A Problem of Easily Tradable Objects

A traditional view of an artwork is that it's an easily commodified physical object. This object can then be displayed for its consumption and this display can in turn be done publicly in an exhibition. The exhibition is then the primary way for a larger public to engage with an artwork.
Indeed, we see that exhibitions are the most important aspect of an artist's professional life, even more so than creating artworks. This sentiment is reflected in the enduring popularity of texts like Boris Groys' The Politics of Installation, which was published fifteen years ago. Despite it being drivel about the 'sovereign character of artistic freedom', it is still regularly referred to today.

I've always strongly disagreed with the notion that the practice of exhibiting is a necessary condition for an artwork to exist, or function, and in the last few months I've thought about this issue in relation to some works I'm presently making.
In those works I feel like I'm presented with a problem of easily tradable objects that are nevertheless unsuitable for public exhibition.
I'm still very much in the process of figuring out such a seeming impossibility, as there are, quite naturally, very few examples of artworks that fit this description. The closest example I can think of is something like the works of Franz Erhard Walther, whose works require 'activation' by an audience. Yet this activation is pre-determined and nevertheless anticipates public exhibition of the works. So while there are some specific conditions for showing such a work, if those conditions are met, public exhibition is still very much an option without being detrimental to the work.

In my ruminations on the subject, I have noticed that public exhibition becomes difficult when multiple (physical) aspects of a work need to be simultaneously considered but aren't simultaneously available to a spectator. An example would be a situation where you have text that spans both sides of a piece of paper, while only one side is visible. 

This example of course has a easy solution in the form of a double sided frame. So please note that general problems of adequately displaying certain works are not what I'm concerned with here. I'm reminded of this atrocity of a display mechanism that was created for a print by Sigmar Polke:

The print was made on semi-transparent paper and presumably this set up was created to highlight this translucency. Although there is some difficulty in showing this property of the work, the difficulty would exist even if you could directly handle the work with your own hands. These kinds of obstacles are trivial and uninteresting, and are usually the result of an artist not considering how others can engage with their work.

No, the problem I'm thinking of is the kind where an object can be readily consumed and freely traded in the private sphere, but accurate communication of its core properties breaks down in a public setting due to the nature of those properties.
I have made some works where I believe something of the sort is going on and I would love to provide you with some documentation of them. Yet it's both fitting and ironic, as well as a minor proof of their inability to be publicly displayed, that I feel like I've been unable to photograph them in any way that captures this internal dichotomy. 

Addition on 30/11/2024:

 In the last month I've thought about this more and there are two artists who might relate to this concept further.

The first is Duchamp, who especially with his various boxes has created a number of objects whose status remains somewhat inscrutable. Those works are best suited for a private viewing where a single person goes through the work, like one would read a book. They carefully study page after page, and after a while the whole of the work is known to the observer. This is best done by handling the objects yourself, but it's simultaneously not impossible to show the work in full in a vitrine. It's more cumbersome to completely grasp the extent of the work if displayed in a more public way, but it remains accessible nonetheless.
Another aspect to note is that many of those works were made in large editions, which is commonly interpreted as undermining the importance of the original in art. This however ignores the fact that most of those works had a 'deluxe' edition, which included some kind of, even more, hand-crafted original object that was unique to that particular exemplar of the deluxe edition. Such an inclusion in an edition blurs the lines between what can be considered a 'unique' object, as this definition will shift depending on what you do or don't include in the artwork.

I'm also thinking of what is known as Eva Hesse's 'studiowork'. Those oddly shaped pieces of latex, wax, wire mesh and cheesecloth are perhaps best shown on a desk or some other kind of work area, like they were in Hesse's dwellings:

There the 'test pieces' appear at home and their position is immediately understandable. They have however since been shown at museums and galleries, where they appear more strange and out of place:

It's not that these works seize to function on a white plinth, but there is a definitive shift in how we are able to perceive them. Having known these works for more than a decade now, I'm however unable to talk about this change in perception in precise terms.

Window Dressing

Speaking about traditional window dressing at a 2023 lecture for Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Lucy McKenzie says: 'And of course as, ..., it makes sense that, you know, as a sort of art form, or..., as something becomes obsolete it suddenly becomes... an artform. [...] It's always as they get superseded they become kind of art, or they become kind of precious. And it's the same as our high streets die, as the physical shopping just whithers, we started to see windows as much more precious and as this kind of tangible art form.'

See also the introductory post of this blog.

It leaves the whole world blind.

Ok, so.
I very recently found out that I don't have a visual imagination.
No wait, let me rephrase that.
I very recently found out that almost everybody else is able to 'picture' things. I've always kind of known that my imagination is essentially blind, I just never thought that this was a rare occurrence. That idea seems so absurd to me that I feel uncomfortable writing that it is somehow possible for other people to close their eyes and 'see' an image.

This doesn't mean that I don't remember things I saw, or that I have no imagination whatsoever. It's just that when I imagine or recall things, I simply don't see any images.
When I do imagine things, I do so in terms of causal relationships, spatial relationships, abstract qualities and perhaps most importantly, movement and proprioception. But from what I understand other people just kind of see shapes and such.

I don't feel this has hampered me in any way in my life, but it does help to explain why I do certain things the way I do, or perhaps why most people don't.
This is especially true for my own understanding of art. I've often jokingly said that it's easy to understand my views on art and that all you have to do is forget everything you think you know about art. But I never understood just how true that was.
Because unlike most people, it's quite literally impossible for me to have a superficial understanding of an artwork. When I think about an artwork, I truly can't imagine what it looks like. The only things I can think about are how it's made, its context, some characteristics of details and so forth, anything 'below the surface'. Whichever understanding I could have about an artwork can only come from meticiously noting every single aspect of an artwork that doesn't involve its appearance.
Consequently, in order to make any sense of art at all, I had to develop a cohesive theory of art that necessarily precludes images. While for nearly everybody else in the world, the image, the visual, is the central part of art. It's even exactly the aspect that seperated the 'visual' arts from all the others. As I'm only able to reason about art without those visuals, if my thoughts about art are comprehensible,  then the visual aspect axiomatically, and perhaps paradoxically, can't be a significant part of art.
Thus, while I was joking when said you have to forget everything you think you know about art, it's exactly what most people will need to do. To be able to see what I see, so to speak, you have to develop an understanding of how it's possible to have informed thoughts and arguments about art without knowing what it looks like. While for me this is the only available option, I don't think it is an easy task for most people.

