Who is it for?
Oh, what a dreadful question.
How embarrassing, how belittling, how pitiful.

1: what is the music?
2: can’t we think of circumstances where it doesn’t matter?
3 (with some leftovers): but aren’t we losing something essential here? Some mistery we break to put it all into the social gesture, as if art really could be effective, as if it ever were, but what does that mean, how do we measure it, but doesn’t it become too close to being measurable?
4: can’t it be enjoyable? Can’t it be blatantly focused on the audience?
This, of course, does not mean it can’t be personal. On the contrary, one could openly use this focus and transform it through the connection of the two sides, as in Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror. But this ever-sacriligeous focus on the audience need not be objectifying, or at least not so openly. Think of applying the concept to the personal, the intimate. What sort of audience are we then?

Part 2 etc

How close to us. Ever closer.
Until, say, we reach the peak, we go beyond the intimate, beyond the sapiens, we give the monkey a camera, dreamfuly believing this is what the monkey sees, dreamfuly hoping (with a tad of gentle self-irony) that this picture, taken by our object, of us, brings us closer, tells us something more about this subject, when in fact it once again brings us back to who we are, as an audience, an audience that acts.
(more pictures taken by Nonja can be found here)

Below is a comment by gallery owner Carrie Horejs from an earlier post called Running an Art Gallery. She talks about some of the challenges that the Internet is creating for the old artist/art gallery relationship. She raises some interesting questions..

My husband and I have owned and operated Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ, and online since 2001. In fact, we opened September, 10, 2001. The next day, with the horrific events of 9/11, we thought we were goners. Of course, the economy of then was nothing compared to the difficult times of today. However, our sales are up from last year by 40 percent (2008 being our worst year yet).

My point in writing this comment is to say we have noticed a dramatic shift since opening in 2001. Back then very few collectors thought to look on the Internet for art or artists. Now, it is second nature to go to google for everything, including researching artists. A collector walks through our doors, falls in love with the artist, goes home and Googles the artist and then commissions directly from the artist. I’m not saying this happens all the time, but several months ago we, by accident, found out about a $200,000 commission that went directly to the artist after the purchaser had discovered his artwork in our gallery. Rather than become bitter, we got smarter. Why shouldn’t the internet work for both artists and galleries.

Now, before we represent artists in our Scottsdale gallery, we require they join Xanadu Studios where they show their work online through our site. Every studio artist shows in our bricks-and-mortar gallery on a rotating basis, but only top-selling artists show on an on-going basis and get shows devoted to them. We’re not sure it’s a perfect system yet, but we’re evolving with the times. We’re requiring more from our artists who promote themselves through personal websites and blogs (which, is like all of them).

I often wonder how other galleries are dealing with artists who have gallery representation but continue to self-promote. I have been known to secret shop gallery represented artists. I contact them through their emails on their personal websites and inquire as to whether they have any studio pieces available. Not once has an artist directed me to his or her galleries for purchases. I fear galleries will dry up if they don’t smarten up. Then where will collectors go to see art in person?

I grew up in an age that eschewed four letter words as “dirty” or uncivilized. All that has changed: just tune into any prime time TV show and there are bound to be several words casually spoken that would have gotten me and my peers expelled from school. However those are not the most dreadful words of all. In fact, the more a blasphemous word is used, the less shocking and more mainstream it becomes. Think of how ordinary or even welcomed an explicative is in a friendly greeting, an advertisement or a song. However, there is one four letter word that has the worst connotation of all. The four letter word to which I am referring is “time.” Time is my nemesis, my enemy and the word that can intimidate me like no other.

Who would not give up millions for time? Recently the MegaLotto in New York was $86 million. Had I won, I would have gladly traded all the lovely cash for a mere two more hours in each day. I can fantasize about millions and paying off my bills, buying necessities (a new lens or some good new brushes) or luxuries (a new camera and all the gadgets that go with), upgrading my equipment and fixing my house, but I space out at the thought of more time. Imagine!!

