Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

I’m starting to think that all of us will soon be talking about, and thinking about, time and space as before and after the virus— kind of like another form of historic B.C. Like many of you, I have really been assessing and, quite frankly, been in complete gratitude for all of the things I took for complete granted even a few short months ago. Chief among them is travel. And yes, the privilege of flying to immerse myself in the art and culture of another place. Will we ever have the chance to move around the world in the same way again? What is lost? How will we adapt? My thoughts have been taking me to this place as I come to terms with the possibility of having to cancel a field school next summer, and perhaps field schools for many more summers to come. It is also weighing on me as I think about research and accessing archival materials and discovering new art, artists, and ideas. I am currently finishing writing a book chapter related to primary research I conducted exactly a year ago at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. While the paper broadly deals with the influence of Vegas resort design, spatial aesthetics, and spectacle culture on current art world exhibitionary practices, I realize as I make my summaries and analyses that most of what I am writing is likely to be completely upended and made even irrelevant by the pandemic. How we think about art exhibition, public space, and even what constitutes a spectacle is likely not going to be the same. What will my research look like a year from now, five years from now, and how will it contribute to the after the virus conversation?

In this week’s round up, I am also noticing similar kinds of pondering and coming-to-terms with the profound changes we are already seeing in the art world. One of the questions has to do with what a post-pandemic architecture and city plan might look like, and another probes the relevance that art can have for frontline providers. I have included a timely podcast interview with Ai Weiwei and his thoughts regarding art’s new role in the wake of the pandemic, along with Jenny Holzer’s take on channeling outrage in these times. And yes, in the spirit of outrage, I have also included a link to Marina Abramovic’s New York Times editorial where she defends herself against Covid-19 conspiracy theorists who mistake her performance art for satanic ritual. I am sad at so much of what I am reading on my feed, but I know we are all experiencing a form of collective grief. Some silver linings are needed, as we are resilient humans that can adapt, and they are present in a few of my picks as well, including the question of how remote teaching can make us more human, how MFA shows can force new kinds of projects, and even how a face mask can be personalized by traditional Indigenous crafters. Hanging in there…. I hope you are doing the same.

The Post-Pandemic Style

slate.com

What Relevance Can Art Have for Frontline Providers Right Now?

hyperallergic.com

A Collapsing Art Market Will Hurt Underrepresented Artists the Most

artnet.com

As MFA Shows Get Canceled, Alternative Projects Take Shape

hyperallergic.com

Marina Abramovic Just Wants Conspiracy Theorists to Let Her Be

nytimes.com

Can Remote Teaching Make Us More Human?

insidehighered.com

Jenny Holzer on How Artists Can Use Outrage to Expose the Hypocrisies of Our Time

artnet.com

Traditional crafters Indigenizing face masks during COVID-19 pandemic

cbc.ca

Home but not alone: CBC launches Art Uncontained

cbc.ca

The Art Angle Podcast: Ai Weiwei on the Coronavirus, China, and Art’s New Role (PODCAST)

artnet.com

• The Post-Pandemic Style

• What Relevance Can Art Have for Frontline Providers Right Now?

• A Collapsing Art Market Will Hurt Underrepresented Artists the Most.

• As MFA Shows Get Canceled, Alternative Projects Take Shape

• Marina Abramovic Just Wants Conspiracy Theorists to Let Her Be

• Can Remote Teaching Make Us More Human?

• Jenny Holzer on How Artists Can Use Outrage to Expose the Hypocrisies of Our Time

• Traditional crafters Indigenizing face masks during COVID-19 pandemic

• Home but not alone: CBC launches Art Uncontained

• The Art Angle Podcast: Ai Weiwei on the Coronavirus, China, and Art’s New Role (PODCAST)

Instagram DJs and the Nostalgia for Live Relational Experience

As the global pandemic has grown and people have increasingly turned to social media for entertainment, connection, and escape from boredom, the newly termed “isolation economy” has yielded among the more popular cultural phenomena of our moment—Instagram Live DJ parties. Starting in mid-March, DJ D-Nice found a unique way to physically distance while spinning and mixing music for his followers. What began as a small party for a few hundred grew exponentially, and like any good party, word spread quickly. By the following week, over 100,000 Instagram users watched D-Nice in his newly dubbed “Club Quarantine” and his followers have since grown to over 2 million from only a few hundred thousand before the pandemic.

