art *can* hurt you

Posted on | February 3, 2006 | 1 Comment

In the past week and a half or so I’ve been to 3 art thangs—quite rare for me—and part of me was thinking, hmmm, maybe I should turn this into an art blog and critique the stuff I go see and hear. It would go something like this:

01.24.06 Martin Parr–SFAI, sponsored by Photo Alliance. Great lecture. Parr was a funny and engaging speaker and makes very interesting, witty work. I loved though questioned that he calls himself a documentary photographer (he is a member of Magnum) though I suspect we wouldn’t define it the same way. Deirdre left inspired. I left happy I’d dragged us there. This self-portrait series is one of my favorites (and I’m partial to self-portraits).

Martin Parr, from his Autoportrait series

01.30.06 Renée Green–one of the most boring lecturers I’ve heard in a very long while. Well, since Eikoh Hosoe, who didn’t know how to edit. We left after an hour and he’d only gotten about 2 years into a chronological presentation of a 30+-year career. Seriously. And I had been excited about both of them. Green’s a black woman, and you know I always wanna support black women artists. Plus, she’d made one of the earliest, most interesting works about Sarah Baartman (see below).

Green was way too theoretical for me. Five minutes in, she lost me. I would say, “always open with the slides,” but it didn’t help Hosoe, and wouldn’t have helped her, I’m afraid. I should always be wary of anyone who has lived in Europe. When they start citing German theorists, it’s over. No wonder Okwui Enwezor hired her (she’s the new Dean of Graduate Studies at San Francisco Art Institute). The two of them seem worlds away from the photo faculty there (right now I’m adjunct faculty there, though I’m not teaching anything). We’ll see what happens.

Renée Green, Sa Main Charmante,1989

02.02.06 Yerba Buena Center Community Conversations: “Diasporic Visions: A Discussion about Post-multiculturalism, Art, and the Artist Today.” I was nervous about going to this one. I figured it would get me all depressed and plunge me into despair, but I was very interested in the topic, and folks I knew were going to be on the panel. The room was packed, and it was a lively discussion. There were lots of important points made, such as:

- Why are mainstream art museums, who continue to lack real diversity, still held up as a standard, i.e., why is SFMOMA some kind of measure by which to judge success? Is it, as artist Amanda Williams eloquently made clear, the money trail?

- Why do artists continue to create objects to market to 5 or 6 people who can afford it?

- Artists are as responsible to engage their communities as cultural institutions are and should support their own cultural institutions

I felt alternately encouraged to continue to pursue my own thing with the publishing and thus creating an alternative to a mainstream I don’t want to participate in, anyway; and left out because I’m not interested to sell my work, exhibit my work, or engage with the structures that do exist. Luckily, we’d been wise enough to bolster ourselves with sugar before we arrived, and I’m sure that’s what kept me balanced. I can say that I find these things much more bearable now that I’m not scrambling to earn my living from it.

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