that is extraneous from the object” Levenson explained, “the marketing, the advertising, the word of mouth, the hype… and just the business of the art gallery is fascinating to me and a lot of what Little Switzerland is about.”

ArtCal Zine: And I imagine your position as an art maker gives you an important and unique perspective…

Dan Levenson: As an artist I am trying to co-opt that business and make it part of my artwork. So I’m interested in the postcards that galleries send out, I’m interested in the catalogs that they print, the essays that are in those catalogs. I love art gallery logos, I love art gallery letterhead, I love printed art gallery advertisements.

AZ: Speaking to this, can you talk about how you feel Little Switzerland identifies itself as an emerging artist gallery?

DL: Well, it’s flexible in terms of the forms it could take, but the story that I have now is that it is a gallery that began in Zürich in 1996 and then moved to Berlin in 1997 where it ran through three seasons and then closed in 1999. So it was an emerging artist gallery that represented a group of emerging Swiss artists. They were all young, they all knew each other, they all went to the same art school and they were all sort of “true believers” in my mind.

AZ: What are true believers?

DL: That’s something that I have a hard time explaining but I guess I divide artists along a spectrum of iconoclasts and true believers, and Little Switzerland is a gallery more for true believers than for iconoclasts. It’s an emerging gallery, so it was a little bit too loud and a little bit too promotional, the way that emerging artist galleries tend to be. We’ve spoken before about Bellwether and how their early graphic identity was a little bit louder and kitschy-er.

AZ: Yeah, their website was an illustrated storefront with someone walking in…

DL: Yea, that’s right! Which I thought was very very cool. And I loved that when they moved to Chelsea they had that pink neon sign that had their logo, which was Bickham Script, a very florid, font. And of course they’ve toned it down now…I think they are aspiring to something a little bit more respectable and upscale and more Chelsea than Williamsburg. So Little Switzerland is more downtown and they have this kind of loud downtown logo, and then they print t-shirts and they have a kind of whole promotional merchandizing aspect that I’m not aware that any real gallery has ever done. I don’t think that galleries generally sell t-shirts and coffee mugs and beer steins and stickers and that kind of stuff, but Little Switzerland does. And more than that, they sort of force their artists in the compromising position of having to model the clothing. So these are the artists modeling.

To read the full piece click here.

Related: James Wagner on Dan Levenson at EFA

There aren’t many ways to get your money’s worth out of the Rutgers MFA program, but painter and professor Thomas Nozkowski, represents one of them.  The above clip comes from Anaba!

My final interview in the series Art Intercom is up on icommons. This week I interview artist Kathryn Smith. Check it out!

Kathryn Smith likes good secrets. Not necessarily fun or beautiful ones - in fact her work often reveals those that are dark and violent – but her talent lies in her ability to both find and create hidden narratives, and obscured meaning, within a variety of mediums including film, photography and drawing. This week I spoke to Smith about her interest in the underbelly of filmic coding, how her simultaneous practice as a curator and critic informs her work, and the project she has planned for the upcoming icommons exhibition. Smith marks the final artist interview in a series of six, leading up to summit.

Art Fag City: So in your artist statement you talk about the cinematic still having ambiguous meaning such that they imply a kind of violence. As a cinematic device, overuse of these shots can feel manipulative, and invasive and violence sometimes is a result of this, but I am interested in how you specifically address this in your work.

Kathryn Smith: Well, I suppose I look for [the violence.] That artist statement was written a couple years ago when I was working with films as a primary source material, but what I’m busy with right now, and probably what I’ll do as part of my Summit project, is working with photographs from newspapers or images found online. I feel quite a connection with Joy in that regard . I’m naturally drawn to images that are violent, or imply violence without being overly sensational. I find I can’t deal with too much gore anymore, but I do enjoy images where there is a protagonist whose actions are not really clear, images in which the action could go either way. I suppose that’s what I enjoy about watching films by pausing or watching in frame advance mode, just to see what the narrative possibilities are outside the narrative flow of a given cinematic narrative.

AFC: And do you feel there is a particular work where this shows up?

KS: I do steal excessively from existing film, and I do use the form in that way. I did a performance piece a couple of years ago called Jack in Johannesburg and I made a film resulting from that performance which remixed documentary footage from the performance with as many dramatized and documentary-style narratives around the Jack the Ripper narrative as I could find, and I included as part of the dialogue for that film, soundbytes from Alfred Hitchock’s film Rope which is based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case where two men murder someone as an intellectual challenge, and they discuss this act in the beginning of Rope. So I don’t only do it with visuals. I use the strategy with voice overs and soundbytes that I find and use in this way.

To read the full interview click here.

Nathaniel Stern, Wind, 2006, archival lambda print.

I was travelling for most of yesterday so I didn’t have a chance to mention that my two part interview with new media artist Nathaniel Stern went up on the icommons blog yesterday. You can read the full discussion here and here, but I’ve included teasers from both interviews below since each part deals with different subject matter. In the first post Stern and I talk about his art work, and in the second, we touch upon how the concerns of the Creative Commons effect artists. Stern speaks with great eloquence on the subject, so our conversation is not to be missed!

Inspired by pioneering artists in the field of Interactive art such as David Rokeby and Myron Kruger, Nathaniel Stern builds upon their work by reintroducing traditional art- making techniques to reinterpret digital records of movement. In the first half of my interview with the artist we discuss works leading up to, and informing his current body of prints he titles Compressionism.In these images Stern manipulates visual documentation of movement distorting memories or impressions of the body.

Art Fag City: So I wanted to begin by discussing your work, and so I thought we could start with the prints you make. I wonder if you could talk about your process a little bit because you have the Compressionism series that you’ve been working on, and, you use a lot of ‘techy’ things, but the actual process is very traditional. You’re also making very traditional art historical references and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that and what your interest is in pairing those things?