Ampersand

All artworks are the result of deliberate actions.
This perhaps seems like an obvious statement, but it's a simple fact that is glossed over all too often. Perhaps in fringe cases it's difficult to define exactly what a deliberate action is, but there is no arguing with the fact that anything that enters into a museum, gallery or 'the artworld' is the result of somebody somewhere making a decision to do so.

This fact also lies at the heart of how we ascribe meaning to artworks. Somebody has done this thing on purpose, so there must be a purpose. Even the purpose of showing how purposeless it all is, is a purpose. This in turn is the basis of any institutional theory of art. And a consequence of that line of reasoning is that anything can be seen as more meaningful inside an art context than outside an art context, because another underlying assumption is that an art context always adds meaning.

We can see this at play in works like Empty Shoebox by Gabriel Orozco and other such 'objets trouvés'. The reasoning is thus: 'object a is commonplace, but if object a is placed in an art context it's no longer commonplace but special and worthy of our attention'. Again, the underlying premise of this statement is that all actions that result in artworks are deliberate and therefore worthy of consideration. This shoe box didn't end up here on accident, its presence is deliberate, and therefore it must be meaningful.
As humans we will try to provide a reason and an explanation for any object that is found in an unusual place. If you're not willing to take that statement at face value, I suggest you put a rock in your refrigerator and wait for the inevitable questions of your spouse to come to you.

All of this serves as background information for something I encountered recently that struck me greatly:

And the reason it struck me is because this is a rare example of an object that would lose significance or meaning if placed within an art context. 

This object; a shoelace that, presumably, fell into the shape of an ampersand on accident, is a remarkable occurrence. It's not something that would have existed without humans, like a bird's nest or the northern lights might have, yet it's also something that is somehow not the result of a deliberate action. As a deliberate action it would be trivial, but it likewise seems just complex enough to be the result of an accident. And this is what gives this object its impact.
Imagine for a second that it wasn't shaped like an '&', but instead an 'S', a '9' or even an 'R'. While conceptually similar, being a shoelace has taken the shape of a recognisable and common symbol, it appears to us as if those particular shapes would be far more likely to be the result of a random set of circumstances. An 'S' is a less specific shape than an '&' and therefore is a less remarkable occurence. Yet at the same time, an '&' is more ambiguous in its connotations than an 'S'. An ampersand by itself is about as empty as a symbol can be, but it's nevertheless universally recognised and often seen as a complex shape.

Which brings us to the art world.
If we would encounter this shoelace ampersand on the floor of an art institution, I doubt any of us would be as struck as I was when I saw it on the pavement.
This isn't because a piece of string lying on the floor has no place in contemporary art. The examples of string-like squiggles range from Richard Tuttle's Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself to Mark Manders' Current Thought and Carl Andre's 3-Part Bent Short. What all these examples have in common, however, is their seeming carelessness. These works are at first glance simply strewn on the floor, with the artists accepting whichever form they might take. This was even the explicit aim in the first work of this kind, Marcel Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages.
If artists on the other hand don't wish to accept this kind of arbitrary form when working with objects that aren't of their own making, they instead tend to do the exact opposite. By carefully ordering found objects, they bring a new way of looking to the commonplace object that before had little meaning. A good example is Markus Raetz working with eucalyptus leaves to create stylized and expressive portraits.

Yet our ampersand doesn't adhere to either of these extremes. If it were placed deliberately on a gallery floor, its shape is too trivial and its symbol too insignificant for us to ascribe any greater insight to it. Yet at the same time, its shape would be too specific to register as an uncontrolled or unintentional accident, even if it were factually so.
The presumption of deliberate actions in art would thus give this shoelace ampersand less of an impact within an art context then if it would be encountered accidentally on the street, as I have.
What's interesting about that is that it is a direct counterexample to theories of the readymade and institutional theories of art. This shoelace ampersand would be less eligible as a 'candidate for appreciation', as George Dickie would put it, if it were made by an artist than when it isn't. And through proof by contradiction, this shows that the premises of any institutional theory of art are false. 

Through this chance encounter we can thus come to the conclusion that a large chunk of art theory is demonstrably false and this personally made me quite excited.

To Make an Artwork

If one realises that art is object manipulation uncommon in daily life, then there is actually a easy methodology one can apply to conceive 'new' (and often fairly uninspired) artworks.

 

In order to do this, you first you make a list of characteristics of an object or phenomenon. Let us take a table, a prime example of an utilitarian object, that nevertheless has a long history of design and aesthetics without us necessarily thinking of any table as art. 

So a table is generally speaking a flat surface designed to hold objects above the ground. They are often made in such a way that one can be seated at the table, with empty space underneath. Their sizes vary, but generally don't exceed 2 by 5 metres in surface area and are between 40 and 120 centimetres in height. They are made of hard materials like wood, metal and stone, in order to support the objects they are supposed to hold. A table is often made up of components, most commonly three or four legs and a separate top, so that it can be made and transported more easily and efficiently. Their top surfaces are even. 

This is of course not an exhaustive list of all common characteristics of tables, but merely an example of the kind of common characteristics one could list for any object or phenomenon.

 

Once this list is made, one can simply think of possibilities that adhere to some of the listed characteristics, but not to others, or include characteristics that simply don't occur on the list. I did this really quickly for a table and came up with the following possibilities:

- A super long table of more than 15 meters, but still only supported by four legs so it sags a lot.

- A table made from polystyrene

- A table much larger than an ordinary table.

- A table with a non-level surface so that anything that's put on top will fall off.

- A table cut from a solid block of metal.

- A table filled with magnets so that it repels (or attracts) metal objects.

- A table which legs aren't evenly distributed among the plane of the top.

- A table made by placing a top on two large balls.