Observing this, I have been fascinated by how perfectly “Club Quarantine” captures the zeitgeist of our moment. Forced into isolation, or more accurately, forced into further isolation than what we have already experienced the past decade, the collective will to create relational experience and recreate something live, spontaneous, and energy-fueled has revived a kind of nostalgia and celebration of something that many of us of a certain age remember very well—the days of the pre-Internet nightclub.  D-Nice, aka Derrick Jones, in fact, emanates from that world. At 49, he is of a generation that came of age in the 1980s as the hip hop scene of the South Bronx collided with the Studio 54 disco vibes of midtown Manhattan. Out of this and other fusions of music subculture, fashion, experimental music, and art, was born the urban scene associated with the 1980s and 90s nightclubs that began to spread globally into most major cities.

In its heyday, Gatien’s club Palladium served as an art event laboratory.

This era holds a special interest for me, not only personally (with memories of my precocious teen years dancing away in Vancouver clubs very much in mind), but also as a point of research into the relational and spatial experience of urban nightlife, and its aesthetic potential as a kind of art form.  Not two weeks after D-Nice reminded all of us how cool it was to vibe together, without pretense, across all racial, age, gender, and geographic barriers, the much-anticipated memoir by New York club promoter Peter Gatien popped up on my Kindle. Having pre-ordered The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife months earlier, I had no idea how timely and incredibly prophetic the book would turn out to be. The book opens with Gatien’s fascinating childhood and stories he tells as a French-Canadian and Indigenous kid trying to survive a life of conformity in a small southern Ontario town. From there, his entrepreneurial spirit and dreams of escaping into the world of American material success and the intoxicating world of nightlife entertainment takes over the narrative, and he weaves together his account of how he built and sustained the biggest nightclub scene and movement in New York as the owner/operator of Limelight, Tunnel, Club USA, and Palladium.

From his own descriptions and understanding, what made these clubs different, and ultimately special and unique, was his attention to creating temporary experiences and willfully experimenting with mixing audiences, musical genres, and moments that could not be duplicated one night to the next. As Gatien describes in his book, “My definition of culture was a communal form of creativity, like crowdsourced art (164).” Moreover, Gatien reflects on how important the physical experience, dancing, and being within the spaces of the club, were to sharing and co-creating the event, and wonders throughout the book what has been lost to a new generation raised on the dominance of screens, or, in his estimation, culture lived by proxy: “The heyday of the digital age changed everything. Before cell phones and Facebook and Instagram, before the web went worldwide, in order to find out what was happening everyone had to get up off the couch and physically present themselves in public. To discover what people were wearing, what they were listening to, what was hot and hip and cool, you had to get out and press the flesh (248).”

Having dug into the academic research on clubgoing (yes, it is a thing!— see my reading list below!) for my own courses, I am especially interested in this notion of shared experiential and aesthetic space that is discussed by American Studies researcher Madison Moore in a well-argued paper titled “Looks: Studio 54 and the Production of Fabulous Nightlife.” Therein, he talks about nightlife as a form of social sculpture: “I approach nightlife in two ways: nightlife as an aesthetic relational experience and nightlife as a site of curation and creation” (64). Drawing on the work of French art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, Moore makes a persuasive case for the connections between the urban night scene and the conditions of art production. “Art itself is a state of encounter,” writes Moore, “one that demonstrates the features of a particular social world (65).” Not surprisingly, it is this world, documented and shaped by Andy Warhol, a key figure in Gatien’s memoir, that also attracted a whole new generation of visual artists that would come to define the New York art world from the 1980s onwards. Here, I could go down a rabbit hole of references (and these are the ones I routinely make and unpack in my courses) but suffice it to say, I was delighted to read about the gigantic Basquiat and Haring murals that adorned Palladium’s walls back in the day (see images).  

Mural by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the Palladium. Photo © Tim Hursley, courtesy of Garvey Simon Gallery.

Returning to our present moment and the current fascination with Instagram Live DJ’s, I wonder what it can mean for our collective desire to move beyond the manufactured and experienced-by-proxy spectacles of many of today’s urban “scenes.” What makes Club Quarantine more reminiscent, at least for me, of the nightclub experiences of the past, is the way in which it foregrounds spontaneity and the relational experience of the music to move and unite people. You simply have to be there, in the moment, and in your body, to understand what is happening, and it will never happen the same way twice. Perhaps not surprisingly D-Nice’s goal with Club Quarantine is to realize it as a live (in real life) event sometime in the future. As he states in an interview with Rolling Stone this past week: “Once we’re able to be able to be together again, I want to pick three cities to actually do a Club Quarantine party live…play that same vibe and celebrate with the same people we’ve been celebrating with virtually…just to be able to see them face-to-face, play that music and feel that bass, that’s the ultimate goal that I have.”

