I’ve been busy with administrative tasks on CAFA the past four days, so I’ve not had time to think any new thoughts about failure. (I promise, by the way, to have my blogroll back up soon…)
However, here are some interesting links from sundry Friends of Failure:
—One of my favorite artist blogs, SELLOUT, which is an examination of the hard issues facing artists—written by artists—declared suddenly yesterday it’s going on a hiatus to refine and retool. The reason for this sudden stoppage, despite the quick notoriety the site has gained: Overwhelmed with email… Hey, SELLOUT, I hear ya. If you figure that one out, let me know. But hurry back!
—Sharon Butler, author of the arts blog Two Coats of Paint, which recently went through its own retooling, just published an expose-style article in the Brooklyn Rail, called Swimming in Pigment, about the lollapollooza art fairs that occur in Miami Beach. Her conclusions about the events? They’re a mixed bag, but mostly, when you take into account only the good art that was there, she found the experience positive:
It’s too easy to scorn Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellites as a vulgar coalescence of dilettantes and profiteers. Beneath that veneer, they provide an invaluable one-stop annual inventory of the art world: a dazzlingly broad array of artwork, much of it vigorous and thoughtful, in two nearby neighborhoods geared for high-intensity viewing, through which art becomes a proud rallying point for an entire city. On an individual level, accepting the challenge of apprehending such a vast ocean of work without props, as it were, is to rediscover the very process by which you first figured out what you loved about looking at, and making, art. The opportunity to redefine and articulate your passion is a lot more than just a good party.
—Meanwhile, Art Happy Hour!, which also just retooled (must be the season for it), wrote that it is holding its inaugural gathering in Minneapolis. If you’re anywhere near the area, you simply have to come check this out—the first artist community-wide happy hour in the country (that I know of)!
–And, finally, your favorite CAFA administrator, Michael Fallon, has just caused himself no small amount of trouble by publishing an essay about the artistic drive in artists, titled (provocatively, on purpose) “The (Endlessly Annoying, Horribly Consuming, Creepily Off-Putting) Drive in Artists to Make Art.” Here’s just a little teaser, in which I take to task a pretentiously wannabe-artist, and former friend, named Mike:
EVERYONE AT SOME TIME IN LIFE ENDS UP WITH A FRIEND LIKE MIKE. Mike wanted desperately to be a screenwriter. Or, to put it more accurately, he wanted you to think of him as a screenwriter.
Another friend of mine, G. (who wouldn’t care much whether or not you knew how accomplished an arts writer, artist, and craftsperson he actually is), first encountered Mike after a meeting which was initiated for the purposes of “screenplay research.” “Man,” he said, “that’s a guy who’s just desperate for attention. Do me a favor and keep me out of the loop next time.” S., yet another friend and a self-taught artist who earned his skills by hard toil over band saw and workbench, after a few months’ acquaintance took to calling Mike an intellectual Baby Huey. “You know Baby Huey, right? Always wanting attention, always bumbling into every situation like an attention-seeking whale in a wading pool. That’s Mike!”
OK, so I’d intended to write a follow-up post on the issue of artistic competition by now, but, as it turns out, I’ve been distracted. Maybe I have a decent enough excuse—today was my birthday, after all, so there was that to attend to. But whatever the case, I apologize for the delay, and promise to have something for you by tomorrow.
In the meantime, here’s a song about an artist growing old. It’s by self-taught artist and folk musician Daniel Johnston, whose work was included in the last Whitney Biennial. Compelling stuff, methinks. Hope you enjoy (until I can get back to the blogstone).
by Daniel Johnston
Listen up and I’ll tell a story
About an artist growing old
Some would try for fame and glory
Others aren’t so bold
Everyone, and friends and family
Saying, “Hey! Get a job!”
“Why do you only do that only?
Why are you so odd?
We don’t really like what you do.
We don’t think anyone ever will.
It’s a problem that you have,<
And this problem’s made you ill.”
Listen up and I’ll tell a story
About an artist growing old
Some would try for fame and glory
Others aren’t so bold
The artist walks alone
Someone says behind his back,
“He’s got his gall to call himself that!
He doesn’t even know where he’s at!”
The artist walks among the flowers
Appreciating the sun
He does this all his waking hours
But is it really so wrong?
They sit in front of their TV
Saying, “Hey! This is fun!”
And they laugh at the artist
Saying, “He doesn’t know how to have fun.”
The best things in life are truly free
Singing birds and laughing bees
“You’ve got me wrong”, says he.