- A table put on wheels with a small rocket engine mounted to it

- A drone mounted to a table so it flies (and whatever other things Roman Signer did to tables)

- A table which smooth marble surface is actually a thin layer of milk.

- A table covered in a thick layer of roughly spackled plaster.

- A table of which the legs are made of springs. 

- Richard Artschwager's tables still function as tables. 

- A table with an irregular shape and an irregular number of legs.

- A table covered in eggshells.

- A table 'dressed up' as a woman.

- A table with a chair as its support.

- A table that moves like a clock.

- A table stuck on another sculpture.

 

Some of these tables have already been executed as artworks and even been acquired by major museums.

It should also be noted that all characteristics are relative to the simple reality of our time. 

If we were five metres tall instead of one metre fifty and a bit, then the 'big' table would be normal sized, after all. Just as a table made of ice might be considered highly unusual in sunny California, while it may be moderately curious on the south pole. This is similar to a snowman in a wintery landscape being a common occurrence and not art, while storing a snowman in a custom freezer year round is considered art, as Fischli and Weiss have shown. This also remains true despite the fact that we're all familiar with keeping ice cubes in our fridges.

This general principle works just as well for phenomena, as they still tend to have a material presence in the world. 

Allow me to provide a few examples for a simple conversation. To make an 'artful' conversation one could have a conversation where there is a ten second pause between each sentence. Or every word has to be exactly four syllables. Or you can only speak to people if you aren't facing each other. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

 

This is an easy method to make art, that can be taught to anybody without the least bit of imagination, and will quickly yield results.

The difference between art and science.

What is the difference between art and science?

I don't have any definitive answer on this subject, but I have given it some thought over the last few years and I believe some indication on the nature of the problem, or its solution, can be found in the direction I will outline in the rest of this text.

Without going into the lengthy debates surrounding the philosophy of science, it doesn't seem too far a stretch to stay that the natural sciences strive towards an ever greater unifying knowledge. Art on the other hand always undermines a common narrative that isn't its own. Speaking in Venn diagrams, the natural sciences aim to have ever greater overlap with the sphere of all knowable things in the universe, while art is always the little circle that wants to lie just beyond it. 

 

It's perfectly possible to imagine a world where 'science' has uncovered 'all' knowledge and understanding about the world. However, in such a world art will seize to exist by necessity. When all given possibilities will be known, no possibilities can be unexpected or lie outside a norm, and thus all possible artworks will be predictable in advance.

 

So while at the present time artists and scientists seem to behave in a similar manner because they are constantly searching for 'new' knowledge and viewpoints, the reason why they do so is antithetical. For science wishes to accumulate ever greater and more complete understanding, its ultimate (and likely impossible) goal being a full comprehension of all totality. Art on the other hand can only exist by the grace of unknown knowledge. A discovery made within art can't be used again for similar purposes, while a discovery made in science can find an infinite number of applications. 

PK = Possible Knowledge, Sc = Science, CM = Common Methodologies, A = Art

An oft-claimed shared characteristic between art and science is that both attempt to gain new knowledge by forming ideas about the world and then testing those ideas to find new solutions. Which is true, but also trivial. It can very easily be argued that this is a likewise valid statement for mutating bacteria, a tree growing a new branch or a crow opening a box. As Karl Popper has all ready stated, 'all life is problem solving'. While forming, and testing, hypotheses is a common characteristic of art and science, this is ultimately irrelevant because it is true for a great number of other things as well.

 

To further illustrate the different ways in which art and science employ (technical) knowledge we can take a look at the work of Joost Conijn, a Dutch artist who amongst other things built his own functional airplane. This airplane can be considered art in a world where the common knowledge about airplanes is that they are complex machines that require lots of sophisticated machinery and a crew of people to engineer, build and operate. In other words, it is because we don't think of airplanes as something that is made by a single person in their shed that such an homemade airplane can be considered an artwork. This is notwithstanding the simple fact that the knowledge Conijn employed is common scientific knowledge and this knowledge was gained through similar do-it-yourself methods in the early days of aero engineering. 

In our Venn diagram, this would be an example of the overlap between art and science, even if it can also be seen that the scientific knowledge employed here has little practical use in contemporary society. Generally speaking, the science employed within art is either an outdated version of well-established phenomena, or theories that are too esoteric to be universally accepted. 

These ideas are far from an immovable theory, but I think that it nevertheless can provide some guidance on where the differences between the disciplines could be found.

Is This Anything?

In October 2020, comedian Jerry Seinfeld published a book titled 'Is This Anything?'. In this book he has collected most of the jokes he has written down and archived from a career that spans five decades.

This book is an intriguing document to me, as it is rare that a comedian's output is published in such a manner. The effectiveness of comedic material often depends heavily on the delivery by the performer and the context of its presentation. Audiovisual recordings of polished, rehearsed and tried performances are therefore the common and natural way to distribute a comedian's work. Put flatly on a page like this, a joke seems more like a memorandum than something to be widely circulated.

In that sense this book is analogous to an exhibition catalogue. In a catalogue there are also reproductions of the work, together with some short introduction and some factual information. This method of derivative distribution is not a way to enjoy the material in the way it's meant to be enjoyed, but rather a way by which the work can be analysed and ruminated upon after the fact.

Although Seinfeld himself has stated on numerous occasions that comedy is difficult to pin down, I noticed that many of his jokes constitute of a circumvention of common logic.

I have a working hypothesis that a joke, or perhaps anything that's considered funny, is the introduction of an idea within a logical construct that is compatible with that construct, but nevertheless has an unexpected outcome.

The jokes of Jerry Seinfeld certainly nearly always adhere to this principle and some of his jokes are in fact nothing more than a drawn-out logical statement. Take for example this early joke from the 1980's:

'

I have a leather jacket that got ruined because it got wet.

Suede jacket.

I was out in the rain.

Ruined.

Why?

Why does water ruin leather?

Aren't cows outside a lot of the time?

When it rains do they go up to the farm house,

"Hey, let us in, we're all wearing leather out here!"

"Is it suede?"

"Suede?

I am suede.

I've been living suede every day of my life!" 