Nathaniel Stern: Absolutely. I guess obviously with any series I’m pulling inspiration from various places, but I think when that series started my interests led me to two things: the first was I was working with interactive installation and performativity, trying to get people to move in ways they normally wouldn’t, and that was kind of my mantra for a while; rather than trying to think of immersion as a goal, I thought of immersion as a side effect of playing with affect – the involuntary ability to effect, and be effected - and how such art can sort of put the body in quotes. And what I found was that it was a very special kind of person that would actually engage and interact with those pieces; most people would just kind of watch and talk about the work, and it was everyone from, like, my mother, who didn’t understand the technology - and just kind of said how proud she was and sat in the corner - but also the writers and critics who really liked my work would kind of stand back, and nod, and talk about how it’s interactive, and it’s performative, and playful, but they would never actually use it.

To read more of part one click here.

A sampler from second half of the interview below.

I think the discussion right now is in the wrong arena – copyright or CC, Fair Use or piracy, this is what big companies should worry about, not artists. Artists should raise questions around if you release the full high-resolution or lower-resolution under CC, or whether you allow people to exhibit the video or do you sell the exhibition rights separately - I think these are the models that are different for each and every one of us, potentially for each and every art work. - Nathaniel Stern

The following is the second half of a two part interview with the iCommons Artist in Residence coordinator, Nathaniel Stern. In this post we speak specifically about the concerns of professional artists vis a vis copyright or CC.

Art Fag City: So we’ve talked a little bit about the prints. I should note that you also make videos, which are on your site as well, before we move on so readers will know to check that work out. I wondered if you could talk about your connection with Creative Commons.

Nathaniel Stern: Admittedly, it’s by default that I’ve become a bit of an iCommons activist. I was one of the few people who had a blog in South Africa - now there’s many, but I was one of the earliest ones there and certainly the first in the art world - and it was under Creative Commons, so I was contacted by the South African CC team early on. Since then, I’ve become an impromptu spokesperson for them on some level and I’ve tried to direct that dialog not only toward my personal interests but also the interests of professional artists more generally. I guess I have two main themes with regards to Creative Commons: the first is that I want to ensure that we make work that’s free and available in the public domain for remixing and playing and generating discussion, but that’s not exploitative of artists. And so with this, ideally, I guess I’d like to see Fair Use expanded exponentially and I see various CC licenses as doing exactly that. With issues of distribution I guess I like to differentiate between ‘art’ and the art’s ‘content’ - the former is for collectors and the latter is free: I think it should be available to everyone. I believe, for example, that you should be allowed to download and play with my video art; I give away files for my prints, they are available on my site - not at super high res, but high res enough that you could print them out or re-mix. I think it’s important that they are out there. That’s the art’s content, not the art itself. From my perspective, with Walter Benjamin‘s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he was right in saying that potentials for easily copying work changed the relationship we have to art objects, but he was wrong in saying that the more copies, the less the authentic original has value: it’s exactly the opposite - the more people that have posters of the Mona Lisa, the more collectors will want the original; the more people that watch my videos.

To read the full interview (part two) click here.

My next interview in the series Art Intercom is up on the icommons blog. This week I interview artist Ana Husman. Check it out!

Media artist Ana Husman often speeds up durational video, in effect, animating happenings and actions to underscore the development of social mores. Such techniques throw back to films like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, a work known for speeding up shots of city dwellers, and Michael Snow’s Wavelength, which consists of a single 45 minute tracking shot of a room, though Husman’s tends to empart a more pointed social message than either piece mentioned above.A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb, Husman explores shared experiences and cultural norms. When I spoke with the artist last week over the phone we focused primarily on her conceptual collaborations with amateur artists as well as her professional experiences with Creative Commons licensing, though we also touch upon her film The Market, which was featured on the iCommons Summit 06 DVD. We finish up our conversation with a discussion about the work she will be creating for this year’s Summit.

AFC: The concept of a shared experience is one of the primary concerns of your work, so Creative Commons makes a lot of sense for you. Do you see yourself as being pro-actively copyright friendly?

Ana: I wouldn’t call myself an activist. I just see myself obligated to the people I work with. On the subject of Creative Commons licensing though, I think there are at least two good reasons to being using it, especially for The Market. Firstly, the film was supported by the Croatian Ministry of Culture with taxpayers’ money. Secondly, often when I create work it is drawn from shared heritage; I am “using” other people’s stories. By putting them in my own context I would find it inappropriate to close it, to copyright it or to sell it, in any way to make it unavailable for them to use.

To read the full piece click here.

Joy Garnett, Juke Joint, 2007, oil on canvas, 26 x 46 inches

My second interview in a series of six with artists the residence program at iSummit this year went up this morning on at iCommons. An excerpt below for your reading pleasure.

New York based artist and blogger Joy Garnett frequently uses images depicting natural and technological disasters she finds on the web as a starting point for her paintings. However, the real objective of her work is not to make political commentary, but to reveal the malleability of meaning within these images.

Joy is well known for her involvement in a copyright fight called “Joywar” which began when the well-known photojournalist Susan Meiselas threatened to sue her for the use of part of a photograph she had taken in 1979, as the basis for her painting Molotov. Joy removed the image from her website, but by that time artist members of Rhizome.org had already copied it in protest inspiring countless online permutations of the painting. Joy also runs the popular and often political reblog NEWSgrist.

AFC: As an artist who makes and sells paintings, what is the role of Creative Commons for people such as yourself?