How would it be if I could go into my studio and actually have the time to work on a painting or a photograph without time constraints? I’m not thinking about commissioned work or art that requires deadlines. Actually, I find that time driven projects drive me also– in a positive way: less time/ more energy expended. These types of time issues cause me to focus and stretch all my abilities towards a specific date on the calendar. However, wouldn’t it be wonderful to develop my own work without stressing about having time for everyday chores that are necessary to live? Obviously I don’t mean (in my case) cleaning my house, cooking or doing the laundry. I mean those intrusive time wasters like making a living outside of my own art: whether it be teaching a class, office work, commercial art involvement aside from my personal projects and so on. Then there are family and friends to consider…

Time for family and friends is a serious issue for the artist who cannot say, “Look, I work at an office all week. Let’s get together on the week-ends or after work.” For me, as an artist, there are no week-ends, no after work, no free time unless I create it. Therefore, just when my starting time is over and I’m really ready to dig into my painting, it’s time for dinner with those close to me. A hard call sometimes to say, “I won’t be joining you because I have to finish my work.”
“What work? Did you get a job?”
“No, my painting.”
“Working on a cash commission?”
“No.”
“Oh, that work. You can finish it any time. We want to SEE YOU!”

Of course I want to spend time with loved ones. Who does not? But while I’m dining with them or driving to and from the visit or having a chat on the phone, part of me feels frustrated at taking time away from my “work:” my art. I feel guilty either way. If I go, I’m shorting myself. If I work on my art and do not spend time with people near and dear to me, I feel selfish, isolated and cannot seem to work well. Yes, I’ve read all the articles on priorities, but that’s how it is for me: damned if I do/ damned if I don’t. Fortunately, my family and friends have been understanding and stuck by me even if they don’t always see me.

Periodically I ask people what their most valuable resource is. They answer: love, health, family. I inquire about “time.” They stop to think, to reconsider. Time IS the most valuable resource for without it what do you have? It is also, paradoxically, the most terrible and wonderful word I know.

Created by Ellen Fisch On 12/15/08 At 08:20 AM

Managed to avoid the excess heat of the Dubai summer this year by spending much of July and August contemplating the infinite shades of grey and green in a very wet Europe. Got back to Dubai to find that I no longer have a job!

The project I was working on was gradually being subsumed into a government body when I left and by the time I returned it had been swallowed up completely. Apparently this is not unusual. I have since heard of other proposals and projects that are taken over and the external consultants unceremoniously dumped. However, despite being unemployed, incomeless and back to square one in the job search, I am surprisingly sanguine about the whole affair. I’m happy with what I did and the whole experience has provided a fascinating insight into the chaotic, schizophrenic and slightly brutal nature of local cultural politics. Also being unemployed does have advantages. September marks the beginning of the post summer season and all the galleries have new shows so I should have time to see them all this year!

I started a few days ago with a trip the Third Line Gallery showing its war themed exhibition ‘Roads were Open / Roads were Closed’. The Third Line is the most successful gallery in Dubai. It has the most staff, some of the most lucrative artists (like Farhad Moshiri) and last spring it opened a new gallery space in the Qatari capital, Doha. The Third Line artists are usually connected in some way to the region but may have been brought up elsewhere or lived between two or more cultures. This allows for a multiplicity of influences and interpretations – very appropriate for the global and transient nature of Dubai.

‘Roads were Open / Roads were Closed’ featured five artists interpreting either direct or indirect experience of the Palestinian and Lebanese conflicts. The exhibition’s focus was on exploring how we register trauma and perceive conflict. However, the work was also very much about how artists interpret history and preserve or package national and political as well as personal memory.

As you entered the gallery, Palestinian Layla Shawwa’s ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’ was a striking start. The huge slingshot complete with large stone sitting on a stand in the middle of the gallery floor is an immediately recognisable symbol of military asymmetry and moral triumph. The piece and its ironic title acknowledge this standard interpretation but Layla Shawwa’s point is more complex. In the absence of any forward movement, the symbol now stands as an impotent victim of its own mythology. It becomes a memory around which an uneasy internal dialogue revolves rather than being the external symbol of strength that it once was.