'

The premise is of course that suede gets 'ruined' by rain, while another thing that is 'made of suede', the cow, is able to endure the rain without being 'ruined'. Whether you think that is funny or not, what is presented here is a simple incongruity of suede as a concept that applies to clothing, which is meant to look and feel a certain way, and the skin of a cow, which is what suede is made of, and how both those things can be 'ruined'. For clothing this would mean a diminishing of aesthetic appeal, while for the cow it would mean sickness or death.

This thread of pointing out apparent logical fallacies in everyday situations runs throughout Seinfeld's career and can thus likewise be found in jokes from his latest stand-up show:

'

The Donut Hole.

What a pathetic snack choice that is.

It doesn't even make any metaphysical sense.

You cannot sell people a hole.

A hole does not exist.

It is the absence of whatever is around it.

If it was really Donut Holes, the bag would be empty.

The only thing you could do,

is take what they are calling Donut Holes but are not.

They are Donut Plugs.

And you could shove the plugs into the holes,

but that would eliminate the plug, the hole and the donut.

'

 

Due to the sheer abundance of jokes in the world I can't claim that all comedy works this way, but certainly the jokes of some highly-rated comedians do. 

Mitch Hedberg is a comedian who never achieved mainstream recognition before he passed away in 2005. Nevertheless, his repertoire of self-contained logical statements continues to receive much praise from his colleagues.

'I'm against picketing but I do not how to show it', is one of Hedberg's more well-remembered jokes. It is a joke that is ultimately an example of contradictory self-reference, which is a domain of logic that has been considered by philosophers from Epimenides to Bertrand Russell and beyond. 

Hedberg also highlights other common logical constructs and fallacies, such as circular reasoning: 'I've got a belt on that holds up my pants and my pants have belt loops that hold up my belt. What the fuck is really going on down there? Who is the real hero?'

But it's not just analytical one-liners that seemingly adhere to the principle of unexpected logical outcomes. Steve Martin, whose physical 'absurdist' comedy made him one of the most famous comedians of the seventies, describes one of his opening jokes in his engagingly written autobiography: 'I would sing "I can see clearly now" and walk into the mike'.

 

Of course I can't analyse every joke in the world, but having a solid logical framework to refer to is likely a necessary, yet not sufficient, condition for the existence of a joke. Which gives indication that 'a joke' is different from 'that which invokes laughter'. An impersonation will likely invoke laughter in an audience, yet this is clearly less of a 'joke' than the deliberately bad and flat impressions that Andy Kaufman performs as his foreign man character, after which he surprises the audience with a remarkably energetic impression of Elvis Presley. 

Conversely it is also true that just because I didn't laugh at many of Jerry Seinfeld's jokes when I read them in his book, that doesn't mean that they aren't jokes. 

 

All of this has been studied in far greater depth by many others, but as these ideas easily cross the boundaries between the two fields, it's nevertheless good to place these observations within the context of an art blog.

Echt raak is dodelijk

When I was a much younger man scouring used book stores I once found book titled 'Echt raak is dodelijk, ook voor de kunst' by Jan G. Elburg. Translated loosely as 'A direct hit is deadly, also in art', it has been a title that has stuck with me ever since. 

 

Throughout the years that followed I've been frustrated time and time again by the seeming inability for anybody working inside art to say something direct and beyond dispute. All the while finding some my own more on the nose statements about art falling on deaf ears and smothered before they were given half a chance to live. 'A direct hit is deadly, also in art.'

 

Recently this thought has once again cropped up in regards to the definition of art I maintain: 'Art is object manipulation uncommon in daily life'. Which before anything else is a very precise and direct formulation that allows for it to be spoken about in concrete terms.

While this definition has received more scorn than praise in the last seven-odd years, echoes of it can be found in the writings and statements of some other well-known artists, so a whiff of similar sentiment must be in the air, as they say.

Mark Manders for example explains his relationship to a non-art context in an 2012 interview with Nickel van Duijvenboden:

'It seemed like an interesting mental experiment - from then on whenever I made things - to imagine clearing a space in a supermarket and setting up the work there first. Would it stand its ground without the art context, without the aesthetics of the museum space? Everything I make should be able to withstand that mental test. With some of the larger works I imagine IKEA in Ghent. That's a truly hideous setting.

 

Why would you want to relate to  such a place?

 

It's the reality in which we find ourselves, whether you like it or not. That's what our living environment should look like, in its most common form. My works often refer to a living room. I know for certain that a work like Room with Chairs and Factory can stand its ground, even in IKEA. If I were to exhibit it there for a public that has no affinity whatsoever with art it would still be obvious that someone had set up something there. That somebody had done something intentionally. It would definitely arouse a response, probably a stronger response than with a more art-aware public. 

 

Doesn't that frighten you?

 

[Surprised] Not at all, why should it? Look, I only apply this kind of mental exercise once I've completed the work. Until that moment it doesn't concern me. All the works that I've made, bar one, can function without the art context. The only work that can't is Short Sad Thoughts. It would go unnoticed. It doesn't declare itself as a decision, as something made and left behind. It requires a museum setting for that.'

 

Another artist who likes to speak about his work in practical, grounded terms is Robert Gober, who nevertheless has always aimed at making powerful and poetic work.

He says about a sculpture that looks like a tissue box placed on a child's chair over a grate:

'One time in San Francisco someone asked me what the piece meant. I responded that he should understand what it is physically before worrying about meaning.'

The tissue box is, of course, made of bronze instead of cardboard and it sits on top of a very light and fragile plastic chair.

The history of another sculpture, a replica of a plank of plywood, is also interesting in this regard: 

'The type of plywood that I was interested in recreating was a 4' x 8' x 3/4" piece of plywood that is used for subflooring or rough construction. The problem that I encountered is that this quality of wood veneer is not sold in retail stores. There are many veneers of wood available but this particular type is too rough and too brittle and splintery and filled with defects to be of any use other than in the creation of basic plywood. I tried contacting plywood manufacturing plants but no one was interested in humoring my request. It can be very difficult to get a high volume manufacturer to stop what they are doing to accommodate such a small order. In ended up hiring Peter Ballantine who made all of Donald Judd's wooden plywood sculptures. Peter had a relationship with a plywood manufacturer and was able to convince them to let me purchase this veneer. I had to buy a full flatbed truck of rough veneer, which was shipped from Oregon.

