Tonight I attended the Critical Conversation series at the MFA building. The speaker was Julia Bryan-Wilson who is part of the faculty at the UC Irvine art school and has also published several books. Her lecture focused on the art of Hans Haacke-- a German conceptual artist. The speaker relayed that a strong aspect of Haacke's art was about the social function of pure information, like in his early-ish pieces with the telex device spewing out mounds of paper with info on it. He would allow the telex device to keep printing information (from all over the world...) and let it overflow onto the ground into large masses.... from this I kindof extrapolated that this related to the amalgamation of all the different forms of life.. onto just a single planet [Alright that sounds like a farrrr stretch, but thats really what my mind jumped to first... too much writing-140? I think so.]
Anyways, Bryan-Wilson also spoke about the development of what we call the art 'industry' today-- as in, the coining of the phrase. It was bound to come along sooner or later, but I think it was just a statement of the obvious-- "artists are entrepeneurs...and viewers are customers". If one thinks about this statement, its true for a lot of things in society-- perhaps not a straight exchange of money and enjoyment? But for instance, TV: we 'buy' the shows that we like... or at least invest our time in them. For friendships too, we invest time, love, care, etc in people that we view as compatible with our own natures. Many things are an exchange of this give and take manner.
On another point, Haacke had an exhibit at the Guggenheim that listed the business transactions in real estate of Harry Shapolsky... that got canceled before its debut, because it was believed that the exhibit was not 'visual' enough. [Butttt....I wikipedia-ed, and well, theres 2 sides of this story, so I encourage other research too because I am not too clear on this one]
Continuing on: In essence, Haacke had just taken information out of its context and put it in an exhibit, which brings up the ever-important area of ambiguity:
What makes something art?
Conceptual or Visual?
Is there a 'golden balance' of both?
Who knows. Personally, I like to see some effort, but other than that, I don't subscribe to any recipes on how to create art.
Haacke was also a bit of a political commentator, most notably on his view against the Vietnam War.
Certainly gets the mind wondering, for those who are hoping to become artists... on what kindof meanings our art should contain.
Goodstuff,
Irene
Oh and here's an interesting picture of Haacke's 'Condensation Cube'... probably my favorite among his works; as well as a picture of the telex device.
