The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

–Ernst Fischer

This NYT quotation of the day caught my eye (for obvious reasons):

“Nobody wants me to do anything, so I’m just doing what I want.”
–Liz Fallon [no relation], visual artist, Portland, Me.

It’s from an article on how the recession is affecting artists called “Tight Times Loosen Artists’ Creativity.”

Here’s another quote:

“This too shall pass. Artists must continue to create no matter what happens around them.”
–Diane Leon-Ferdico, painter, Elmhurst, Queens

A Statement by Jeanne Finley: 

My graduate seminar at CCA is a fail. While on sabbatical and leave for the past two years, I developed a seminar that would focus on the cultural construction of failure identities both historically and contemporarily; the failures of graduate student’s work created and shown publically during the seminar; and a further public reflection and celebration of those failures through the forum of Michael Fallons Art Failure website.

The Failure seminar filled on the first day of registration and quickly a long waitlist developed for the class. FAIL. On the first day I walked into the classroom and over twenty people were fighting for a place in the seminar. FAIL. I opened my computer and patched it into the projector. FAIL. I went around the room and asked the student’s department affiliation within the fine arts department. FAIL. I am a professor in the media arts area and have always had classes populated with about seventy-five percent media arts students. FAIL. Things had changed at CCA during my leave. FAIL. None of the students in the classroom were media arts students. FAIL. Most of them were painters. FAIL. The projector would not see the power-point presentation I had prepared. FAIL. I struggled with the technology. FAIL. Students went to the AV center to try to fix the problem. FAIL. Some of them never came back. FAIL. I told the students that most of the work I came prepared to show was media arts based work. FAIL. I gave up on power-point and presented from individual files. FAIL. I showed some things off U-tube. FAIL. I heard a student ask under their breath, “Did she just do a search on failure on u-tube?” FAIL. I showed a work of my own that was a failure in my own eyes although successful publicly. FAIL. I showed a work of mine that is a success for me although curators have been uninterested in it. FAIL. At last it was break. FAIL. Students began telling me they were dropping the seminar. FAIL. Students began saying that the description of the seminar didn’t match what was happening that first day. FAIL. By the end of the day almost everyone dropped the seminar. FAIL. Almost everyone on the waitlist left too. FAIL. I have never felt so devastated in all my years of being a professor. FAIL. Five students in total remained in the class. SUCCESS.

The intimacy of the seminar and the commitment by the students to both the seminar topic and their own work resulted in a remarkable class. We took an overnight field trip hosted by social practice artist, Gregory Gavin. Richard Olsen brought us to his high school art classroom and Tina Takamoto gave a talk on her work. The process of creating a seminar from a focused group of students through the first day’s failure was not something I would necessarily wish to repeat, but I am grateful that that it happened this semester as the seminar would never have succeeded in the way it did if we hadn’t first failed.

Here is the final project proposal from Jeanne Finley’s class on Failure, by the student Zina Al-Shukri:

What happens when people get together drawing and painting in the same room?

A show happens.

On Thursday, March 26th, I will be having a show in the place of productivity — My studio.
I am transforming my studio into a gallery called, Gallery 90.
The title of the show is:

What Happens Here Stays Here
Thursday, March 26th
6-9 pm
California College of the Arts
Graduate Center, Hooper St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

A series of small drawings and watercolors done by an emerging group of artists will be put up for display while people enjoy refreshments and the finest songs that contemporary rap can provide.

The artists involved are:
Anna Simson
Queena Hernandez
Maja Ruznic
Zina Al-Shukri
Justin Hurty
Liesa Lietzke
Brigid Mason

All of these small works on paper contain figurative content. It just so happened this way. They are all very different and are considered not to be any ‘real’ work of the artists’ in that they are secondary practices that are not really meant to be shown to the public eye.

So, all the pieces are failures.

Kamil Dawson

Fish Space Gallery Proposal

What Is Your Daughter Doing?:A proposal for an art event at the California College of the Arts Fish Space Gallery.

A weeklong event, highlighted with an opening night participant based art show and film screening. This would take place Saturday, March 28th and would be removed on April 4th, 2009.

I’d like to propose an event based on what daughters are doing. The event is prefaced by the underlined theme of what daughters do when mothers are away: watching sexy movies, eating junk food, looking at magazines, making naughty drawings, taking pictures, listening to music, as well as conversations based on “bitching” and “trash talk.”

The opening event will include a film screening of Led Zeppelin’s concert film, The Song Remains the Same, from 1976. During the duration of the film, event goers are encouraged to participate in the further mentioned activities. The documents and objects created during this event will then be displayed on the walls of the gallery for one week’s time.

The objective of this event is to encourage community and group collaboration between women, girls, boys and men in order to create a freeing and stress relieving space through the act of art making.