 

The sculpture is not built like an actual piece of plywood, where different layers are sandwiched in different directions for strength. There is a core of particle board. The ends are faked in the sandwich pattern and a full piece of veneer was glued to both front and back.

 

This work was vandalized twice and when I speak about my work, I am invariably asked why this is a sculpture, which is odd to me because it is in so many ways such a traditional sculpture, steeped in a deep history of still life.'

 

More recently I've found a passage by Walead Beshty in his text 'Notes for an introductory lecture', which comes the closest to my own formulation that I've encountered so far. It reads:

 'Through the accumulation of patterns of use, certain conventions become standardized. Painting, for example, has developed a certain set of base conventions (e.g. canvas, rectilinear form, wall as support, portability). These conventions form the starting point for a dialogue, an agreement regarding the nature of the communication that will be taking place. For example, if a painting has a 'conventional' relationship to the wall on which it hangs, we would be acting in bad faith if we were to discuss the paint on the wall as part of the work. In art, these conventions designate what is inside and what is outside of the work. The boundary between the work and its surroundings is manifest through its adherence to convention.'

Beshty is an artist who is known for his prolific writing, yet he nevertheless falls into the common trap of thinking about artworks in terms of finished objects, rather than relating art to its mode of production. This leads him at the beginning of his text to assert the rather banal idea that 'the most precise thing one could say about art is that it is a discourse about aesthetics staged through aesthetics'. Which for being 'the most precise thing one can say' sure looks an awful lot like a blanket statement.

 

Additionally, there is the hyperrealistic sculpture of a Christmas tree by Philippe Parreno. This is titled Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it's an Artwork and in December it's Christmas (July). Which in this context ought to speak for itself, even if Parreno's personal views on art are otherwise likely incongruous with my own.

All these statements strike me as roundabout ways to make the same point I'm trying to make. Which is a very egocentric way of approaching their texts, where I might be placing words in other people's mouths that they hadn't meant that way at all. 

This tendency can perhaps explain why this circumlocutory way of speaking remains so popular inside art. For if the meaning and boundaries of what you're expressing isn't clear and precisely formulated, then it is much easier for others to project their own ideas into them, further absolving you from your own responsibility for anything you might have thought about the subject.

Diapers and Pacifiers

'Samuelson et al. (2011), continuing the work of Baldwin (1993), showed that there are clear posture and spatial biases in infants' learning of the mapping between words and objects.

In their experimental setup, infants repeatedly experience two new objects (the target and the foil) in consistent but different locations. Subsequently they hear the object name 'modi' while attending to the foil object which has now been placed in the location normally associated with the target object. On testing with both objects present in new locations, the infant is asked 'where is the modi?'. The statistically significant majority of children select the target object. 

This means that they are selecting the object normally associated with the spatial location they were attending to, rather than the actual object they were looking at when they heard the name. By implication, this means that infants cannot be using a simple mapping between the object features observed and the word detected at that point in time. They rather rely on a memory for own posture and the related object location to associate objects and their names.'

 

I can't help but picture George Dickie and Arthur Danto in diapers, sucking on a pacifier and calling every object in a certain place 'art', simply because that is the location that they learned to associate with the word.

Spectator Sport

It always confuses me when I see people trying to define art by examining how it affects the spectator.

It would seem naturally ludicrous if one were to attempt to describe the game of tennis by how the spectators behave, so why is this a common occurrence in art? 

 

 

Jean-Luc Mylayne

Upon acquiring the catalogue of Jean-Luc Mylayne's first museum exhibition, I was reminded of how I was immediately struck by the complexity of his work. This was in stark contrast with the reaction of the people I was with, who called them 'those pictures of the birds'.

Our difference in reaction can be explained by understanding that what they saw was this:

And what I saw was this:
'I invented my own technique that permits me to see the bird clearly, sharply, and also to show parts of the landscape in various degrees of clarity. It is very complicated, and I've been working on it for thirty years. I start with a standard-focus lens, and then put the other lenses over it. These lenses allow me to change the positions of the planes in front of me -the foreground, middle ground, and far distance- to have several diffrent focal points on one image. [...] The lenses can turn in the camera, so I can be in the same place but have different points of view, different points of focus. You can see that the focus I get from the lens is not the same as reality, or the way the eye perceives perspective and distance.'

The Difference Between Precision and Perfection.

Art is object manipulation uncommon in daily life. I've received many suggestions over the years to slightly alter this definition and this merely shows that it is commonly misunderstood. The key part is that art is defined by the actions of people and not the results of those actions, even if those results are called the artworks. This also indicates why it has proven so difficult to define art by only looking at the artworks, without considering their methods of creation as a primary factor.
For example, take a normal table, made in a normal way. Everything about this table is done the same way that every other table in the world is made, except that it was assembled while the workers were suspended upside from the ceiling. Then a reasonable argument could be made that this table is an artwork.
It's probably bad art because you can't ultimately distinguish the final artwork from any other table in the world, but that's a different question. 

Update on the 3rd of October, 2020:

At the 4th edition of KölnSkulptur, the bi-yearly exhibition at the synonymous sculpture park in Cologne, Andreas Slominski installed a sculpture that was a simple field of bricks in the shape of a car parking spot, with a car parked on it, placed perpendicular against the walking path in the park.

From their website:

'Now comes this cunningly simple Der Parkplatz, almost crazy, given the elaborate working process it involved. For the paving was first only laid round the edges, and was then completed by a workman lying under the car. But the absurdity of the relationship of his works - such as Tierfallen - to their titles, ultimately leads to the question, "What is art?" The same question as is posed - not without irony - by his installations and performances.'

If You Believe the Hype, You Have to Believe a Backlash

I'm always caught off guard by how much pushback my ideas get from people who have a theoretical education in art, but have no experience making it.
Upon learning of my definition of art as object manipulation uncommon in daily life, somebody who was working on her post-doc claimed without stopping to think that it must be wrong because art has to have a goal of some kind.
I paused and thought about that for a second before I told her that as soon as she finds a goal that unifies all of art, yet somehow excludes everything that isn't art, she should let me know.