Joy: To me painting has always been a remix. It is a really old technology that excels at remixing. But the remixing has to do with the eye, the hand, the memory… So I think the idea that the commons is something we just thought of is a misconception. It’s just that we’ve had to re-identify it because our culture has become so proprietary and it’s been leaning in that direction for some time. As a painter dealing with the idea of copyright, I see that it doesn’t really function for us as it was intended to because it doesn’t really apply to “one-offs”; copyright was first devised in the context of publishing and it is meant to function for works that are mass produced. So for me, Copyright has nothing to do with how I earn my living, and it has nothing to do with how painters earn their livings.

AFC: So given this statement, does Creative Commons have a place in the professional art world and amongst artists?

Joy: Yes. To me the idea of Creative Commons licensing is the beginning of a way for artists to take charge, to try and understand how claiming or relinquishing property can serve them and the community.

AFC: And do you think that the community at large is basically on the same page about copyright as artists?

Joy: I think not; one of my favorite judges, who specializes in issues of copyright and fair use, Judge Pierre Leval, said something at a recent panel discussion regarding this very issue that made me and other art professionals in the audience jump.

He said, “Without copyright, authors and artists would still be at the mercy of and dependent on the good graces of wealthy patrons for their living” Well, we all know that artists are dependent on the whims of the wealthy and that our careers aren’t really affected by copyright. So that was a revelation to me: that there is such a gap in understanding between these different realms of expertise, that there’s such a split between art people and law people. And even within the artist community there is a gap between those who feel like they need to control their work because people might steal it — there’s paranoia on the one extreme end — and then way on the other end there’s the open source sampler position . And there are many shades in between. It’s very interesting to see how polarized the community is. I think redefining the commons can help us create a dialog.

To continue reading click here.

Part two of my interview series is now up on the icommons blog. The teaser immediately follows below with a link to the full interview.

The following is the second post in a two part interview with conceptual art collective MTAA. I discuss specific works and what the collective has planned for the iCommons Summit. We concluded part one of the interview talking about how MTAA define the workings of a ‘collaboration’, and the discussion continues below. (Read part one of two in this series here.)

T.Whid: So we’re making this new graphic illustration or diagram and my first inclination was that I don’t really need to collaborate with the people running the Summit. It’s like, I’m giving them this thing, and they can do with it what they will. But at the same time, I want it used there, so I guess I have to be proactive in asking for certain things.

AFC: Right, but just to be clear on collaboration at the Summit, when you get there you’re doing some sort of collaborative project are you not?

T.Whid: I guess. But we’re not sure what that is yet! So then this other piece we’re thinking about doing is this thing called On Kawara Update, which we had done a few years ago, and it lived on Rhizome’s site for a while and then it broke when they reconfigured their web server so we decided we would have to remake it at some point… The way that piece works is that it updates [the conceptual artist] On Kawara’s dating process, so you go to a web page and it displays the date for that day. If you click on the date, you’ll see news stories from that day, and then there’s an archive where you can go back and see other days. Because the way On Kawara’s paintings work is that he’d paint a painting that day and then he’d package it in a box with news clippings from where he was that day.

To continue reading the full article click here.

The first part of my interview with artist collective MTAA is up on the iCommons blog. I’ve posted a teaser below, but as always, click through to read the whole piece.

Art Intercom is a six part series conducted by Art Fag City blogger Paddy Johnson, who will be interviewing the iCommons Summit Artists in Residence. In the weeks leading up to the conference, interviews will be posted once weekly, profiling the artists’ work and describing their approach to Creative Commons licensing. Artists to be interviewed include Ana Husman, Jaka Železnikar, Joy Garnett, Kathryn Smith, Nathaniel Stern and this weeks interviewees, Mike Sarff and Tim Whidden (who go by the names M.River and T.Whid), of MTAA. Tim will be representing MTAA as one of the Artists in Residence at the iSummit in Dubrovnik.

MTAA (M.River & T.Whid Art Associates) is simply described on their website as “a Brooklyn, New York-based conceptual and net art collaboration founded in 1996.” I like them because they give me wine when I visit their studio. I like their work, because it is characterized by economy of expression without being generalized or simplistic. What’s more, they frequently extend this aptitude to create feedback systems that require the same streamlined response from their audience. The result is very clean and eloquent communication mediated by or in the form of websites, installations, sculptures and photographic prints. Creative Commons licensing plays a critical role in their work, because it provides a set of pre-established rules for use of their work so that they don’t have to. In short, it simplifies the conversation, and facilitates the elegance that defines their art.

In the two part interview that follows I discuss specific works and what the collective has planned for the iCommons Summit.

AFC: So you guys are a team - how will you be working with one of you in Croatia (Tim Whidden) and the other one (Mike Sarff) in New York?

M.River: I’ve defaulted to Tim!

T.Whid: Well, I guess there’s… sort of an online discussion happening, so we’re both taking part in that and then in Dubrovnik I’ll just be there as the representative of MTAA so I’ll have to email Mike before I do anything and ask “Mike should I do this?”

M.River: “Get lunch first!” (laughter)

T.Whid: We had two ideas and we wanted to do both of them, so the first idea was that we have this illustration called the ‘Simple Net Art Diagram’ that has had a Creative Commons licence applied to it for a few years now, like one of the most liberal licences beyond just going in the public domain.

AFC: What does a “very liberal” licence mean?

T.Whid: I guess it’s called the attribution licence meaning that any one can use it for any purpose as long as we get attribution. So that means someone could make t-shirts and sell them and that’s fine with us….

To read the complete interview click here.

I guess technically today’s a holiday so it’s not like I need to be posting any notices here, but seeing as how I’ll be out of town on business I’m just going to assume not everybody has it off. Here are a few choice music videos to take you into the long weekend, (people using newsreaders will have to click through for the videos as always)

Jack to the Sound of the Underground via: Jeff Sisson

This video features The Nihilist Spasm Band (comprised of Canadian art stars, John Clement, Art Pratten, Bill Exley, Murray Favro, and John Boyle) demonstrating how to use various non-traditional instruments to make music on a Japanese television show. The hosts clearly don’t know what to make of the noise band at all. They’ve cracked a few jokes, but unless you understand Japanese you’ll not get them.