“The sun don’t shine in your TV”
Listen up and I’ll tell a story
About an artist growing old
Some would try for fame and glory
Others aren’t so bold
Everyone, and friends and family
Saying, “Hey! Get a job!”
“Why do you only do that only?
Why are you so odd?
We don’t really like what you do.
We don’t think anyone ever will.
It’s a problem that you have,
And this problem’s made you ill.”
Listen up and I’ll tell a story
About an artist growing old.
Some would try for fame and glory
Others just like to watch the world.
According to the story, starting in 2008 artists may have a “hard time finding places to live and work for cheap” (as though it’s currently that easy). This is because a new IRS ruling says low-income artist lofts are not in compliance with federal tax regulations.
The IRS’ Section 42 Low Income Housing Tax Credit generally helps pay for anywhere between 35 percent to 60 percent of the capital costs of building or renovating a building that “serves the general public.” However, Section 42 says a building can’t qualify for the low-income housing credit if it offers housing only to members of “a certain social organization.” This appears to be the tax sticking point with artist lofts, and the IRS has now begun more closely scrutinizing such housing.
Of course, this conflicts with much of current civic policy, as, according to the story’s author, Marianne Combs, many cities across the country are “using affordable housing to attract artists, in the hopes they will bring with them urban renewal.”
Minnesota-based Artspace, a real estate developer that specializes in developing artist live/work spaces in blighted areas of America’s cities, is working to appeal the IRS’s determination process on Section 42.
Bill Mague is portfolio director for Artspace. He says he doesn’t understand how after 20 years of financing artist loft developments, the IRS could rule that his organization isn’t serving the general public.
“All of our projects have people who fit every possible demographic - age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, primary source of income,” says Mague. “And so that’s why I don’t think we come even close to any of these concerns that the IRS is voicing. And I think if they were to prevail, it would significantly impair a very powerful federal housing tool.”
“No more bread.” –Said by a baker to Vincent van Gogh; the painter had been exchanging paintings to the baker for food. (I wrote this in my notebook during my visit to Dean Fleming at the Libre Commune; I think I saw it in a book I had pulled from his bookshelf to read in bed while sleeping in the extra room at Fleming’s geodesic studio/home, but I can’t recall for certain.)
“I feel—a failure.” –Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother written after visiting Docter Gachet in Auvers. While in Auvers, van Gogh completed dozens of paintings and drawing, including a portrait of the doctor that later, in 1990, would sell for $82.5 million (the highest price ever for a painting sold in auction—proving “failure” is a relative term). At the end of his two-month stay in Auvers on July 27, 1890, at age 37, the painter would shoot himself in the stomach, and he would die two days later.
I met Dean Fleming in the summer of 2005. Driving through the Sangre de Christo mountains about 40 miles south of Pueblo, I realized the weather in Colorado in August is about a perfect you’ll ever fine. Heartbreakingly beautiful. The sky is a pearlescent blue ocean hanging over the sage green ocean-bottom valleys and the distant coral-reef mountains. On each side of the Huerfano valley, the landscape rises up into scrubby chaparral then disappears into rocky murky mountaintops.
Dean Fleming first discovered this region in 1966. At the time, he was feeling increasingly stifled in New York. “Art was a profession,” he said, “like playing football. You get together a resume and a portfolio. You work to get the critics to do a review… The structure of the profession was not something I ever worked at. I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. In New York, there’s a lot of pressure to repeat yourself and do the same thing. In New York I was the ‘parallelogram’ painter, which I thought sucked beyond belief. I didn’t want anything to do with that. I wanted to do what I felt like.”
Dean Fleming, “Untitled,” 1965
Fleming took a get-out-of-New York trip to California in 1966 with composer Steve Reich and painter John Baldwin. On the way, they stopped Ignacio, Colorado, to catch a Native American Sundance. “I found it magical,” said Fleming. In a letter to New York gallery owner Paula Cooper in July 1966, he wrote:
Dear Paula,
Excellent mustanging across country spending 4 days with the Colorado Utes sun dancing, basking in stars & Rocky Mountain blaze of sun, cleansing chunks of Manhattan funk & generally changing. Steve playing tapes, John the trumpet & me giving out books & buttons, we Johnny Appleseeded culture across the land…
Fleming’s suggestion that he was changing was revealing. It was difficult for him to adjust again to SoHo when he returned: “When I went back to New York, ” he said, “to my loft on Broom Street, I had a dream that I was supposed to be in the country, surrounded by friends. That was the impetus to come back to Colorado.”