This pushback is especially odd considering that my approach is the way a general public invariably uses the word 'art' when trying to describe something as such. Their aims are often different from mine, commonly trying to praise and elevate some activity or conversely to ridicule and ostracize, but whatever their goals, the aspects they highlight are always what makes those things uncommon. Whenever something is described as artful or brought forward as 'proof' that field x is 'art', no one has ever used a run of the mill example of that thing. It is always something that is out of the ordinary to some extent.
Creators of videogames are often attached to the idea that their medium is art, but when they give examples of this they never show the best-selling tropes of the medium like FIFA or Call of Duty. The games they talk about when trying to legitimise videogames as art are games that deviate from the norm, such as Papers, Please, a game where you do nothing but check passports at a border control point.
On the tv-program Top Gear they have argued on multiple occasions that cars are works of art, yet the examples they use are Lamborghini's, Ferrari's and Aston Martin's, not the Renault Espace's or the Kia Sorento's of this world.
And when it's said that architects are artists, people speak of Frank Gehry and Santiago Calatrava, not of the nameless schmuck who penned out five blocks of indistinct public housing.
I could of course go on at infinite length about this, but perhaps its better to let you imagine some more examples to convince yourself and I will just tell you an anecdote instead.

When I first moved to the house I live in, my front garden was empty.
Provided with this blank slate, I took the opportunity to research a little about what other people in the neighbourhood did with their gardens and try to formulate an alternative that nevertheless by and large adhered to the unwritten rules of what 'ought' to take place in such a garden. This is what I came up with:

As any garden needs upkeep and attention, I was working outside one day maintaining the grass of my garden when four children walked up. They were little tough guys, about 8 years old I think, so one of them asked me a question: 'Sir, do you think this is beautiful?'. Curious to find out what they had to say I replied that I didn't really have an opinion and that I was just there to maintain it. Two of the other boys said they found it ugly and this went back and forth for a while until the the last boy, who had been silent up to then, decided to speak up. As if he had a great revelation he opened his mouth and exclaimed; 'Ooooooohhhhhhhhh, it's art!'
This seemed to satisfy the other boys and they immediately trod onward without saying goodbye.

Which begs the question, if four little boys can intuitively come to these conclusions, then where did we go so wrong that people with more than a decade of university education are actively hostile towards them without being able to provide a better alternative?

Artistic Beachcombing

There are a lot of things wrong with the term 'artistic research'.
The very first of which is that it implies that any other kind of art doesn't do any research, which obviously isn't true. Even if we take the works of Picasso, the most blasé and romantic example of modern art, it is easy to see that his oeuvre progressed by constantly questioning his own working methods and reconsidering what he knew about painting to gain a greater understanding of his own capabilities. This is almost a definition of what research is.
So let us contrast his method with a short list of things I've seen presented as artistic research in exhibitions. Among many other things I can't recall, I've recently seen photographs of items labeled as contraband at JFK airport; metal washers arranged by date and location; a framed royal decoration; copied letters to a seismological institute and a 3D scan of a nineteenth century fountain.
All of these are unaltered materials that were simply found in the world. They were acquired through what can be considered exploratory research, but then they were not expanded or touched upon in any way. They simply were presented as they were already available in the world.
If you, as a researcher, are presenting stuff that you haven't altered, commented upon or added any kind of insight to, what you're presenting doesn't even remotely resemble research results and what you're presenting should be called source material.
It is thus ironic that 'artistic research' commonly seems to be the only kind of art that in fact doesn't do any research at all and merely presents what is already known. A term like 'artistic beachcombing' would be therefore be a much more accurate description, but I guess that would pretty difficult to sell so well.

Art is the Result of Human Actions

Back in 2014-2015 I wrote my master's thesis on the ontology of art and recently I found out that my former academy has gotten round to publishing it in their online library.
It contains quite a few grammatical errors and I probably would word some things differently today, but all in all I think quite a number of its ideas still hold up a few years later.

For those interested, the full text can be found here:
https://catalogus.hogent.be/catalog/hog01:000673585

Edit on 12-3-2021: 

My alma mater has decided somewhere in the meantime that the full text can't be accessed without an account for their website, presumably requiring you to either study or teach there. So I apologise for that inconvenience.

Funny thing is, I cited this thesis in another text and I was told by an editor I didn't need to mention the date whereon I consulted that webpage, since it was a 'stable link'. 

Academia has a lot to learn about the internet.

Edit on 10-11-2022:

Somehow they changed their site again and I'm happy to report that it's once again freely available to anyone interested.

Edit on 8-9-2025:

Once more the webpage has changed, making the thesis inaccessible using this link. This time the culprit is apparently a switch to WorldCat for their database, which also means you once again need to be somehow affiliated with the institution in order to access it. 

Taryn Simon Starling

Recently I have become re-acquainted with the work of Taryn Simon. During some conversations where her work was discussed, neither I nor the people I spoke to seem to be able to argue why her work is called art, rather than high-quality investigative journalism. This may seem like a trivial distinction, but it wouldn't differ much from the scenario where a person would like to sell various kinds of meats and then opens up a cheese-shop, when there is already a well-established section of society called the butcher-shop that could fulfill this role. If this person would still use the 'cheese-shop' to sell only meat, it is up to them to explain why that would be appropriate, rather than the other way around.

Investigating a little bit into the work of Taryn Simon, there are very few clues as to why her work would be anything other than investigative journalism. One of her galleries, as well as she herself, have stated that her work 'integrates photography, text, and graphic design'. This seems to me like quite a good description of what a magazine is.

