Weekly Twitter Round Up

Creative graffiti art incorporating the Mad Men advertisements for Season 5. Image Courtesy of: Slate

A very busy week! Besides my regular teaching schedule, I finally submitted a grant application that I had spent weeks working on, lead a lively and fantastic discussion at a Philosopher's Cafe on artist activism, and participated in a Peace Symposium as part of a stirring exhibition of Goya's Disasters of War and Los Caprichos prints on show now at the Reach Art Gallery in Abbotsford (until March 25th). I met so many high-energy and inspirational people along the way-- I will say more in the week ahead-- and I am once again renewed with faith in the positivity generated in collective dialogue about art and social action and its many potentials to unite people around the world.   

The Twitterverse was also very busy this week buzzing with news of Facebook's immiment IPO and all things Superbowl. And yes, I watched the Superbowl. Surprised? Well you really wouldn't be if you understood my love and admiration for Madonna-- a true artist going all the way back to her NYC roots running with Basquiat, Debbie Harry, and other misfits of the late 1970's and early 1980's underground music and alternative art scene. And her performance, centered around a gladiator inspired spectacle (!)  for the masses (!) was both apropos and conceptually brilliant. As the game is now over, I invite you to grab a celebratory beverage and check out some of my favourite tweets from this week:

Hating on the ladies: The sexist social media backlash against Pinterest 

How to Write an Artist's CV in 10 Steps 

If David Cronenberg directed Midnight in Paris it might have been good

Facebook’s IPO gives a stunning and unprecedented amount of power to Mark Zuckerberg 

‘Happenings: New York, 1958-1963’: A look at images from an exhibition at Pace Gallery

NY Times on Mike Kelley

Who Gives a Tweet? Carnegie Mellon U study includes "nine lessons for improving tweet content"

And a bonus one this week, because well it made me laugh out loud.

First time watching #Superbowl live on TV in America. It's very..... American.

It Takes A Village: Jackson Pollock's Loner Legacy Reconsidered

Jackson Pollock (on the far right) with George Cox and Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Image courtesy of Archives of American Art

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.  

Further Reading:

Frascina, Francis ed. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. Routledge (2000).

Siegel, Jeanne. Painting After Pollock: Structures of Influence. G & B Arts (1999).

Weekly Twitter Round Up (very LATE edition)

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? 

Inside Apple's hidden factories, finally. #labor #economicJustice

Bjarke Ingels builds community by infusing humor and hedonism into sustainable spaces: 

Is scent considered new media art? 

Weekly Twitter Round Up

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 Artist cleaned 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

The best Twitter responses to #SOPA as seen on @herpderpedia:

Eastman Kodak files for bankruptcy. Guardian has its history...in pictures

Ridley Scott teams up with@YouTube for Your Film Festival - a competition to find the best 15-minute video storyteller

How to Fail as an Artist

Focus on Tech: Collage and Organize Images with Pinterest

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!