In 1965, some artists, filmmakers, and philosophical types from Lawrence, Kansas had started—in Trinidad, Colorado—what would become known as the first rural “hippy commune,” Drop City. The founders of Drop City had hope to continue working on an art concept—Drop Art—they had developed earlier at the University of Kansas. Drop Art was informed by the “happenings” of Allan Kaprow and the work of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and R. Buckminster Fuller—a professor and inventor who pondered questions related what would later become known as the “sustainability” movement. (Fleming knew “Bucky” Fuller, as he called him. In fact, he learned to make the geodesic dome that is his Libre Commune studio/home from him.)
“The Ultimate Painting ,” by Drop Artists, 1966, acrylic on panel, 60″ x 60″
Fleming first stopped at Drop City with a few friends for a short stay, coming to think of the place as a “touch chaotic.” “They had this open-door policy thing that was untenable,” he explained. “Artists need their own space to think and get work done. They were doomed for failure.” (Drop City was abandoned by its residents in 1970.)
After a few months, Fleming and his group discovered a plot of acreage on a mountainside near Gardner, Colorado. Somehow they scraped up the money to purchase it ($6000), and thus began the Libre Community, a continuously existing commune that has expanded and contracted through the years—with various artist microcommunities popping up then fading away. Amazingly, the commune still exists today, forty years after its founding.
“It’s a funny mix here,” said Fleming, who these days possesses deeply lined face and a long mane of white hair. “There have always been Native American practitioners, Buddhists, wine drinkers, pot smokers. Theater artists. Photographers. Artists. Everyone, each in their own area. Some of the groups overlap. But for me, it’s always just been a great place to work.”
Fleming’s life as a working artist in Colorado has been long and rich—even removed as it’s been from mainstream currents. “I don’t have a lot of money. I never have. But if I have a place to stay, it works out.” Still, like anyone, he seems to have his share of regrets. “I worry about not having health insurance,” he said several times over the course of my stay.
Fleming still paints every morning, first thing—”even when I’m traveling,” he said. Behind his geodesic studio, a good-sized shack holds a large cache of paintings reveals the results of this fifty years of effort. He is pensive about his legacy as he shows this trove to me. “My situation (as an obscure artist) is deliberate. It doesn’t matter in the long run if people like my work or not. I seek a place always where the painting takes over. I’d hope the observer would have that experience, but that’s very individual. It’s the nature of people to like a different painting for different reasons. I think of painting as being a mirror for people—where they’re at.”
Take a blighted or economically diminished section of your favorite city, preferably with a wide array of large warehouse or mixed-use industrial buildings;
Inherit, steal, or buy up a bunch of real estate in said blighted area;
Invite people who have few other options for finding cheap urban real estate—namely, artists—to inhabit your warehouses and old factories;
Watch the artists turn your blighted area into a hip area where lots of young, up-and-coming people hang out;
Watch new businesses like galleries, art stores, cafes, restaurants, and so on develop in formerly empty spaces;
Kick the artists out of your buildings, sell to investors at a huge profit, retire fat, happy, and with a spotless conscience.
I wrote my story about Northeast Minneapolis, just north of the downtown of Minneapolis, which, back then, was the hub of arts activities in the Twin Cities. Here’s a sampling of the crux of the story:
Roughly defined as the Central Avenue corridor running between 3rd and 37th avenues, Northeast Minneapolis has historically been a confluence of working-class residences, light-industrial parks, warehouses, and low-rent retail shops. At present, several art galleries (including Acme Visual Arts and Icebox Gallery) and a number of large studio complexes (including the S & M Tire Warehouse, the Tyler Street Studio Building, the California Building, and the Northrup King Studio Complex) can be found around the Central Avenue corridor, where the low-rent warehouse and industrial spaces began to attract artists and gallery owners about 10 years ago….
….Although Northeast Minneapolis is arguably the art center of the Twin Cities these days, that distinction may be ending as the neighborhood evolves. Like AØSO, two other Northeast galleries have closed in the last six months, and another in the last year. At the same time, rising rents and new neighborhood development threaten to displace some of the artist occupants of warehouse studio spaces.
Of course, this story is not unique to Minneapolis. It’s been going on for ages all over the country. (The cycle has repeated in the Twin Cities at least once more since I wrote the story in 1998.) This book, for example, tells the story of the rise and fall of the great arts colony in Manhattan’s SoHo district. And this was way back in the 1960s, before they’d even invented urban blight!
And, as you’d expect in this great age of Artistic Failure, this story continues to play today—except now, as this story by David Freedlander in Am New York relates, the cycle of artistic exploitation-rejection can encompass entire major metropolitan areas.