References and Further Reading:

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les presses du reel, 1998.

Chatterton, Paul and Robert Hollands. 2003. Urban Nightscapes: Youth Cultures, Pleasure Spaces and Corporate Power. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Gatien, Peter. The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife (p. 164). Kindle Edition, 2020.

Moore, Madison. "Looks: Studio 54 and the Production of Fabulous Nightlife." Dancecult 5, no. 1 (2013): 61-74.

Peretti, Bruce. Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996.

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

Watching the art world react while the global pandemic grows has been a fascinating part of my daily Internet information diet and I am looking forward to picking back up and continuing my weekly round-up to bring those media items and share relevant links and information that have caught my eye. Looking back now, it seems years ago, but the first few weeks in mid-March, when New York was finally responding to the growing crisis, I watched intently as I was weighing the decision to travel there and complete some long-awaited research at MoMA and look at potential accommodations for the planned 2021 summer field school to NYC and Venice (a trip that is quite obviously now very much up in the air). My plan was to get in and get out of the city in under a week, but as we now know, the full extent of the exposure was only becoming fully apparent. Twenty-four hours before I was to leave, I finally got word that the Met was closing, and then finally, MoMA too. Within a week, all of the major world’s arts museums appeared to close, and soon thereafter, the galleries, private and public, followed their lead.

Banksy posted this image of his bathroom transformed during quarantine on Instagram this past week with the caption, “My wife hates it when I work from home.”

The question of the art world’s “essential” nature has therefore been a big part of the ongoing conversation since that very dramatic week of shut-down. Anxiety and fear around what will happen to the public spaces that facilitate the exposure of new and existing audiences to the visual arts is real and palpable. Clearly, art is not generally regarded as a must-have necessity during times of war and global emergency, but it has been the art world that has quickly stepped in to open its virtual doors and offer some measure of pleasure, comfort, amusement, criticality, and education to the confined masses. Take Banksy’s fantastic response to being quarantined at home— a post that went viral within hours of being posted! Many of my links this week explore this dynamic, beginning with the way the #betweenartandquarantine Instagram challenge (started by the Met, and one that I finally contributed to this week—see photo above) sparked creativity and challenged audiences old and new to carefully look at and recreate great works of art through whatever means at their disposal.

Other links examining notions of productivity (particularly in my world of academia) and how to navigate rites of passage online, like the art school year-end critique and other important aspects of art education have been eye-opening and yield many creative approaches. Many artists, art critics, curators, and others have also been writing with great passion about how to remain creative at such a difficult time, and I have included a few links on this topic as well. Finally, I have been starting to review a number of new podcasts and films on the topic of art and the art world that have appeared in recent weeks. Two that I am drawing attention to this week are a podcast discussing how photographic practices are already changing with the pandemic, and the release of the much anticipated film about the largest art fraud in the USA (involving lots of very good Rothko, Motherwell, and Pollock fakes)-- Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art. There is so much great content out there right now, and I am only offering a small portion of what I am finding. To see more, check out my Flipboard of collected links here and enjoy!

Art Recreation Is the Only Good Instagram Challenge

nytimes.com

Your Maps of Life Under Lockdown

citylab.com

Adapting to Disaster: Research Productivity in Disaster Conditions

theprofessorisin.com

Yayoi Kusama orders coronavirus to 'Disappear from this earth' in a new poem

cnn.com

The Art Angle Podcast: How Photography Is Being Revolutionized in the Coronavirus Era (PODCAST)

artnet.com

Can You Get Your Art Critiqued on Zoom? New York Art Students Are Finding Out

artnet.com

How Do You Make Art During a Pandemic? Jerry Saltz Has a Few Suggestions

slate.com

Jean-Phillipe Delhomme on Artistic Self-Promotion, From the 19th C Salon to Instagram

artnews.com

'Everybody On Earth Is Feeling The Same Way As You': Douglas Coupland offers slogans for the COVID-19 age

cbc.ca

Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (STREAMING FILM)

cbc.ca

• Art Recreation Is the Only Good Instagram Challenge

• Your Maps of Life Under Lockdown

• Adapting to Disaster: Research Productivity in Disaster Conditions

•  Yayoi Kusama orders coronavirus to 'Disappear from this earth' in a new poem

• The Art Angle Podcast: How Photography Is Being Revolutionized in the Coronavirus Era (PODCAST)

• Can You Get Your Art Critiqued on Zoom? New York Art Students Are Finding Out

• How Do You Make Art During a Pandemic? Jerry Saltz Has a Few Suggestions.