But let us look in depth at 'The Innocents', her breakthrough project, initiated in 2001.
The exact sequence of events is of course somewhat unclear, but two definitive facts are known. The project was funded by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as The Innocence Project, and it seems like the ultimate culmination of the project was a book published in 2003. A book that, for all intents and purposes, looks like a fleshed out magazine article.
It was this project that led to the first commercial gallery exhibition I could find, held at Gagosian Gallery's London and Beverly Hills branches in 2004. The press release for this exhibition mentions no other exhibitions or art projects besides the previous showings of 'The Innocents' at PS1 in New York and Kunstwerke in Berlin. Other than some mention of the book that accompanied the project and the Guggenheim fellowship that funded it, the only relevant experience given is work published in traditional media outlets such as New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Frontline, CNN and BBC.
What isn't said in this press release is that 'The Innocents' was first shown at Duke University's Centre for Documentary Studies and later moved on to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, both public institutions where art is a secondary concern.
All things considered, it seems that 'The Innocents' was a project instigated by a young photojournalist, funded by a well-known arts foundation and introduced to the world of fashionable collectors by a high-profile gallery. As such, it somewhat stumbled into a world it was never really meant to be part of, but once this threshold is crossed there is no real turning back.

After this first baptism into the strata where art value is no longer questioned, her approach to her work has hardly changed and Simon has done little to assert any kind of artistic aspirations beyond aesthetic concerns. Perhaps most telling is a statement from a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose where she claims that working outside of the corporate structure of published media is her 'medium': 'getting the agreements and getting access and being able to produce these things as an individual person, you know, outside of any overarching media structure for example. It's -- that is my -- my medium in a form'.
This would indicate that it is not so much her work, the way she produces it, nor the way she handles it afterwards that make her work circulate inside the art world, but rather a want for autonomy that can only be afforded with the kind of financial possibilities an art market can provide for a singular person. This is echoed in a remark made in another interview with Charlie Rose from 2007. When asked why a museum is the place for her to ultimately place her work she responds that 'it is a public forum, and I'm dictating the context. Although I'm still in the context of a museum, it's not motivated by certain -- it doesn't have certain political motivations. It doesn't have financial motivations. Although we all know museums do have these -- these overarching things -- they need to please. It just feels like the purest form in which you can show a photograph'.
I can't help but feel that freely distributed e-books on a website that costs $25 a year to maintain would have even less political and financial restraints, if those are truly her primary concerns.

Her work remains close to the quintessence of investigative journalism, both in content and in appearance. Her inclusion within art seems closely related to showing in well-known public institutions, which in turn can be linked to her inclusion on the roster of a well-known commercial gallery. Presumably to justify the increase in perceived monetary value, the production value of her work has grown accordingly. Lavishly produced books and mahogany frames might be a sight to behold and posses, but they are not prerequisites of art.


Now let us contrast this with Simon Starling, whose work similarly contains a large photographic element stemming from percipient research. One might expect that Starling's work therefore has similar issues, but some essential differences are present that prevent this from being the case.

One of Starling's more photograph-reliant projects is titled 'Pictures for an exhibition', from 2013. In this project he took an installation view from the 1927 Brancusi exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago. The entire series consists of 36 photographs, yet within the first four the overarching narrative is already made clear, employing a kind of visual storytelling that Taryn Simon never manages to achieve.

Simon Starling, Pictures for an Exhibition, #1

The first picture in the exhibition is a photograph from the ground glass of a large-format camera aimed at a cityscape. This ground glass is obviously modified, with the outline of some kind of arrangement of sculpture on top of it. Even if we don't know if the building in the center is the first home of the Arts Club of Chicago, at the very least we can deduce that building somehow held these works inside it.

Simon Starling, Pictures for an Exhibition, #2

The second picture is clearly a composite photograph that follows the exact contours of the works etched into the ground glass of the first. We might not know where these works were photographed exactly, but clearly they are not located all together in the same space and brought together only by photographic means. The modification of the ground glass thus serving as a guide to take replicate the exact arrangement.

Simon Starling, Pictures for an Exhibition, #3 and #4

This assumption is further exemplified by the third and forth picture. They are a shot reverse shot of one of the pieces in the previous overview, placed in exactly the same location it was in that second photograph. Without using any words, the whole methodology of project is made clear. 'I recreated this set-up that was present in this building, by creating this composite photograph using this camera by photographing the objects wherever they are now', it says.

Starling is very skilled at letting these silent objects speak for themselves and tell their own story. As he explained in a conversation with Janet Harbord: 'They're sort of objects that have gone through some kind of process normally, they've been transformed or they've been moved [inaudible] And the hope is they can sort of tell their own story and bring those processes with them. You know like the shed that I showed here for the Turner prize. This structure that has been kind of cut and drilled and reconfigured as a boat and then put together as a shed and it's kind of readable in its material sense. So, you hope that the work can sort of embody these kind of processes and things.'

One of the main differences between Starling and Simon is that the emphasis in Starling's research and presentations always lies in whatever he himself brought to the situation. When he moved the invasive Rhododendrons from Scotland to the Spanish Parque Los Alcornocales they originated from, he did not show a picture of a plant with a lengthy text describing how it was actually an invasive species that also overtook our perception of the Scottish landscape. Instead, the end result of the work is a group of photographs that document the journey wherein Starling moved the plants in his own car and he did so by creating a makeshift studio that show the car, the plants and the photographic equipment in the same arrangement, while the landscape around it slowly changes.

Simon Starling, Rescued Rhododendrons, 1999

Again, this is a thoroughly researched investigation that is not aimed at simply presenting the facts of the world, but an introspective journey that explores the artist's own relationship with the subject matter, predominately in a physical sense, as well as the tools at his disposal.

Taryn Simon's work, although executed well, never adds anything to a standard technical repertoire of the professional portrait, product or journalistic photographer. Starling on the other hand uses the medium to both create an implicit narrative and continuously reflect on the medium he employs. This latter strategy is wholly personal and has no counterpart in contemporary society, therefore it can not be called anything other than art, while the first is still mostly a reflection of whatever common strategies journalistic media employ.

How Not to Look at Non-Art

"I began to pay attention to how much this act of brushing my teeth had become routinized, unconscious behavior, compared with my first efforts to do it as a child. I began to suspect that 99 percent of my daily life was just as routinized and unnoticed; that my mind was always somewhere else; and that the thousand signals my body was sending me each minute were ignored. I guessed also that most people were like me in this respect.