Deerhoof’s Kidz Are So Small animated video. Via: Drawn!

And as a special Easter bonus this commercial for Golden Gate Funeral Homes is especially sweet. Via George Hotelling.

AFC: It seems like it’s really difficult for a gallery to survive without doing an art fair.

PG: Yeah, you hear that line, and I guess it’s sort of true. We sort of did. We survived for a long fucking time before an art fair. We didn’t thrive. I guess it sort of helps. It exposes you to people who wouldn’t otherwise come down to Chinatown to buy art. We will in one week at the Armory get more exposure than we’ll get in six years of being down here.

AFC: Do you see fairs as being part of your advertising? Or part of your programming, like part of your exhibition program?

PG: That’s a good question. I think you strive to make it something valid. It’s funny. I have a couple of different takes on this, sometimes the dealers try to make the art fair booth into a statement, into an installation. And sometimes it’s actually pretty successful. I’ve had a pretty good time at art fairs looking at some pretty decent installations. I sort of like when that occurs. I also understand them as strict trade fair, you know, group show. Here’s the leftovers from my showing year, you know, come and get them, and I also admire that. I like both. You know, where it’s this cool, installation, meta-show, and sometimes the work is site-specific even, and it’s an installation of the art market, and it’s kind of okay, you know. Or it’s my installation about the art market, and it’s a hodge-podge, cracker barrel hanging, come and get it, ‘cuz I’m just at a stupid art fair anyway, you mothers. That was what we did at NADA [The New Art Dealers Alliance fair in Miami]. I wasn’t going to do some hot shot, okay, you’re on, do your solo show at NADA. A little bit of everything that we do, and that is helpful because with a wide group show, you can introduce a bunch of stuff to people who kind of want to see something. It’s kind of more democratic of me to cover more, every artist, and to give them the opportunity to make some dough and have their work seen. I think it can kind of interfere, that kind of cracker barrel hanging requires a viewer who can kind of see…

AFC: Do you think viewers are getting accustomed to art fair hangings?

PG: I’m hoping…

AFC: Well, it’s sort of a whole aesthetic, right?

PG: Yeah, I like this conversation, the subject of the art fair hanging, and whether the work can still be seen. The weird context, whether it can overcome the context of this hanging and this environment. And I like to think, sure fuck, if it’s good stuff, it can…

AFC: It can hold its own?

PG: That’s always where my hope is…

AFC: But certainly some galleries achieve these goals better than others because there really is it’s not hung, you can’t sell it sort of aesthetic.

PG: Yeah, or the dealer is really fidgety and like things really clean, dealers that probably see their galleries as an extension of themselves or their home, and need this aesthetic, you know, in their booth.

AFC: Those who will lay in a brand new floor…

PG: Yeah, take the carpet out because the sculpture looks better. I think we’re all different. Dealer people come from different places, and they have different ideas of how the work should be and look. So, good luck, you get yourself a booth at an art fair and you have ten or fifteen artists that you represent…

AFC: And you’ve got a day to put it together…

PG: Good luck to you. You got yourself into it, you filled out the order form. You went over to London to badger your way into this thing, and I think that’s fair enough. I’m willing to take on that burden.

AFC: Did you go over to London specifically to badger people?

PG: Yes

AFC: Really?

Sarah Braman (codirector of the gallery): Yes. We scrounged together money to put him on a plane. Went to Target and bought a new pair of pants.

PG: Got my Target pants and got on the airplane, because it was at this critical moment. We already lost this bum artist because we didn’t make it into the Armory fair, so we were fucked. So it was like, we’re going to do this, wrestle our way, fuck our way into this thing. Or we likely be ignored by it because they don’t need to care. It’s sort of humiliating. To have to introduce yourself. You know you sort of want people to come to you, you don’t want to have to go to them, but whatever.

AFC: But now it worked out, right?

PG: Yeah, but now we’re in the thing, and it’s awkward. You just want it to be worthwhile and decent. It’s just sort of weird to be invited to the garden party late because you badgered your way into the wedding.

AFC: Right, yeah…

PG: I didn’t even think about art fairs until some of the artists started going to them with or without us. And then it was like, by gumbo, we got to get into one of these art fairs. So at first, we talked to NADA because they seemed kind of youthful, and then last September, we applied to a Swiss fair and we finally got to Europe, which was useful because you get to show up in Europe. Say the artists have been in Paris or Berlin or London, showing their stuff and finally you show up too. We were a little late in getting there, like, oh you guys, I thought _______ showed with ________, who the hell are you? Showing her too? A lot of this sort of stuff, so you’re in Switzerland and you have to straighten out the story because the secondary dealers who show your artists don’t really talk about you. They don’t really care. They’ve got this work, it’s important, it’s selling. They don’t really talk to their collectors or curators about where it emanated from. Who showed it first? Until you the dealership show up, you finally get to make a case for yourself. Because it’s not a very big community…

AFC: I know, it’s tiny. I mean are you sure there’s a connection between your getting in and the badgering? I mean, the gallery over the last couple of years has become much more high profile.

PG: I think they needed their cage rattled a little. I’m not certain of that at all. This is the problem I have I think the committee is likely too small and likely too old to be able to really discriminate and know what the hell’s going on downtown. They’re very busy people. They’re doing their own damn shows. Their neighborhood in Chelsea, all on Gideon. I don’t think it’s the mandate really to kind of go into the outback to find the dealers and the galleries that are doing the heavy work.

