Much of my time in lecture is spent describing the mechanisms of how the "genius artist" discourse emerges in histories of art. This is especially the case in survey art history classes and modern art courses where I attempt to find that difficult balance between introducing students to what is essentially the canon of art history, while simultaneously exposing the many stakes and interests involved in how that knowledge came to be constructed. When it comes to the true heavies in the "artist genius" category (think Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Matisse), Jackson Pollock is among the most challenging artists to position and discuss. Perhaps it is because the abstract expressionist movement he is associated with is already difficult enough for most audiences to contextualize and understand-- one need only point to the Voice of Fire controversy over the National Gallery of Canada's purchase of a Barnett Newman painting in 1989 as evidence, also the subject of a book length treatment. It might also be the cult of celebrity built up around a man who was positioned as kind of loner James Dean figure, an artist who died too young and was largely misunderstood, but also an individual who catapulted New York to the center of conversations around modern art during his lifetime. In this sense, Pollock's pivotal position in American modern art history, and in New York art institutions such as MoMA and the Met, sets up a legacy that is not often questioned-- at least not within the broader public.
Pollock was often pictured alone in the many pictures that circulated
of him during the 1950's. This was critical to the persona of Pollock as
an "artist genius"-- a man who would create a new American style of art.
In recent weeks, a new series of talks caught my eye on my YouTube subscriptions. I have been following the New School's Channel for some time and have already blogged about their various public access programs in the past. In January, they initiated a two-part series looking at the urban milieu of New York's Greenwich Village and its influence on two key artists: Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. Within histories of modern art's development in America, Greenwich Village is often relegated to a kind of hazy backdrop against which Pollock and Warhol operated in their rise to greatness. And because today the Village is commonly associated with notions of trendy decadence and associations with the worst of New York's gentrification, many audiences simply miss the more radical connections that this part of New York had to the development of modern and avant-garde art movements in the early to mid twentieth centuries. This disconnect is only reinforced in the popular history of Pollock's legacy. When Jackson Pollock became branded as the poster boy for the new style of American painting in the 1950's, critics and historians were careful to efface his connection to a wide range of artists (both whom he worked with and learned from) deemed too socialist and left-leaning to taint Pollock's legacy. Instead, Pollock was presented to the public as a lone cowboy figure from the mid-West, a figure who emerged with a new vision and method of making art, an artist who had not come under the influence of the radical bohemian elements represented by Greenwich Village.
Greenwich Village was the center of a vibrant bohemian
culture associated to the rise of modern art in New York
Image courtesy: Greenwich Village Digital Archive
As such, what I find especially interesting about the New School's approach in this public lecture series is that the focus of interest shifts away from a strictly individuated history of the artist producer and foregrounds instead the mechanisms through which the creation of the "artist genius" phenomena emerges from within marginal groups who struggle with the move from being virtually unknown to becoming embraced and even celebrated by the wider public. In the case of Andy Warhol, an artist who understood and exploited these mechanisms to his advantage, the story forms a wonderful parallel to that of Pollock.
I have embedded here the public lecture from first part of the series titled "Jackson Pollock's Downtown Years" from January 26th and will in the coming days embed the second of the series "Andy Warhol's Greenwich Village" (**update** now uploaded). The talks are co-sponsored by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and The New School for Public Engagement and include the full Q&A at the conclusion of the presentation. I hope you enjoy the material presented on Pollock as much as I did.
A meta-hommage to Duchamp-- celebrating so many levels of media and performance!
Courtesy of a tweet via one of my favourite websites, Brain Pickings
Yes, this post is now waaaaay late, but better this post be
late than the mammoth grant application I was slaving away on for the better
part of the last week (well actually all of the last few months). Somehow all of my plans to gradually put the parts of it
together over a longer stretch of time failed and I found myself sitting for
twelve hour stretches over the past week to edit and re-edit and perfect the
paperwork (any of you graduate students and academics in Canada know the
particular challenges of writing that perfect SSHRC app!). All is now finally
calming down and I am happy to share some great tweets from the past week. Ironically enough, I almost missed the Twitter blackout all together since I was so removed from my social media networks. Not so sure it was very successful anyways. With
any luck, I should FINALLY get back to some regular blogging this week—I have
some great items to share and muse over.
Do I Have to Finish My Dissertation?
Almost certainly the best review of what may be the Best
Picture: Geoffrey O’Brien on ‘The Tree of Life’
How Twitter users have responded to @Twitter's new system for withholding
tweets #twitterblackout
Are traditional colleges ready for the emerging forces
disrupting higher education?
Warhol shopping for Campbell's soup-- how meta.
Source: Flavorpill's twit pic of the day
A quiet and mostly uneventful weekend for me (at last!). I got a chance to catch up on my film-going and caught both Roman Polanski's wickedly clever Carnage, which I absolutely loved (especially as someone without kids who marvels at the inner-workings of parental subcultures) and Martin Scorsese's much hyped, but very entertaining love letter to early film, Hugo. After The Artistcleaned up at the Globes and is, by all accounts, set to do the same at the Oscars, I am quite struck by how early cinema history is really having a moment in the popular culture. It is fantastic since it helps me raise new discussion with two courses I am teaching this term which have sections related to early film history. I plan to post on this phenomena later in the week. As for Twitter, it was full tilt all week with lots of commentary about both the Globes (I thought they had Ricky Gervais pretty reigned in, no?) and the blackout day to protest SOPA. Take a break, grab a cup of coffee, and check out some of my favourite tweets from this past week:
Learning from Vuitton and With a Little
Help From Facebook, Hong Kong Designer Launches a Sell-Out Line
A brief history of personal computing,
1975-2011, in 28 animated seconds
'The Artist' is silent?! Clueless
moviegoers demand refund from theater
Screen grab of a Pinterest board for one of my art theory classes.