• Jean-Phillipe Delhomme on Artistic Self-Promotion, From the 19th C Salon to Instagram

• 'Everybody On Earth Is Feeling The Same Way As You': Douglas Coupland offers slogans for the COVID-19 age

• Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (STREAMING FILM)

Bonus Assignment | Wasting Time on the Internet

In the Avant-Guardian Musings "Bonus Assignment" series, I will occasionally post creative prompts for students to explore and expand their understanding around a range of art history and visual culture studies topics. These assignments will be collected under the Resources section of my website, hashtagged #bonusassignment under Search, and available as an Open Education Resource for educators. 

It would only seem fitting that I begin my foray back to musings on this blog with an idea sparked by Kenneth Goldsmith. Poet, conceptual artist, and founder of UbuWeb-- an early proponent of open access and web-based educational resources for avant-garde works, writings, and films-- Goldsmith is the individual who inspired me to begin Avant-Guardian Musings back in 2010. In my very first blog post, I spoke about how I had come to believe that through opening access to alternative spaces of dialogue beyond the university classroom, new fields of radicality and potential could emerge to break down traditional barriers. 

Goldsmith has continued to evolve his message and approach to thinking about accessible learning with an avant-garde mindset. Back in 2014, he sparked controversy by proposing and teaching a course at the University of Pennsylvania called “Wasting Time On the Internet.” Writing about his rationale for the creative writing class in The New Yorker, Goldsmith explained how the framework, mechanisms, and spatial/temporal elements of the Internet are tailor made for avant-garde experimentation:

“The Surrealists’ ideal state for making art was the twilight between wakefulness and sleep, when they would dredge up images from the murky subconscious and throw them onto the page or canvas. Proposing sleepwalking as an optimal widespread societal condition, André Breton once asked, “When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers?” It seems that the Surrealist vision of a dream culture has been fully realized in today’s technologies. We are awash in a new, electronic collective unconscious; strapped to several devices, we’re half awake, half asleep. We speak on the phone while surfing the Web, partially hearing what’s being said to us while simultaneously answering e-mails and checking status updates. We’ve become very good at being distracted. From a creative point of view, this is reason to celebrate. The vast amount of the Web’s language is perfect raw material for literature. Disjunctive, compressed, decontextualized, and, most important, cut-and-pastable, it’s easily reassembled into works of art.”

To his credit, Goldsmith found a way to create the course and went on to publish a fantastic manifesto-like book with the same name, accumulating many of his own reflections, ideas, and luckily for us, actual assignments and directives to re-create aspects of his course. Over the years, I have borrowed ideas from the book’s Appendix: 101 Ways to Waste Time on the Internet in a number of my new media and visual culture courses. But now, as we collectively isolate at home in the midst of a global pandemic, I figure what better time to spark creativity, critical thinking, and new perspectives around something we are all doing—“wasting time” on the Internet.

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INSTRUCTIONS:

1) Select 1-2 of the tasks listed in the curated list below. I have chosen strategically from the original “101 Ways” list. Choose a task that you know will be a challenge and moves you out of your comfort zone. Trust me, it will be more of a benefit to the outcome of the assignment.

2) Execute the task(s) as faithfully as possible. While doing the task(s), or immediately afterwards (all will depend on the nature of your instructions), keep careful track of your thoughts, reflections, and the outcomes of your experiment. Ideally you can capture this more spontaneously via video or audio diary, captioned photographs/screen shots, and taking written/typed notes.

3) Take a few days to think and reflect further on the outcomes of your task(s). Assemble your findings from above into a document, video, visual presentation, or art work. To accompany your final submission, write a rich paragraph discussing how you understand the task(s) challenges/subverts/upends/disturbs the unspoken “rules” of the Internet/social media and its social norms. Include discussion about how your chosen task generates new perspectives or exposes problems/issues/inequalities/shortcomings of the Internet/social media.

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Curated List of “101 Ways to Waste Time on the Internet”

 2.  Instagram something with the intention of it being taken down by Instagram. Take a screenshot of it; keep a record of it. Instagram the screenshot. Screenshot that Instagram. If it is taken down again, repeat the process until all you’re posting is a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot . . . of the original photo.