AFC: Unfortunately it’s not really necessary for them to do that, so you have to kind of make it necessary…

PG: Yeah, you do. It’s a weird thing. I’m not sure of this yet, but I think that these art fairs have an impact, like going back to the advertisement thing, like your name on the list or your position in the fair be it in the coach or whatever has some bearing on why someone might choose to take your artist to a museum show or buy them or whatever. I think, yes, likely it helps. I don’t know how that should be decided on, whether this board of five Europeans and two New Yorkers should have all that the authority because it does advertise and change the currency and demand likely of the work here. They have quite a lot of power, it turns out. I’m not sure exactly how it should work. You know, it’s like, I want an ad in Artforum, I call up Knight Landesman, and say, here’s your $2000, can you run this ad? And it will happen. But if I need to get into the Armory fair, it’s not just because I filled out the form and gave them the $500 fee. There’s some other voodoo going on. And good luck, to decoding it, if it’s your ambition. I think a lot of galleries probably just say, ah, fuck the Armory, it’s a queer garden party and I ain’t going anyway. Yeah, okay, good luck, that sounds cool too. But I think for those who think it’s useful and that the New York art fairs should be something significant and are important to the New York art world, then fuck. I hope the fair does some justice in the future for the galleries that are deserving, that’s all. That’s my one hope, and I’ll watch them. When I head this gallery or that gallery got in one year and out the next and what replaced them and why, it’s curious. Who did we replace? Who got knocked out when we got in?

AFC: Yeah, I hadn’t really though about that.

PG: Yeah, it’s a bit of a musical chairs.

AFC: It’s every year too, it seems like the Armory gets bigger. Although that’s really not the case, it’s just art fairs are getting bigger.

PG: There more satellites. Like you were down in Miami…

AFC: That’s insane. I get the sense that it’s going to be less insane here, than it was last year.

PG: This is the bigger story, really, because of the musical chairs thing. Is it getting bigger or smaller? And how long does the party get bigger? This is the other question that people are all asking. Is the bubble going to burst? And all this crap. I don’t even know, I’ve never been aware of a bubble. I’ve just been doing this thing, but apparently there are a lot of galleries and a lot of art being sold on the market. And I guess there is the community to support that. We’ve broke even or done well at all these things somehow, still sort of shocks me. But that’s because I’m Canadian.

AFC: (Laughter) I know about that.

PG: Selling art is still a slap in the face. I still can’t believe it. (Laughter)

AFC: Like it’s hardwired into us.

PG: It’s the last thing you buy. Nobody buys art.

AFC: Unless you’re Ken Thomson.

PG: Right. And isn’t he dead? [Editors note: Ken Thomson died in June of 2006]

Phil Grauer of CANADA New York at the Armory Show

This week my colleague Steven Stern details CANADA’s fight to get into the Armory Show in Time Out New York. The article reveals no real scandal or conspiracy, but it does shed some light on the pitfalls of the art fair selection process. I similarly interviewed the gallery founder, Phil Grauer prior to the show’s opening as part of our fair programming, and as such have a few words to add to the developing discussion. What you are about to read constitutes the first of a two part interview.

Art Fag City: So, tell me the story!

Phil Grauer: Which one?

AFC: The one about how you fucked your way into the Armory!

PG: (laughing) Slept my way…

AFC: Yeah.

PG: No, it’s not really a big story. There were a couple of Europeans that were showing our artists, some New York-based kids that we had done solo shows with, you know… introduced these artists to the Parisian dealers. And then…Rosson Crow would show up at art fairs we weren’t at and that kind of thing. And so it just gave me a reason to kind of go up to the committee members, and tell them…

AFC: Are they based in Paris?

PG: The Armory committee?

AFC: Yeah…

PG: No, no the committee’s just made of…I don’t know much about how this committee gets chosen….Um, but they’re dealers, so I went over to Frieze and complained to the committee,. The committee’s just like Anton Kern and Lisa Spelman, whatever, you know, the guys, right? [Editors note: The 2007 selection committee members are Ciléne Andréhn, Stockholm, Matthias Arndt, Berlin, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, Anton Kern, New York, Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, Stuart Shave, London] And so I went over to Frieze because that’s where they’re all congregated, so I can go talk to them all…I was trying to get myself off of a wait list.

AFC: Wait, were you at Frieze? Were you showing there?

PG: No, no, I was just a tourist.

AFC: Just visiting…

PG: Yeah, I was just a backpacker. European ehhh…

AFC: Backpacker at the art fair?

PG: Yeah, Eurorail pass.

AFC: AWESOME.

PG: And so I got to Frieze, and there they all were, so I could just kind of go like, the problem I’m having with your Armory thing, folks, is that my artists are now being shown at the fair without me through these European dealerships, and it’s a sort of a misrepresentation of where they come from and who engineered their beginnings. So could you stop doing that or let me in your fucking fair? (Laughter) It just gave me an argument, rather than, oh please, but we have such fine art, which I think is the problem a lot of galleries likely have. It’s like then they likely have great works that should been seen and sold at art fairs, but I mean, this is the avenue that we kind of took. The New York art fair is kind of eroding the young New York dealers and gallerists and galleries like this one. Because it’s misrepresenting, it’s not covering this work that’s already being seen internationally.

AFC: Right.