Photographer Tarek Al Ghoussein is also Palestinian but born in Kuwait and living in the UAE. As a consequence he is not directly exposed to the conflict but still needs to process and interpret his connection to it. His photographs, all taken in the UAE, depict huge and featureless concrete walls reflecting both the reality of the Palestinian situation and his inaccessibility to that reality. He also photographs barren desert spaces sometimes juxtaposing the two themes. When placing himself in the images he is inevitably dwarfed either by space or by containment.

Fouad El Khoury documents a month of his life in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 when Beirut came under serious bombardment following the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. The technique is a series of prints that show his diary page for each day. Sometimes the whole page is situated inside his house surrounded by the normalcy of household items. Other times the text is superimposed on events taking place outside the house, sometimes images familiar from news reports during that period. At the same time as news of what is happening in the nation is reported in his diary, a parallel tragedy is unfolding in his personal life as a relationship fails which makes a nice if obvious juxtaposition of the personal and the political. The whole photo series covers an entire wall of the gallery and makes an impact as both visual and emotional archive.

A very different approach is taken by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige whose multi part project ‘Wonder Beirut’ documents the earlier civil war period using the ‘Story of the Pyromaniac Photographer’. This was Abdallah Farah, a photographer commissioned by the Lebanese tourist board to take postcard images of Beirut in the late 1960s. With the onset of the civil war in 1975, he systematically burned or altered the slides and negatives he used for the postcards to reflect the damage of battle. This results in some fantastic images with parts melted and blackened but retaining postcard colour intensity at the same time. Others such as the ‘Battle of the Hotels’ show sequences of the same postcard image gradually being destroyed.

Another part of the project relates to Abdallah Farah’s many rolls of film, which were never developed, first because of a lack of materials and then out of choice. Each roll is carefully dated, some as recently as 2000, and their contents documented so you are able to read the images but not see them. This part of the project is called ‘Latent Images’. Latency is apparently an engineering term meaning the time delay between the initiation of an action and its results. So the consequences of the action remain unobserved in the present. What a perfect notion for an exhibition about conflict!

The Thirdline Gallery

http://www.thethirdline.com/

Created by Valerie Grove On 09/11/08 At 11:14 AM

I find it interesting that a backlog of about 200 works by Damien Hirst can be news. He’s the closest thing we have to a Britney Spears in the art world, with the media looking for any excuse to publish a story on the man (I realize I do it too). All the art world needs now is some art celebrity sex tapes and some police mug shots of artists that have misbehaved. I would probably subscribe to an art gossip magazine if it was cheap.

Anyway, what was I talking about? I have the flu and I’m taking lots of evil tablets from big pharmaceutical companies, so sticking to the point can be challenging.

The Times Online has reported on Hirst’s “mountainous backlog” of more than 200 works by the artist and his production line sitting in the White Cube gallery in London.

“The items include 34 butterfly paintings dating back to 2005; six medicine cabinets with price tags of up to £2.5m and a batch of 25 fly and resin coated skulls. The “Hirst mountain” held by the White Cube gallery, and detailed in next month’s issue of The Art Newspaper, shows the challenges of selling mass-produced art.” Times Online

In a later Bloomberg report, White Cube’s Jay Jopling said that their stock level for Hirst was normal and the gallery is NOT sitting on a “mountain” of Hirst works.

Jopling said “The appetite for Damien’s art is such that we never have enough and I’m always keen to have as much work on consignment as possible. The market for Hirst was strong and suggestions to the contrary were based on redundant documents.”

It’ll be interesting to see how much more we hear of Damien Hirst as his big auction at Sotheby’s draws closer. I’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t make the 6 o’clock news.

Update: There’s an interesting Damien Hirst interview (video) with Tim Marlow on the Sotheby’s website here.
>> Damien Hirst News