The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

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.

Today’s edition of the Bullet Points of Failure (B.P.O.F.) gives up following, for now, all the local artistic hand-wringing that has of late been something of a preoccupation. Instead, today I strive to expand both inward and outward by bullet-pointing a few personal issues, as well as a few national ones.

• To start, I’d like to steer your attention to mnartists.org, where I recently published some thoughts/questions about what might be looming for the new generation of emerging artists in this age of diminishing resources and a failing artistic support system. Warning: This is a speculative thought-piece, and sometimes bluntly polemic, particularly when I assess the apparent value-system of young people today, values that seems to me likely to doom the emerging generation to ever increasing amounts of artistic failure (if something is not done). So controversial were my thoughts/questions that the administrators on the site deemed it good fodder for a Featured discussion forum on the subject, with 68 comments (and counting) by local arts community members.

• On my other (yin) blog–about happiness and sunshine and art and drinks all around–I wrote a piece nearly a month ago (yikes! I’ve got to update that blog!) about the Nature of Happiness (and its Connection to Art). My motivation was responding to the artists who had been complaining about changes to a local artists exhibition program. I quoted former NEA chair Bill Ivey who suggested that art is best when not deemed a career-building enterprise, but instead is seen as “a way to pursue self-realization without forcing us to deny the materialist and competitive drives that pass for human nature in the West…” (See www.arthappyhour.com for more of Ivey’s thoughts).

• Perhaps inspired by these two points, an alert reader, Louis Allgeyer, wrote the note below (which alerted me of a recently published Peter Schjeldahl review, which I hadn’t seen, that touches–much more eloquently–on notions put forward in my recent writing):
  

  admin/M.F.

  Down towards the end of your nature of happiness piece you sort of ponder,where is it all going art-wise, which I think many do. Esp artists themselves, so that they can jump on the-next-big-thing (just like a stock
  broker). Esp artists who are tired of their usual self-gratification that isn’t gratifying and isn’t art.

  I hope you read the article “feeling blue,” by the other great midwestern art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, in the august 4th New Yorker magazine ( a swimmers head on the cover). He also seems to be having similar ponderings and seems to think he may see ( in a much bigger picture than the little show he is reviewing ) a “fashion auditioning as a sea change.” He goes on to predict what the next-big-thing might be, if history is any guide and if, “our particular civilization is (not)spent.”

  Naturally I like it because my stuff falls right in line so I am gratified.

  Anyhoo, I think it is an important bit journalism.

  Louis Allgeyer

• Finally, Schjeldahl’s review–of “After Nature,” currently up at the New Museum in New York--is itself well worth bullet-pointing. He says the show “proposes a saturnine new direction in art…. Something is happening in artists’ studios: a shift of emphasis, from surface to depth, and a shift of mood, from mania to melancholy, shrugging off the allures of the money-hypnotized market and the spectacle-bedizened biennials circuit. (In fact, the underappreciated recent Whitney Biennial hinted at the mutation.)”
  

  And he continues: “the futility of artistic technique in the face of world conditions may constitute a subject for art as substantial as any other, and rather more compelling than today’s stacked-deck models of success… Existentialist standards of authenticity may be back in force, however fleetingly. How much can we bear of art that, like Sebald’s writing, glories in bottomless malaise? I expect we’ll find out.

  You suspect that a big change is coming when sensitive young people project (and, because they’re young, enjoy) feelings of being old. This has often signalled a backward crouch preceding a forward leap. I think of Picasso’s world-weary blue period, T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” and “Prufrock,” and the budding Abstract Expressionists’ wallows in Jungian mythology. The syndrome announces the exhaustion of a received cultural situation, whose traditions are slack and whose future is opaque. It typically entails nostalgia for real or fancied past ages that dealt—successfully, in retrospect—with similar crises.

  Viva la artistic failure!