PG: So what the fuck, sort of thing. And I think that they sort of had to go, oh, that’s a pretty good point. Oh yeah, that would suck, if I was in your shoes, that would suck. So then they kind of rethink it. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy or anything of the like. I don’t think they are trying to pull, and I’m a paranoid person by nature, so I start to think, oh, this is about suppressing me. It’s removing the guts of my program, the bread and butter from my table. You suddenly start feeling, because if you don’t get into the international art fairs, you’re going to lose your artists to these dealers, because you’re a gallery that can’t swing with the sharks. They might as well split, which did happen to us, you know, that sort of scenario did happen to us. I also had that to say, “I’ve already lost an artist,” you know this artist, and they’re like, oh yeah, because of your art fair…You know, the artist is going to say, “oh you didn’t get into the Armory? What the hell? I’m a great artist, I’m a superstar. My work’s in the Whitney Biennial, and my art gallery’s not in the Armory, well fuck you…”

AFC: Yeah, “I want my work to sell…”

PG: “I want my work to sell, and I want to be really famous. I want that room at MoMA. I’m the guy, and my art gallery’s not in the Armory. Fuck ya’ll,” so then they walk. Like sure, some artists aren’t going to do that and are going to fight kung fun style the dealer until we get into the fairs or don’t or whatever, but I think a lot of the artists are looking for the exposure that they see coming to the other artists at these fairs, be that the Armory or Basel or whatever. So it becomes part of the criteria to maintain a staff of artists, this type of exposure becomes …that was the thing, you have to, it seems, get in there, and I just didn’t think the New York art fair of all art fairs should be eroding the kind of landscape of young art dealers by using their artists but not using the galleries, like what the hell’s that? You know I’m the poor sucker who sat down here on the Lower East Side in the cold showing this motherfucker without a track record four years ago, and now that he’s in the Whitney Biennial and showing in Europe or whatever, you know, you’re able to use him and I can’t or something.

AFC: Right.

PG: That kind of imbalance.

AFC: Do you know how many galleries from this neighborhood are going to be at the Armory?

PG: I have no real idea, probably none.

AFC: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too.

PG: Well, this is the thing. It’s hard for me to throw tomatoes because I got into the thing. So, it’s like, ooh, shit, you know…

AFC: And you want to get in next year…

Look forward to Part Two of Two to appear shortly.

In addition to our regular art fair coverage this week we will be featuring interviews with a few of the newer art stars in the New York area. First up, Top Design participant and Scope artist Ryan Humphrey, discusses his latest work, the interior design world, and our desire to accumulate more crap than we already have with my colleague Marie-Adele Miniot. We won’t know the success of the gun sculptures he tells us “hold the mirror up to society” until Thursday, though I trust we can all prejudge those words.

Look forward to our Armory primer tomorrow as I discuss the politics of art fairs with exhibitor and gallery co-owner Phil Grauer of Canada.

Marie-Adele Miniot and Ryan Humphrey: An Interview in Two Parts

AFC: Tell me a little about the project you’re working on for Scope.

RH: Well, it’s a very sensitive topic.

AFC: Oh, is it?

RH: I think I may have lost some friends over it with the press release, but we’ll see how that pans out. I kind of dug into the interior design world a little bit, and I don’t know if I’m going to be successful with my project, but I’m going to give it my best shot. There’s like a lot of stuff I’m trying to juggle, and the space hasn’t even been erected yet. It’s basically a tent.

AFC: Right.

RH: It’s loosely based on an interior, but it’s more like installation work I’ve done in the past. And it’s a little edgy. There’s a big display of gun sculptures, and spears that have been made from brooms, and paint poles, and mop handles, and the brooms have been cut with…they’re steel, and they’ve been cut out with a plasma cutter, so they’re very accurate. It’s kind of an idea about arming the domestic worker. You know, what happens when your maid starts to rebel?

AFC: Okay…

RH: So, and the bigger picture, I’m kind of holding a mirror up to society right now, and saying, what do you value and why do you value it? I kind of feel like a lot of people’s desires, some people might consider them needs, are highly based on, I guess I’ll call it advanced peer pressure, what marketing companies decided people need to have. They sell people to those products; they don’t sell products to people anymore. Like you gotta have, don’t have walk into a – did you hear that?

AFC: Yeah, what was that?

RH: Some guy on the street saying, “Yo, you fucking idiot!” (Laughter) Beautiful, only in New York. Wow, what’s going on here? Like you can’t have a knock off Louis Vuitton bag, you know what I’m saying? It still functions as a bag; it gets you across town; it carries your keys; it carries your wallet. The difference is really…there isn’t much of a difference. I’m sure there’s a difference in terms of quality and materials, but it’s still a bag. And the fact that you have to have a knock-off of another bag says something, a lot about the psychology of people who exist in, and I’m not talking about capitalism in a bad communist sort of way, but like, capitalism has to continually create markets in order to survive. Bringing all that back to my installation, I’m trying to use iconography that really is a common denominator that really resonates with people on some level. I’m not saying guns are good or bad, I’m just saying this is a thing that we value or we don’t value. And when we put this next to your, whatever SUV’s in style this week, there’s a lot of questions asked, I would think. Am I making any sense?

AFC: Absolutely, you are.

RH: I’m rambling on.

AFC: No, it makes a lot of sense. Are these ideas that you’ve kind of thought about for a while, or has the show (Top Design) further developed them for you? How has that sort of relationship existed…?

RH: I really looked at the show as an extension of some of the performance work I’ve done. It’s hidden in there, and I think somebody who’s conditioned to studying art, and looking at art, and asking a lot of questions, can pick up on things and see it. But I think a lot of what I was talking about or trying to do has been made for TV, it’s been edited. But I feel like I fought the good fight.

AFC: What were the sort of events that led up to the show?

RH: To the show?

AFC: Yeah, for you personally as an artist?

RH: Actually I saw an ad on Craig’s List on a Saturday morning.

AFC: Good old Craig’s List.