Erik Madsen

I am going to document my successes and failures in my attempts to make contact with certain galleries or organizations as well as send work to a juried competition. The first venue is Alternative Television Access in San Francisco, CA, I intend to show either some experimental works on large graphic arts film or an experimental video. My second venue will be Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafel, CA , where I will attempt to get some recent works on paper exhibited. Thirdly I am going to enter an international competition for innovative printmaking. This will be held at the Musee Hamaguchi Yozo in Tokyo, Japan and is free to enter but work must be sent to Japan and will be juried in person with prizes ranging from 1 million yen for first place as well as six 400,000 yen prizes.

Here is the second project proposal from Jeanne Finley’s class on Failure, by the student Rebecca Ora:

I HAVE ASKED MY MOTHER TO MAKE ART—ANYTHING SHE CHOOSES—AND I WILL DISPLAY IT FOR HER.

My mother is a failure.

My mother is the most intelligent person I know, and the person closest to me in the world. I love her more than I love my life.
She has said that her goal, as a mother, is for each of her children to know that he or she is the favorite child.
I am my mother’s favorite child.

She single-handedly raised seven children through two failed marriages, no money.
We all went through private school, from nursery through high school, beyond.

We are

1 Columbia BA graduate, works for the Boston Symphony Orchestra
1 Masters candidate in Fine Arts
1 lawyer, NYU Law School
1 Masters candidate, Middle Eastern Politics through Hebrew University
1 Barnard College BA graduate working for Legal Aid
1 Psychology BA student, USC
1 BA candidate, Brandeis University

but she, my mother, is a failure.
She had been a silversmith, a political campaign manager in New York, a dean at our high school.

Now she has no work, and no children at home.

The reason I am my mother’s favorite is because I am an artist. My mother majored in Art History because she never thought she was good enough, never had the courage to make anything herself.
She had seven children so she wouldn’t have to make anything herself.

I have asked my mother to make art—anything she chooses—and I will display it for her.

She will never have to meet the people who will view her work, and she needs to meet no standards other than her own.

I hope to give her a sense of purpose, accomplishment by creating a sign of her presence in my endeavors and her responsibility for the achievements of her children.

My mother is not a failure.

As I announced this past weekend, all this week CAFA will be presenting proposed student projects from Jeanne Finley’s class on Failure currently running at the California College of the Arts.

First up is the following proposed project by Natalia Gomez:

I will present my 1min and 10sec stop action video in Richard Olsen’s art class at Gateway High school and have a critique or conversation after the video is presented. This video is an experimentation which explores the cyclical patterns of violence. I have created a faceless silhouette made of patterned paper which only exists to exert force and orchestrate the movements of others who then repeat these abuses of power upon others. Once trapped within these patterned cycles of violence any efforts to resist them only results in getting oneself buried even deeper within their tapestry. I will document the critique by using a voice recorder and take half an hour of the class.

Artists seem more and more inclined, these days, to shrug and toss in their art rags — giving up all hope that there’s anything left for them to strive for. And I, for one, can hardly blame them (so intent have I been this past year-plus documenting the constant trials and disappointments of a fast-fading art market).

This artistic fatalism is a pity of course, on one hand, as without something to strive for you lose a large portion of the potential pool of artists seeking to make it. And, as a result, logically the quality of art declines for the foreseeable future…

On the other hand, as I pointed out the other day, once all the hoohah and art-world striving has gone away, we end up with a lot of idealism about the purity of the practice of art.

Still further, on the third hand, as Jeanne Finley astutely alerted me recently by sending a link to an upcoming show at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary of Art called “It’s Not Us, It’s You,” artistic fatalism also means also we end up with a number of artists who embrace the current age of artistic failure and employ it as an art-making strategy.

From the show’s description:

It’s Not Us, It’s You is an exhibition that explores the inevitability of rejection in our lives – a timely topic in today’s woeful economic climate. Through a tragic and sometimes heartbreaking lens, the artists in this exhibition respond to the reality of rejection with subversion, self-reflection, humor and brutal honesty. The show is guest curated by artist Ray Beldner and includes paintings, sculpture, video, and multi-media work from artists Anthony Discenza, Stephanie Syjuco, Michael Arcega, Kara Maria, Steve Lambert, Jonn Herschend, Dee Hibbert-Jones, Nomi Talisman, Desiree Holman, Orly Cogan, Kate Gilmore, Robert Eads and Arthur Gonzalez.

As part of It’s Not Us, It’s You, Beldner is compiling a book of artist rejection letters. Artists are invited to send their rejection letters via email to info@sjica.org with “FOR REJECTION SHOW” in the subject by March 28. The ICA promises that no entries will be rejected for this project.

That said, you all should stay tuned to CAFA, because coming up this week — as previously announced — we will be posting student project descriptions from Professor Jeanne Finley’s graduate level seminar on Failure, a course that is currently running at the prestigious California College of the Arts.

These are a fascinating look at the expectations and assumptions of young artists coming of age in this very age of artistic failure!