The story starts by quoting Robert Elmes, who recently very nearly moved his gallery, Galapagos Art Space, out of New York (to the more favorable climes of Berlin):
“The cultural ecosystem is under incredible threat right now,” Elmes said. “The word spreading back across the country to young, creative people is that New York is incredibly expensive and there isn’t the opportunity to experiment with new work. The best and the brightest are going to other cities.”
It’s a common refrain among those who work in the creative industries and follow the cultural scene closely: New York City, which has incubated a century of the world’s leading artists, musicians, and performers, will cease to be a place where art is made.
“New York could easily become a museum city like Paris or Rome that doesn’t produce much in the way of relevant culture,” Elmes said. “If you take emerging and cutting-edge arts away, the city becomes dramatically less interesting. That was always what New York was about but we are not protecting our brand.”
There’s a lot of humor based on stereotypes. Stereotypes are generalizations based on minimal or limited knowledge about a group, usually made by people who do not belong to that group. Of course, there’s often an element of “truth” to stereotypes, whether it’s self-fulfilling truth or not. Stereotypes can be a way to help people comprehend a vast and complex society. The problem, however, is stereotypes are often employed for reasons of power and subjugation. Or as Michael Pickering, a professor of sociology, explains: “Those who generate and perpetuate stereotypes of others are usually in positions of greater power and status than those who are stereotyped. Stereotypes not only define and place others as inferior, but also implicitly affirm and legitimate those who stereotype in their own position and identity.”
This website includes a list of 45 (and counting) humorous artist stereotypes. Many are overly simplistic, some are insulting. The following seem to me, based on what I know about artists, particularly true:
A humorous look at the things you do that indicate you’re an artist.
2. The highlights in your hair are from your palette and not Clairol.
8. You are over 50 and still have no health insurance.
9. Your family takes out a life insurance plan on you for less than $5000. [ouch]
14. You chose to buy that new Russian Sable Number Six Round instead of a Big Mac, a Large Fry, a Milkshake, Desert, and five gallons of gas.
21. When you go out, you are always stopping and gazing at the world around you.
26. You explain your deplorably bad housekeeping by saying, “it’s a work-in-progress…” [I’ve heard this one from artists at least a dozen times]
30. You paint more than you talk.
44. When others are needing to be with the in crowd, you feel lost in the crowd.
Because this site by design is concerned with the lofty idea of chronicling systemic artistic failure–following developments in arts policy, art world economics, the social condition of art, and the like–it may sometimes seem disconnected from the struggles of real artists on the ground. But of course, the reason I look at and write about these forces is because I am truly concerned about their effect on artists.
What I mean to say is, in the midst of my rants and deep investigations of this country’s unjust treatment of the arts I do realize we should remember the struggling artists who have come and gone and are still yet to fail. We should remember them and try to keep others from following in their miserable footsteps.
So, to remember the struggles of artists I’m introducing a new regular feature on CAFA, Favorite Failed Artist Stories.
And here’s the first story, Amedeo Modigliani:
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1884–1920) was an Italian artist who, following the long-standing tradition, moved to Paris in 1906 to work as a painter. He worked furiously when he arrived in that town, making myriad images first influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, then, in 1907, by Paul Cezanne. Eventually he developed his own unique style, one that cannot really be grouped with other avant garde artists of the time.
Not only was Modigliani’s style unique, but his behavior also stood out among his peers of the time, even considering the Bohemian standards they upheld. He carried on frequent affairs, drank heavily, and used absinthe and hashish. While drunk at social gatherings, he would sometimes strip himself naked. In time, his childhood tendency toward illness was exacerbated by poverty, overwork, and self-abuse. His health declined. On January 24, 1920, Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis. He was 35. The following evening, his common-law wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, leapt to her death from a fifth-story window. She was eight months’ pregnant with their second child,
And here’s the kicker of the story:
During the 1920s, in the wake of Modigliani’s early death and spurred on by comments by the critic Andre Salmon, who credited hashish and absinthe as the progenitors of Modigliani’s unique style, many hopeful young artists tried to emulate this “success” by embarking on a path of Modiglianian substance abuse and bohemian excess. This was encouraged by Salmon’s claim that whereas Modigliani was a rather pedestrian artist when sober, “…from the day he abandoned himself to certain forms of debauchery, an unexpected light came upon him, transforming his art.”
This rallying cry—toward debauchery and excess—has grown to become the modern hallmark of the romantic soul longing to be a tragic, doomed artist. For this—the great seed source of failed artists everywhere—we can thank Modigliani and his posthumous propagandist Salmon!
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