RH: Yeah, isn’t that funny? I do primarily installation work, and in my opinion – I think they even put this on the TV commercial – I don’t think interior design has had its rebellion yet. It hasn’t had its Ramones, or its Dead Kennedys or its NWA. It hasn’t had something that’s kind of turned on it yet because I think everyone in that community – and this goes for the art community as well, and the fashion community – I think there’s a lot of people, as long as they continue to keep pushing on that bike pimp, everything stays inflated. And they’re like, okay, if I keep inflating it, and you keep inflating it, and you keep inflating it. And I’m not talking in financial terms. I’m talking in terms of keeping this big thing afloat. You know, at some point, I don’t know what it’s going to be, it’s probably not going to be an artist or a fashion designer or an interior designer. It’s going to be a plague or some giant economic collapse in China that’s going to pop it. But something’s going to come along and pop it. So, what was your question again?

AFC: I was wondering, what sort of led up to participating in the show?

RH: On the TV show?

AFC: Yeah, sort of what internally, and externally, you were kind of…

RH: Basically I do this installation work, and it has to do a lot with taste and what people consider good taste and bad taste, or high art or low art, or high culture or low culture. And, you know, I grew up in a burned-out industrial town, and what’s actually considered low culture here, is on some level considered high culture to me and to a lot of my friends growing up. So, I guess basically I looked at this Craig’s List advertisement, and thought, you know what, I could go and really do something with this interior design thing. I think most of it’s like bad airports, and computer beige, and doctor’s offices. You know, there’s some amazing stuff going on out there, I won’t discount it entirely. I just think it’s a weird, weird world, and I felt like, you know what, this is some place I can have an impact. It would be like a new genre for my artwork, like television. It’s like Andy Warhol 101.

AFC: Yeah, I just think it’s really interesting because there are so many similarities right now between the interior design world and the art world.

RH: Well, more and more so. That’s kind of one of my frustrations, and I could name a name, but I won’t do it. But you can pick one of the top five galleries, and almost all of the painters that show there, it’s just decorative. Conceptually there’s not much there, it comes down to style and technique, and concept is just missing. It’s a market, and I’m not going to say if it’s good or bad, but in my opinion, that’s not what I think artwork should be about. To me, that’s like a whole other place, and it has its place, and some of these painters I know, and I’ll tell them that to their face. I’ll be like, come on, is this what you’re studying in school, really? And I don’t mean that in a bad way.

AFC: Yeah, and it seems like such a byproduct of a strong market, that you know there are so many collectors, maybe not necessarily educated collectors who want work that looks good with their couch.

RH: A lot of the pieces end up over mantels.

AFC: Right.

RH: They are considered as one little component in an interior, like a wall treatment or a window treatment or a lamp. And I feel like art should be considered differently, and I don’t have the answer for how, but that’s something I’m always pushing for in my own work. If I had the answer, I’d be done, my search would be over.

Look forward to part two of two tomorrow, in addition to a dizzy amount of fair coverage.

Every once and a while you are reminded that you are proud of your friends for being as smart as they are. This happened to me today when Brandon Stosuy forwarded me an excerpt from his exceptionally good interview with Matthew Barney published by McSweeney’s. You really get a sense about how the artist thinks about his work, and aesthetics in general. Given his importance and influence as an artist, this discussion has the potential to become one of the few key art historical documents of the 21st century.

An excerpt from the excerpt:

THE BELIEVER: You often reference punk and metal in your work—for instance, Murphy’s Law and Agnostic Front in Cremaster 3 or Steve Tucker and Dave Lombardo in Cremaster 2. I love watching the kids getting ready to slam-dance in Cremaster 3—that overlapping with the Playboy Rockettes. There are a number of younger artists working with punk and metal (and, well, goth) in a manner that resonates with your practice. I’m thinking especially of Banks Violette, who has been casting in salt, come to think of it, and also Matthew Greene and Sue de Beer. The aesthetic’s different in most cases, but do you see them, somehow, as descendents?

MATTHEW BARNEY: I’m not sure. The feeling I got from the last Whitney Biennial was that there were a number of pieces that had to do with the artist as outsider, and these subcultures like metal, or a general abject sensibility, were being used to describe an outsider culture as a way of defining the role of the artist. I guess that’s not really my interest in metal, or the extreme music scene—my interest has more to do with it as an abstraction of conflict. There’s a way that conflict becomes abstracted into the architecture that interests me. Something to do with the relationship between the amplified music on stage, the active mosh pit, and the passive audience beyond the pit, and maybe even more to do with the trench between the stage and the pit, where the security guards are stationed to remove people from the crowd. That same trench is used to protect the performers in other concert situations. With extreme music shows, it functions differently, more like an overflow valve in a bathtub.

To read the full excerpt click here. UPDATE: This article is now available in December’s issue of The Believer.

Photo copyright Picturehouse

Paddy: One of the things that I had been thinking about when I saw this movie, was a similar case a few years ago – maybe you’re familiar with it — The Getty had bought a Kouros sculpture, of a young boy, and had done all sorts of forensic studies, which had concluded that this thing was an original. There were only two experts who looked at it and said “I don’t think so”, voices that were dismissed in exchange for the scientific evidence. And then, The Getty Museum loaned the sculpture to Greece, (at this point the sculpture had already been purchased for a hefty sum of money), and when it arrived everyone laughed at them, declaring it a fake on arrival. So now the museum has some sort of plaque that says Greek, 530 B.C. or modern forgery. In the same sort of way, that in the movie you see a few art experts look at Teri’s painting and say “that’s not right”, you saw the same thing happen in the of the Getty sculpture, only with disastrous results. What is the difference between that case, and yours?

Peter Paul: It’s very simple. The nature of the evidence is very different. In Teri’s case you’re dealing with finger prints. And the science of fingerprint identification is a true science. There are no gray areas. And when you have a sufficient number of characteristics a match exists. The science of fingerprint identification has been around for well over a hundred years now, and if a mistake is made it’s only because of the lack of qualification on the part of the examiner, but if it is properly done, it is always one hundred percent reliable. Now I don’t know exactly what they did with this statue, but that definitely was not about fingerprints. I work with fingerprints.

