I am a bit behind on updating my responses to panels I’ve seen, so, in an anachronistic fashion, analogous to the way I’ve experienced the entire conference, I’ll offer a few mental sound bites on things I’ve seen and heard.

The Friday conference on collaborative leadership (Inventive Concepts: Models of Participatory Leadership in the Arts) was disappointing. And that was the one panel that I should have been most invested in. Angela Ellsworth presented on the LA Art Girls, of which I am a founding member…but because I taught on Friday, I missed her talk (though I heard it was great of course). I stayed for a few of the others, however.

The panel was regrettably plagued with technical difficulties and mumbley presenters. But I was impressed with Chris Csikszentmihályi’s presentation. He spoke about projects that were made (involving collaboration or collectivity) in the Media Lab at MIT.

He outlined some interesting differences between the ideological perspectives on collaboration in the arts versus collaboration in the sciences. In science, he reminded us, a paper can and is expected to have multiple authors (he then showed us one that had 2500!) and that is in fact a commendable thing. But in art, when one works on something with multiple authors, they run the risk of being unoriginal, or sacrificing their individual artistic voice. I found this to be an interesting observation, and one that sadly indicated our continued and unfortunate reliance upon modernist and capitalist models that privilege authorship and creativity as commodity. The projects he mentioned by artists (artist/scientists?) Kelly Dobson and Alyssa Wright were great! Look them up!

I have enjoyed the talks that address the confluence of art and science. There seem to be a lot of papers on the ideas and positions that code has in the realm of creative art. The panel today (Saturday) chaired by Victoria Vesna, Database Aesthetics: Artists Sorting through Bits and Flesh, was great. I sat through more of this session than any other session at the conference. Though I missed the first speaker, I heard Carol Gigliotti, Eduardo Kac, George Legrady, and Lev Manovich. They were very stimulating- but for the moment, I have to go help pack up the X-Tra table at the book fair. To be continued….

SATURDAY, February 28th, 7 - 10pm

artSpa presents: experimental music & massage

at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, 2225 Colorado Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90041

* sponsored by Sea and Space Explorations!!

featuring live experimental music by (in order of appearance) Cassia Streb, Francesco Gagliardi, Gerhard Schultz, and Mark So

artSpa proudly presents some therapeutic experimental music & massage at the Eagle Rock Arts Center. Live experimental music will be provided by several composer/performers, while Adam Overton and his newly-formed army of amateur massage therapists (numbering currently in the single-digits, but growing) provide complimentary bodywork for the public. This event is being held in conjunction with the closing reception for the exhibition, Needle In A Haystack.

They don’t say so explicitly, but I think that one massive benefit would be to increase the participation of that significant segment of the CAA membership who don’t have the time, money or lack of airline-induced carbon-emission guilt to be able to attend any given conference.  I’m sure many of us would gladly pay a fee to watch streaming video of selected sessions - and it’s really the next logical step from the already-existing audio recordings.

Added to that are the large number of actual attendees who can’t see a given session because of interviews, appointments, conflicting obligations, etc.  (To state the obvious, I have been posting session reviews for the benefit of anyone who was interested but couldn’t be there.)

There are plenty of potential revenue streams here!  To go along with the potential for intellectual enlightenment, of course.

Personally, I’d much rather download someone’s paper as a PDF, then go to a session and hear them in a dialogue about their work, than listen to someone read a text aloud. It just seems inefficient.

Claudia Mesch argued against the cliched position that each of the two Germany was devoted to a single style, “dutifully imported from its corresponding superpower”; i.e., Socialist Realism in the DDR and abstraction in the BRD. She highlighted the Western tradition of critical realism, precisely positioning the figurative work of Baselitz and Schoenebeck, caught between the Scylla of the Western celebrity icon and the Charybdis of the Eastern socialist icon. Later, linking the post-1973 crisis in the economy to a parallel crisis in the working class at the level of representation in painting, she found B. & S.’s colleagues Johannes Grützke and Wolfgang Mattheuer continuing the model of the realistically critical artist. Mattheuer took aim at the worker-hero, and Grützke at the middle-class consumer.

April Eisman followed the political and aesthetic twists and turns of Bernhard Heisig’s early East German career, leading up to his eventual role representing the DDR in Documenta, Venice, et al. Reviewing the debates on formalism of 1948 and 1951 and the repercussions of post-Khrushchev, post-Wall state repositioning, she destroyed any simplistic idea of East Germany as a land of socialist realism. Artists and commissars engaged in a good deal of back-and-forth about the right relations between artist, style and socialist public. Heisig’s Hotel Deutschland murals were seen by functionaries as a troublesome “invasion of modernism,” but both sides did agree on the need to properly educate the public.

Jess Atwood-Gibson treated Duesseldorf’s Zero Group, arguing against the view of Mack, Piene and Uecker as simply affirmative and politically disengaged. She reviewed a number of examples of the group’s zippy detournement of the techniques of spectacle — a billboard, hand stamps, an alarm clock punning on Zero and “Stunde Null” — before interpreting this not only as an attitude toward capitalism, but also (boldly!) as a displacement of the political aesthetics of the socialist East. This was followed by a treatment of the problems of individual vs. group artistic models, and Documenta capo Werner Haftmann’s extreme reluctance to include the group in the 1964 show on account of his zealous anti-collectivist ideology. Haftmann finally relented and included them, but only with a “passive-aggressive wall label” blaming their inclusion on co-organizer Arnold Bode.