We here at CAFA HQ recommend all of you check out Holland Cotter’s recent NYT article “The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!“ 

In it, he writes: “The contemporary art market, with its abiding reputation for foggy deals and puffy values, is a vulnerable organism, traditionally hit early and hard by economic malaise. That’s what’s happening now. Sales are vaporizing. Careers are leaking air. Chelsea rents are due. The boom that was is no more.” But instead of wallowing in this failure and bemoaning this decompression, an accusation that has occasionally been leveled at this site, Cotter sees this moment as mostly a hopeful one:

It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again.

Still, lest we give Cotter and his boundless hippie idealism too much credit, you should know that Cotter, and most of the New York artcritiscenti, have been salivating for this boom to be over for much of the past two or three years, as I recounted in this essay from May, 2007:

While I have been pondering, this past autumn and winter, the issues related to why a person decides to take on the artist’s mantle, numerous art critics and observers have commented of late on the wild-and-wooly nature of the current art market and the great rewards within reach of an artist who is able to “make it” today. In December, Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker called the current art market an “art-industrial frenzy, which turns mere art lovers into gawking street urchins.” In mid-January, Holland Cotter in the New York Times called contemporary art “largely a promotional scam perpetuated by—in no particular order of blame—museums, dealers, critics, historians, collectors, art schools and anyone else who has a sufficient personal, professional or financial investment riding on the scam.”

Two days later, Jerry Saltz described, in eloquently jarring terms, what he thought of the art market: “A private consumer vortex of dreams, a cash-addled image-addicted drug that makes consumers prowl art capitals for the next paradigm shift… a perfect storm of hocus-pocus, spin, and speculation, a combination slave market, trading floor, disco, theater, and brothel where an insular ever-growing caste enacts rituals in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight… an unregulated field of commerce governed by desire, luck, stupidity, cupidity, personal connections, connoisseurship, intelligence, insecurity, and whatever.”

At the end of January, Charlie Finch on ArtNet.com explained that the art market’s arbitariness “disregards questions of esthetics and connoisseurship.” And he said such distortions in turn “affect the traditional ways we think about the art market.” And Jed Perl, one day later, in an article about money in the art world subtitled “How the Art World Lost Its Mind,” bemoaned the “insane art commerce of our day” and proclaimed “the essential problem in the art world today is that in almost every area, from the buying and selling of contemporary art to the programs of our greatest museums, there is an obsession with appealing to the largest imaginable audience. And in practice this means always operating as if painting and sculpture were a dimension of popular culture.” He explained that when we see artists “whose careers are barely a decade old dominating the auction rooms, with their work selling for millions of dollars, we are being told that a widespread consensus can crystallize in a moment—and this is a pop culture idea.”

Cotter and his ilk were not really exhibiting much insight, as one of the the easiest things in the world to predict is that an overinflated bubble will eventually burst. Further, these critics didn’t really offer many useful thoughts in the midst of the market, as they seemed to prefer instead simply to kvetch and complain about the situation, revealing the sour grapes they were tasting from their loss of cultural import in the face of the market boom. Nor is Cotter particularly unique in suggesting that arts folk will get back to simple brass tacks after the dust has settled (I did the same here and here; it’s a pretty easy call).

Still, as you fans of failure know, such tawdry thoughts do make for pretty good reading…

The Two Coats of Paint blog posted a nice a piece on the Park Place Gallery, on the occasion of an exhibition, at the Blanton Museum, that takes retrospective look at the artists who helped establish the ground-breaking 1960s gallery.

One of the artists, Dean Fleming, was featured in several short posts last year on the Chronicle of Artistic Failure, as an artistic figure who’s long been forgotten by the mainstream art world.

Here’s an interesting passage from the press materials for the show at the Blanton Museum (quoted also by Two Coats…), which is called “Reimaging Space” [emphasis mine]:

Park Place artists were united by their multifaceted explorations of space. Their abstract paintings and sculptures, with dynamic geometric forms and color palettes, created optical tension, and were partially inspired by the architecture and energy of urban New York. The group regularly discussed the visionary theories of Buckminster Fuller, Space Age technologies, science fiction, and the psychology of expanded perception, and these ideas become essential to their work. Dean Fleming’s paintings of shifting, contradictory spaces were intended to transform viewers, provoking an expanded consciousness. Di Suvero’s allegiance was to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and his kinetic sculptures explored gravity and momentum in space.

By assembling a selection of major works not seen together since that era—as well as photographs and documents chronicling the group’s activities—this exhibition opens a new window on the art world of the 1960s. In doing so, it reveals the decade to have been a period of much richer artistic possibility than standard art histories suggest. According to Guest Curator Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Reimagining Space’ is meant to ‘encourage new, more subtle readings of the 1960s and to direct attention to the superb Park Place artists who have not received the critical attention they deserve.’