Brushing my teeth attentively for two weeks, I gradually became aware of the tension in my elbow and fingers (was it there before?), the pressure of the brush on my gums, their slight bleeding (should I visit the dentist?). I looked up once and saw, really saw, my face in the mirror. I rarely looked at myself when I got up, perhaps because I wanted to avoid the puffy face I’d see, at least until it could be washed and smoothed to match the public image I prefer."

This is how Allan Kaprow describes his own experiences watching himself brushing his teeth in the morning. Because of the strange effect this daily routine has had on him, he infers that the activity itself must have been special in its own way and it doesn't take him long before he concludes that even the mundanest of activities could and should be considered as art.

Although I am a great fan of mr. Kaprow's captively written texts, I rarely agree with their contents. Just because a thing can be looked at as if it were art does not mean there is any necessary correlation to that thing being art.
The specific method of looking that Kaprow employs in his argument only seems to regularly occur when viewing artworks, hence his confused understanding. Yet this does not mean that merely letting an intense gaze fall upon an object changes the inherent characteristics of that object. It should go without saying that nothing changes in the interaction except the perception of the viewer.

One can make any object appear unique and disjointed from its surroundings by fixing one's gaze upon it and then moving one's body. It's incredibly easy to try this out for yourself. If you can, stand up and choose a random object in your surroundings. Fix your gaze upon this object and start walking around, never taking your eyes of the object. Without falter whatever you are looking at will appear separated from its surroundings, bestowing upon it some special status that this object never previously possessed.

While this more intense way of directing one's attention is a useful tool when looking at art, to deem it a sufficient condition for art to occur is as foolish as proclaiming beer goggles are all one needs to understand that the world is truly beautiful.

Rational Arguments Expressed as Judgements of Value

'I saw an exhibition yesterday.'
'Oh, how was it?'
'Good.'

The last word could also be 'bad', 'great', 'terrible', 'amazing', 'horrible', 'alright', 'so-so', 'not bad' and so forth.
This is a common way to speak about artworks. When talking about art and artists we encounter, these expressions of value judgements are commonly accepted as a sort of shorthand for more rational and logical arguments.
This became clear to me when a curator recently expressed the wish to place my work in the vicinity of an artist in an exhibition. I was not particularly predisposed to this artist's work and thus I had my reservations against our works being linked together in such an obvious way.
My knee-jerk reaction of course was to use the shorthand; I don't like this person's works, they're not very good, so my work will suffer when it's placed next to it.
Beside the obvious objections related to general social interaction, it also struck me that although these are my opinions, they express little to no factual argumentation. Therefore I tried to see if I could formulate where the difference lay that made us incompatible. After a while I realised that the work of the artist unanimously consisted of assembled parts that are readily available in any hardware store. My negative view of the work was thus shaped by my own belief that an artwork, any artwork, is in some way related to the specifics of its production and thus a work that insufficiently accounts for other possibilities for producing objects merely touches on an important aspect in a superficial manner.
From that it quickly followed that the time and effort I spend making things which only have the appearance of the commonplace will be lost when placed in direct relation to works that do not do this. My objections lay within this difference, not the idea that the other person's work was 'bad'.

Every time somebody says that art is good, bad, or otherwise, it bothers me. Not because I believe everbody is an artist and all things are worthwile, but because these hierarchial judgements hide a logical system wherein things are measured against an unspoken and often ill-defined set of rules. Unless you make clear what your yardstick looks like, any kind of judgement is useless and it should be good to keep this in mind when we speak about the next exhibition we'll see.

More Problems with Intentionality

During the summer of 2018 McDonald's launched an advertising campaign in the Netherlands. For this campaign, they created a small version of a McDonald's restaurant, only capable of seating five people. For a period of a month people could enter a contest where they would make a case for this private McDonald's to be placed in a location of their choosing for a day. After which McDonald's would pick the most interesting suggestions and actually deliver the restaurant to the location of the winners.

While some locations were sentimental things like grandma's garden, one family requested a personal McDonald's on a remote location where they take their vacation every year.
This has led to the following promotional photo:

Which of course reminded me quite a bit of this other famous chain located in a far off location:

I have already discussed the problem of intentionality before and suggested in my introductory post that Prada Marfa is only an artwork because we are not used to seeing high-end fashion stores in faraway locations. I also said that the precarious status of an artwork is biased to something not being an artwork rather than something being an artwork when it's not.
That an advertising campaign of a large multinational has now effectively resulted in the same concept as the 'subversive' work by Elmgreen and Dragset is noteworthy. The intentions of McDonald's plainly lay with giving the brand a more personal feel, by displaying the wants and needs of individuals rather than large groups of anonymous consumers. They did not have art in mind, but nevertheless employed a similar strategy of isolating an otherwise ubiquitous object in order to make it more special and original.

Paradoxical Ideas on Forgery

Everybody knows that it is easy to create an identical copy of a digital file. Within seconds you can have a duplicate of a film that is absolutely indistinguishable from the original.
This has posed some problems to artists working in digital media, as the monetary value of art was and is strongly linked to scarcity, artificial or otherwise. Often this problem is solved by adding some material aspect to the digital video. A Francis Alÿs film on his personal website is in no significant way different from its counterpart in a museum collection, but in the latter there is additional documentation or objects that are shown together with it.
This is the common solution to the problem of the creation of copies. Yet this simplicity in making a copy and distributing work comes with an interesting paradox if seen in the light of the traditional art forgery.
A forgery doesn't reproduce the image, but the object and its conditions of creation. If one forges a painting, one needs to use the right support, the right paint, the right order of brushstrokes and so forth to make it believable.
To apply this logic to a film, however, would be a nearly impossible task. You would have to reproduce the lighting, the camera angle, focal length and settings, the location and the placement of objects in it for every single second of the video. Not to mention any living beings and their exact movements.
This doesn't get much easier for films made entirely out of found footage. To locate each and every clip, together with any kind of edits that were performed on them, is simply impossible. A video does not contain any information about its origins and since its flowing in time, the amount of things that define it are compounded to near infinity.
All of this already exemplified in the short story 'Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote' by Borges, wherin creating a copy of the final product is shown to be easy, while reproducing the physical reality that led to the final product is improbably absurd.