Pinterest provides users with a "virtual pinboard" to collect
and organize images/ideas found on the web.
As a kid, I always loved cutting pictures, inspiring images, artwork and design ideas out of collected magazines and then pasting them into scrapbooks or simply posting them around my bedroom. Back in that analog world of paper, glue, and white walls, the process of collage and rearrangement was rooted in a desire to make new connections and/or transform the original context of images into ones that were both personal and individually meaningful. Later in life when I began to study art history and make my own flash cards to study key works of art (in my opinion, still *the best* way to prepare for an art history exam), I was struck again by how powerful the act of collaging was to reinforce and make critical connections between visual materials.
Here is a screen capture of three of my boards--
two were created for classes that I teach while the third one is
collection of books I have read and/or want to read.
In the past week, I posted about my discovery of Prezi presentations for lecture material-- an application that allows the most intuitive approach to arranging images in a kind of dynamic story-board. Along with Prezi, I have also started using another web-based application called Pinterest that takes collage and picture/idea collecting in a more hands-on and pragmatic direction. Described as a "virtual pinboard" by the creators, Pinterest allows users to collect, organize, and share found images on individually created boards which can be labeled and categorized in any way the user likes. I first began using Pinterest last summer when I was collecting images and ideas for a course proposal. Instead of traditional bookmarking or even using another of my favourite info-gathering applications Evernote (an application I blog about here), I began using Pinterest because it provided a visually appealing platform for seeing my collected images/ideas at a glance. Later on, I found Pinterest was also very useful for gathering and sharing a pinboard of favourite books and films. And last semester, I began using the application to arrange and share the art works that I had assigned in my classes to students for individual writing assignments. Students were thus able to look at the board and follow each week's presentation of featured art works while also seeing the "bigger picture" of the course.
I added a Pinterest button to the top page of my blog to direct
visitors and students to my Pinterest boards.
To create a Pinterest account, simply request an invitation on their website (it does not take long to get an account) and then make sure to also download their very useful "Pin It" button that sits on the Chrome toolbar and allows users to clip and collect images quickly (see the short "how-to" videos below). While I have yet to fully engage with the very large Pinterest community-- you can follow favourite boards, make comments on others pins, and find like-minded people who share your interests on the website-- I have added a Pinterest button at the top of my blog to allow visitors and students access to my boards. I am now working on creating more interactive pinboards to encourage others to pin images on a shared board. In this sense, the potential for this application is fantastic and I think it especially appealing for that inner-child who used to sit on the bedroom floor with a pair of scissors, a bottle of glue, and a stack of cool pictures. Creative-types, artists, and designers rejoice!
Wikipedia (English-language) will be blacked out for 24 hours starting on Wednesday, January 18th
I have a love/hate relationship with Wikipedia. As with many web applications and services that can simplify the exchange of information, Wikipedia is one of those "use at your own risk" entities that is often the source of some very bad plagiarism in the papers and assignments students submit to their professors. As I say over and over again in my classes, scroll to the bottom of any Wikipedia entry and look at the sources of the information very carefully and with a critical eye before assuming it accurate.
Even so, the collaborative on-line encyclopedia project remains very useful for quick info on the fly, a place to get a basic sense of a topic area, and a nice starting off point for sparking connections and ideas you had maybe not thought of. Bottom line, anyone in academia would be lying if they said they didn't use it.
**updated**This a screen-grab of the Wikipedia site as it appeared at midnight EST
on Wednesday, January 18th.
With all of the openness and international collaboration associated with the Wikipedia project, there have been new movements afoot to try and control just how quickly and through what channels information flows on the net. At the same time, copyright is a growing concern and Internet piracy a hot topic of debate. Still, even if there is a legitimate basis for action in some arenas, these actions also carry the serious risk of limiting current freedoms on how information is exchanged and circulated on the web. In particular, the Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives this past fall has raised many concerns. There are real questions about how freedom of speech and censorship will be addressed with an Act that attempts to limit how "foreign" websites access local publics. There is also the fear that this will be among the first of many moves to control and mediate how information and access to news and breaking world events will be dealt with. Just consider the crucial role the Internet has played in the wave of recent global and more localized protest movements, and you can see the significance of such legislation.
In a statement posted on their website, Wikipedia announced that as an act of protest against SOPA, it will black out the English-language version of their website for 24-hours on Wednesday, January 18th. At the same time, Wikipedia outlined the importance of maintaining a framework for open access and collaboration to maintain its existence:
"We depend on a legal infrastructure that
makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure
that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both
information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are
organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting
it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.
But that knowledge has to be published
somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due
process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only
speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your
views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas
already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to."
The public needs to debate these issues, and I think Wikipedia is taking a bold move to raise awareness about the ramifications of policing the Internet to such a high degree. I am also interested to see how everyday people are impacted without access to Wikipedia for a day. Could turn out to be the bigger story!
