For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
JdP RSS
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
In February of 1968, Robert Crumb loaded a baby carriage with Zap Comix #1. He and his wife Dana, strolled down Haight street selling copies for 25 cents each. That was the year that “underground comix” began to “solidify as a viable enterprise in the Bay Area.” Crumb’s work has an anachronistic style, as if “an old-time newspaper cartoonist from 1908 had suddenly stepped out of a time machine and begun smoking dope and drawing hippies.” JK
-
Thomas Albright, in his “Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980” writes “By 1980 there seemed to be no more vanguard ‘schools’ like those that had challenged the status quo of the 1950s and 1960s. The militant era of modern art—the time of epic battles between abstract and figurative art, rationalism and primitivism, even artist and philistine— seemed to have passed, leaving the field in a state of anarchic disarray. What opponents to ideologies and movements had always sought to achieve had finally happened. A new ‘pluralism’ reigned, and no one knew quite what to do about it.”
-
“The paintings are vanishing into the walls; but they will be marvelous walls. In turn, the walls will vanish into the landscape, but the view will be ecstatic. And after that the viewer will vanish into the view.”
-
-
-
Offering an analysis of modern life, former UC Berkeley Art History professor, T.J. Clark identifies a “social life driven by a calculus of large scale statistical chances, with everyone accepting (or resenting) a high level of risk; time and space turned into variables in that same calculus, both of them saturated by ‘information’ and played with endlessly, monotonously, on nets and screens…”
-
What experience in your life best prepared you for curatorial work, particularly exhibition-making?
I’m not primarily interested in exhibition making. I operate from the position that standardized exhibitions are an exhausted format, and that audiences are either oblivious to the narratives that curators propose, or that they are over-influenced by them and see groupings of artworks not as individual voices in proximity, but as singing the same song. Some would call this a lack of confidence in the viewer (who might be reconsidered as an active participant/producer in the attention economy), or say that I’ve just seen too many mediocre exhibitions, both of which are true. Ultimately I find it more productive to start from a position of not-exhibitions and only move in that direction when necessary.
-
The Port Huron Statement and the Origin of Artists’ Organizations
Renny Pritikin, 1986 -
-
-
-
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” M. Mead
-
-
Studs Terkel – Listening to America
Page One – Inside the New York Times
-
-
Groups & Spaces is an online platform that gathers together information on people making art in groups and collaborative situations, groups that run art spaces, and independently run artist spaces and centres. The site serves as an opensource portal for artists, educators and citizens to learn more about these working methods and connect with resources in their area. The platform aims to facilitate dialogue about community engagement, collaborative practices and provide educational resources for new audiences.
-
Art Spaces Archives Project AS-AP is a non-profit initiative founded by a consortium of alternative art organizations, including Bomb Magazine, College Art Association, Franklin Furnace Archive, New York State Council on the Arts NYSCA, New York State Artist Workspace Consortium, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, with a mandate to help preserve, present, and protect the archival heritage of living and defunct for- and not-for-profit spaces of the “alternative” or “avant-garde” movement of the 1950s to the present throughout the United States.
-
“If I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don’t actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others – a received pronunciation. For professional curators, selecting specific paintings for an exhibition is a daunting prospect, far too revealing a demonstration of their lack of what we in the trade call “an eye”. They prefer to exhibit videos, and those incomprehensible post-conceptual installations and photo-text panels, for the approval of their equally insecure and myopic peers. This ‘conceptualised’ work has been regurgitated remorselessly since the 1960s, over and over and over again.”
-
“But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in [the US in] 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.”
-
“Artists and intellectuals despondent over the prospects for originality can take heart from a phenomenon identified about twenty years ago by Don Swanson, a library scientist at the University of Chicago. He called it “undiscovered public knowledge.” Swanson showed that standing problems in medical research may be significantly addressed, perhaps even solved, simply by systematically surveying the scientific literature. Left to its own devices, research tends to become more specialized and abstracted from the real-world problems that motivated it and to which it remains relevant. This suggests that such a problem may be tackled effectively not by commissioning more research but by assuming that most or all of the solution can already be found in various scientific journals, waiting to be assembled by someone willing to read across specialties. Swanson himself did this in the case of Raynaud’s syndrome, a disease that causes the fingers of young women to become numb. His finding is especially striking—perhaps even scandalous—because it happened in the ever-expanding biomedical sciences.”
-
“No one today can afford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance of the nature of contemporary governments, politics and social orders. The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear: monstrous protection rackets. The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet except against oneself…”
-
From: David Foster Wallace To: Joel Lovell, Harper’s
…The deal is this. You’re welcome to this for READINGS if you wish. What I’d ask is that you (or Ms. Rosenbush, whom I respect but fear) not copyedit this like a freshman essay. Idiosyncracies of ital, punctuation, and syntax (“stuff,” “lightbulb” as one word, “i.e.”/”e.g.” without commas after, the colon 4 words after ellipses at the end, etc.) need to be stetted. (A big reason for this is that I want to preserve an oralish, out-loud feel to the remarks so as to protect me from people’s ire at stuff that isn’t expanded on more; for you, the big reason is that I’m not especially psyched to have this run at all, much less to take a blue-skyed 75-degree afternoon futzing with it to bring it into line with your specs, and you should feel obliged and borderline guilty, and I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering* if you fuck with the mechanics of this piece.)
Let Me Know,
Dave Wallace
* (It may take years for the opportunity to arise. I’m very patient. Think of me as a spider with a phenomenal emotional memory. Ask Charis.)
-