Colin Lang considered the case of Imi Knoebel’s 1968 sculpture Room 19. Knoebel had come out of Darmstadt with a Bauhaus-style background in design by modules — foreign both to the norms of the Duesseldorf academy and the particularities of Joseph Beuys’s pedagogy. So Knoebel and Imi Giese took over the (literal) Room 19, an annex to Beuys’s class, as a space in which to creatively recharge from the strain of dealing with Beuys and his student throng. The modular, reconfigurable wood piece works not only as an example of the deductive structure [cf. Stella, Buren - often ostensibly de-auraticized], but also as an example of the architecture of memory [hence, very auratic indeed!].

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Reviews and comment on the LACMA exhibition (website, catalog, timeline):

English: Christopher Knight, Culture Monster * Eduard Beaucamp, Art Newspaper * Jori Finkel, N.Y. Times * Kate Bowen interviews Stephanie Barron, Deutsche Welle * Suzanne Muchnic, L.A. Times

German: Hanno Rauterberg, Die Zeit * Jordan Mejias, Frankfurter Allgemeine * Kerstin Zilm, Deutschlandradio * Marlis Schaum, Deutsche Welle

Why are there no benches along the walls, where throngs of blazer donning historians crouch to plug in their laptops as they eagerly check our blog posts? 

Why are there so many presenters at the conference who seem to be presentation veterans (evidenced by their meticulous paper structure), but who have apparently never plugged a laptop into a projector, or used power point on someone else’s computer? And, how is it that a building and staff that exists to host conferences is not somehow more tech savvy, in order to help when problems arise?

When someone’s cell phone rings in the middle of a paper, why do they let it continue to ring as they rush out the door? They do have off buttons on those things you know…

Why aren’t there any ashtrays outside along ‘the Smoker’s Wall’, since anyone who does smoke is certainly going to be especially likely to do so after attending a session or two.

There is free, all-day parking on the streets 2 blocks west of the convention center.

Parking in the lots nearby the convention center costs $3 in the morning, $10 by midday, and $20 by evening.

The parking lot at the Convention Center rivals the Bonaventure in its Postmodernity. Once inside, it is nearly impossible to tell which way to go, which way is out, and when you’ll ever see daylight again. It reminded me a bit of the parking garage in the Wiz (which, if you’ve never seen, you should Netflix it today!)

This was a great panel, and I was ashamed to arrive so late. Apparently, I missed quite a bit of history and hopes for the future. I particularly enjoyed Dowell’s comment (when asked about technology’s impact on art schools) that his students “want to make things with their hands.” I like that.

Siegel’s premise was that contemporary artists wrap their practice around “extremes” in order to neutralize the dialectics typically evoked in public or media discourse: disaster/salvation, boom/bust, protagonist/villain, and so on. After watching the well-groomed Chris Bennet’s well-delivered paper on Alighiero Boetti (whose quote about Boetti’s “high times with hardware” was well-played - thank you, Chris, along with fellow emerging Arte Povera scholar Claire Gilman, for bringing this movement out for further scrutiny), Our Literal Speed advanced on the podium and played recordings of rock music over speakers. They alternated between a lineup of comely suited presenters, who, among other things, mentioned “the strategic logic of the breakthrough” that dominates art historical scholarship. The breakthrough is something with which Siegel is not unfamiliar (her dissertation was on the modernist phenomenon of the artistic breakthrough), which was another recursion that I appreciated. And I hate to be the kind of person who says things like this, but Our Literal Speed’s presentation frontalized some of the things that I’ve always thought about Buchloh and other contemporary art history superstars: that they favor artists whose work reflects back on art history in some way - in other words, they like artists whose work points to the work that they themselves like to do.

Anyway, there was no question-and-answer session afterward, which I’m going to interpret as Siegel’s attempt to neutralize the peacocking that typically goes on during those after-discussions. And even though the presentation was overblown and favored, as a friend said, “style over substance”, my nerd-brain interpreted it as a searing portent projected on us all.

Congratulations New Citizens!!! We are happy you can join us.

That said, however, there was a sort of spirit this morning. I witnessed a couple of great talks that really cheered me up. Matthew Biro from the University of Michigan’s talk on the Bechers and Andreas Gursky was stellar, pointing out the changes in how the Bechers approached their work over time and how Gursky is a logical extension of their teaching. What a clear, well put together presentation, my notes on the talk unfolded like an outline and then were pulled tight at the end. We all could take a lesson from this guy.

Quickly after, I wandered into a presentation by Mario Ontiveros from University of Massachusetts on several important Chicano Artists in Los Angeles. I enjoyed learning about the photography of Christina Fernandez, work which really resonated after just seeing the talk on the Bechers. The talk introduced me to Sondra de la Loza and P.R.S. and the important work they do in reviving the lost histories of our fair city. Most importantly, however, the talk confirmed the impact of Daniel J. Martinez as a central figure in Los Angeles Art. I know I am going to study up.

CAA is wearing on me, but I am enthusiastic, only a day and a half to go. Look for me in the Germany Panel this afternoon and at the School of the Art Institute Reunion tonight. I would love to chat with you about your impressions of this conference.