Paddy: My understanding was that they were testing the age of the patinas and that sort of thing….

Peter Paul: Age determinations are often very vague. Carbon 14 dating for example, on more recent objects there is a very wide margin of error. You have to go back many hundreds of years where it becomes more and more precise. And then after a certain point its precision falls off again, and then other techniques are used to try to determine age. So there is a margin in that kind of dating, and if it is not done properly or if the sample is too small or perhaps the sample is contaminated…you have to take a lot of things into consideration. I don’t know who carried out the examinations, I don’t know how they arrived at their conclusions. The thing about what I do is that it is a very transparent process. And if I arrive at this conclusion that this fingerprint a match, then everyone will arrive at the same conclusion because the work has been done properly.

Teri: Which you always have double checked anyway

Paddy: Oh, so there’s more than one fingerprint expert who has said that this is correct?

Peter Paul: Absolutely. My work, I always have double checked by a colleague who was head of identification at the RCMP for the entire province of Quebec. He has decades of experience in identification, and he was supervisor for the entire province. I think that is about as high as you can go. And you know, I am extremely meticulous, I take a long time to arrive at a conclusion, and there are many factors that go into sorting out what’s what in a finger print. And in twenty years I haven’t made one error.

Paddy: Is matching of fingerprints more definitive than the matching of paint samples, because you’ve done both?

Peter Paul: Yes, because paint samples do not necessarily identify individuals but fingerprints do. This is not to say that paint characterization is not important. In fact it is very important and when I go through an authentication process, I look at it as well. I go through every facet of an image, this is what I call the forensic process, is that we don’t just take one aspect of a work of art and then work on that. We consider all of it. We consider its history, its visual appearance, as a connoisseur’s assess a painting for it’s style, technique, and aesthetic qualities, the chemical composition, physical composition of it, and of course the forensic elements that may be present on the painting. So if you leave any one of these things out the work is not complete. Which brings me to have to conclude that all these documents floating around out there in the market place titled authentication are partial authentications because they have not really looked at every aspect of the painting. If a painting is authenticated because an expert who judged it because of its visual appearance says that it is authentic and neglects to do the chemical work well, heads have fallen because of that, because people do make mistakes judging by eye. So you have to do the whole job, you have to do the whole nine yards to call something an authentication.

Text and photo via Peter Paul Biro: Montage of two details of equal size and orientation. On the left half Teri’s Find, on the right half Number 5, 1948. The right hand side image is somewhat blurred in comparison as it was reproduced from a book illustration. Selection of colours and their relationship to each other are highly comparable.

Paddy: So the other thing that you did was that you looked at Jackson Pollock number 5. Or rather you did a visual comparison of the two paintings?

Peter Paul: What I tried to do there was kind of like a blind taste test. I took two areas that were completely arbitrary, from two images - one of which was number 5, David Geffen’s picture, and an equal area from Teri’s picture, same reproduction ratio, and I just put them side by side. And without saying whether the left or right was this or that, now you decide.

Paddy: Well, see that’s what I thought was one of the most interesting parts of the movie in terms of providing compelling evidence, was that there was these two images side by side.

Teri: You can’t differentiate.

Paddy: Yeah, you can’t differentiate. The only thing about that though, is that I had no reference point as to where that sample came from, from within the greater scope of the painting. So I could certainly say that within two areas it looked indistinguishable to me, but there was no comparison of the full sized images…I mean, I went home and googled that image immediately.

Peter Paul: Just published an article on this, you can find this article online and in the article they reproduce Teri’s painting

Teri: The color is different, but the design, they intermingle perfectly together.

Paddy: Exactly. So Teri, I have a question for you. When you got this painting…when did you get it?

Teri: 1991 1992, about 14 years ago.

Paddy: Right, so when you got it you thought it was piece of shit?

Teri: Right, I didn’t know what I had. It was just a joke.

Paddy: Now that you’ve spent 14 years with it, has your opinion of it changed, or do you still think it’s pretty much a piece of shit?

Teri: Well, the only way I can explain that is that the whole painting to me is based on principle, and what I want to do with it and the barriers I’ve run into to accomplish the authenticity of it, but as far it as a piece, it’s not my forte, I don’t care for abstract, never have, I don’t care if it’s a Pollock or whoever, but I did see it, one time on the wall, of somebodies - somebody who had it on the wall and had the proper lighting, and I have to admit it was beautiful…it had the right lighting, the right environment, and it was pretty it really was, but me, I don’t like abstract, I like Norman Rockwell, so…you know.

Paddy: But one of things I noticed about your place, at least when it was shot in the film, I mean I thought that you had great taste in art. Like your apartment is REALLY well decorated.

Teri: Well, when I got involved with this, to learn about art, I had to have something to learn it with. So I went to yard sales, thrifts stores, and I’d pick up this painting, they were all oils or watercolors or whatever, but I had to have something. I couldn’t just go to the colleges and start investigating what art is unless I had something to start with. You know what I’m trying to say? To know what it was made out of, and who the artist was and da-da-da da-da. And that was a big help, in helping myself learn how to research Pollock, and in the frame of doing it I ended up with some really nice pieces. So they’re hanging in my house.

Paddy: So you actually have a lot more art now?

Teri: Right, but it’s not worth anything like this.

Paddy: Right, no no…

Teri: And you see I wasn’t driving any more, I couldn’t drive any more, and I had collected antiques for years, they were running out and bored and I had to find something else to do instead of sit at the BMW and play peanuckle and drink all day cause that’s just as honest as