7.   Go on Netflix, and look at the first suggestion for your Top Picks. If you’ve already seen it, then pick the next suggestion. Read a generic Wikipedia article about the show/movie, and write a Facebook status using what you’ve learned (develop an opinion or a question or a statement). The status should not mention that you haven’t seen the show/movie. Tag at least one person in the status.

29.   Take an article you vehemently disagree with, post it as your Facebook status, and then say how you align yourself with everything it’s saying. Like this status. Share it. Post it on other people’s walls. Do the same thing on Twitter.

 32.   With a partner, watch a short video in turns with one both recording the other with a camera as well as taking notes on the other’s affective response. Put the original video, and the two reaction videos side by side in a new video.

41.   Ask each other about passwords. Talk about how you picked your password. Ask how other people picked their passwords. Share your password if you want and explain what you like and don’t like about it.

54.   Clog as much as you can. Clog online forums for your school or work. Post a series of blank posts on your Facebook feed, send a bunch of blank e-mails to everyone you know, open a bunch of blank tabs, and just clog everything. CLOG. What does it feel like to apply force to the Internet?

71.   Pick a genre of music you don’t usually listen to or that you dislike. Listen to five minutes of it without doing anything else. Once you pick a song, you have to listen to the whole thing. Don’t touch the computer as you listen. After the five minutes, write about what you felt/were thinking about. How did it feel to do nothing but listen to something you don’t like?

73.   Exchange phones with a partner and text someone from that phone whatever you feel like.

80.   Look through your Facebook messages and go back as far as you can. Find the oldest message to which you never responded. Write back. Make the responses really long and detailed. Make it super awkward. Don’t explain why you’re writing back now or apologize for not writing back earlier.

98.   For fifteen minutes, see who can tally the largest dollar amount by putting things in their Amazon shopping cart. The one with the most at the end of the time wins. Delete everything in your cart. Or don’t.

What is the New Normal for Art Historians Amid Covid-19?

How to even begin…..? Like you, I am figuring out how to process being thrust into a world pandemic and learning a new normal, and as I write these words, I am entering the fifth week of the Covid-19 quarantine here in Vancouver, Canada. As an art historian and university professor, I am also facing a time of many firsts. My first time transitioning courses online, my first time invigilating remote final exams, my first time completing a book chapter without benefit of primary research (research I was supposed to complete in New York two weeks ago— yikes, can you imagine?!), my first time applying for conferences, fellowships, and planning for a field school, all of which may never happen, and my first time planning collaborative and brand new summer courses without the ability to take students to museums, studio visits, or to research in archives. I am even facing the reality of a launch for a book project I have been co-editing for the better part of four years, and without a physical audience. Many many challenges.

So why am I turning to my blog? To be sure, I reached a real point of struggle with what to do and how to deploy my website late last year, even as Avant-Guardian Musings enters its tenth year in existence. As my teaching approach evolved over the years to become more experiential, case-study focused, and even experimental in terms of adapting new non-linear and flipped classroom modalities for art historical analysis and meaning-making, the kind of “musings” I used to regularly post on this blog have entered more directly into my classroom. As such, the website has served more as a repository for targeted blog posts and open-education resources that address research, studying, and visual arts analysis. These posts remain popular, and I intend to continue creating this type of content for my students. It is also the reason this website persists.

But what happens now outside the paradigm of my face to face classroom? How do I introduce and model the case studies, musings, and unrehearsed connections that frames so much of my classroom teaching? Much has drastically changed as I am once again forced to evolve my teaching and research methods. A big part of that shift will entail migrating materials online for digital consumption along with presenting and workshopping case studies and visual culture news in the way that I used to do on this website before I all but abandoned the more traditional “sage on the stage” lecturing format.

So in the coming weeks, I will begin using my blog once again as it was originally conceived— a place of reflection and an extension of the ideas and visual materials raised in my classroom. And as much as that classroom is now, and for the foreseeable future, remote, online, and at a physical remove from the kinds of experiential and in-person dialoguing that I enjoy most with my students, I am hoping that my “thinking aloud” and visual brainstorming on this blog will serve a larger and perhaps unintended audience. More than anything else, I believe the art world has a vital and key role to play in how we make sense of this global pandemic, and in a manner that is not always immediately apparent to those who sign up for an art history class. In the spirit of the avant-garde, I am looking to entertain whatever unorthodox outcomes all of this brings.