The Tate Modern offered the invited orgs, collectives and etcs absolutely no compensation for setting up shop in Turbine Hall–but neither were the galleries charged to be a part of the proceedings. Many spaces accepted the Tate’s invitation as a great opportunity while at least one group of anonymous British artists and arts professionals called “Making a Living” issued an open letter that stated “The title No Soul For Sale re-enforces deeply reductive stereotypes about the artist and art production. With its romantic connotations of the soulful artist, who makes art from inner necessity without thought of recompense, No Soul For Sale implies that as artists we should expect to work for free and that it is acceptable to forgo the right to be paid for our labour.” Read the entire letter online here. Other groups, like W.A.G.E (Working Artist and the Greater Economy), participated in NSFS at X Initiative but drew the line at having a presence at NSFS at the Tate Modern.

This small protest was of course accepted by curator Cecilia Alemani as welcomed institutional critique (3) and perhaps mostly forgotten about in the nearly six months since NSFS took place. The issues raised by NSFS have a larger art-world relevance and set up an interesting conversation about the price and the value equated to diy arts establishments and what those stakes might mean to the creative economy. In order to explore these issues I have written two articles.

This article takes an against stance, arguing that artist and art organization should have protested NSFS and exhibitions like it, alternative spaces are alternative for the very fact that they operate outside the systems ascribed by the Tate–artists should be paid for the work that they do, especially by major institutions that have the resources to do so. Art is a skill that people are educated for and like all educated persons that render a useful service they should be paid.

The opposite argument–also by me, has been published in print in Machete. You may pick one up at Marginal Utility, located at 319 N 11th street (Philadelphia) on the 2nd floor, absolutely free of charge.

In this article we will explore what it might mean to set up a system in which cultural capital has an exchange rate of zero dollars.

Exhibit A:

An excerpt from a conversation with Nike Desis and Josh Kerner of FLUXspace. FLUXspace was invited to be a part of, and took part in, both incarnations of NSFS.

Annette Monnier: “I get it. No organization or project that I’ve ever been a part of would have ever said ‘no’ to being part of something at the Tate Modern. We would have gone, no matter what the tickets cost and paid the whole way ourselves. . . but when you’re a young artist going to art school you think that by the time you make it to the Tate Modern you are getting paid to be there. . . ”

Nike Desis: “That was my question, if we don’t get paid at the Tate Modern then when do we get paid?”

Josh Kerner: “I think you just answered your own question.”

AM: “That’s a little scary”

ND: “That is a little scary”

JK: “The economic situation that we’ve set up as an alternative art space is not an economic system that functions through monetary transfer. It functions through the transfer of time, generosity, and other things and that’s a system that WE, I believe, are responsible for. It’s one of those situations that if you’re going to point your finger at the Tate you’ve got to point four fingers back at yourself.”

*It is important to note that this is a excerpt from a half hour conversation in which both Nike and Josh expressed various views, both positive and negative, about the NSFS experience.

Exhibit B:

I sell my soul but at the highest rates

Closing Arguments

Those organizations that participated in NSFS should feel used, because they were. By hosting NSFS the Tate was made to look like a friendly and open environment that supported and in fact worked in tangent with alternative models. NSFS was not a conference put together so that fellow independent spaces could network together. Nowhere in the programming did time exist to do so. The Tate instead scheduled an art exhibition in which each alternative space was the art–only they were art that constantly had to work and perform for the public. This is very cheap programming that garners a lot of press. This is cheap programming instead of programming that someone should be getting reimbursed for.

Art is an important service provided to the public by skilled and trained individuals who are indeed special and who require reimbursement for services. Artists who work inside the system  of established art institutions but work for free or very little sabotage an artist’s right to earn a living and create an environment where art is expected to be provided to the public free of charge. It is one thing for an artist to remove themselves entirely from capitalism and create an oeuvre that politically challenges the system of monetary exchange but it is quite another for an artist to work within the system and yet still not receive the benefits of doing so. If artists do not demand payment for their services they will not be paid and art will become a service that is always free.

Artists and artist-run spaces should band together and boycott situations like those set up by the Tate Modern for No Soul for Sale. This is not to say that festivals like No Soul for Sale should not take place, but they should be properly equipped and provided for when they do. Institutions like the Tate, large Institutions with enormous budgets and resources, must be held accountable for being the model of art-world practices.

Referenced in this text:

1. Tate Modern web press

2. “Restoring the ‘Eek’ to Eking Out a Living” written by Holland Cotter and published in the New York Times on June 24, 2009

3. Artnet news May 20, 2010

This article would not have been possible without valuable conversations with Andrew Suggs, Nike Desis, Josh Kerner and Angela Jeradi–all of whom were participants in No Soul for Sale.

Mark Price on the whys and what fors of Zine of the Month:

I have been self publishing my work since I was 11 – photocopying mini comics and hawking them at school between classes for 25cents. I love the zine / self published / hand made book medium and it’s possibilities. The act of publishing physical things is becoming more and more interesting to me as more of our physical and mental environment becomes ‘digitalized’. I wanted to extend from my own self publishing into collaborating with others. These are a few ideas I was thinking about in starting the project. Also I stole the idea from LA based weird art damage noise punk dance (what?) label Death Bomb Arc that has offered a Tape Of The Month Club for the past few years … as a subscriber I would receive a new cassette single each month from two bands… and getting mail rules so I have been offering a year subscription as well.

This year I am working with almost all Philly based artists who I am friends with or whose work I really like and selfishly want bounded in zine form for my own collection. Next year I plan to expand to include artists outside the city and to continue to offer the subscription service.

The artist zines are a mix of screen printing  and full color assembled by hand in editions of 100 – 200. I print them at Space 1026′s printing shop and do additional production work using Hottt off the Press’s shop on Baltimore Ave in West Philly.

Zine of the Month is currently sold at these locations:

Cafe Royal, UK based zine publisher and distro
Cinders Gallery, Brooklyn Gallery
Desert Island, Brooklyn Comic Book Shop
Glowdome Salem, Oregon based touring streamline trailer full of zines
Needles & Pens, San Francisco DIY goods and art gallery
No Coast Chicago collective, show space, and shop

online

and

on Saturday, October 17th at Little Berlin’s BYOTY Book Fair

The Naomi Cleary I have uses a bunch of yellows and blues and greens, there is some grey, the patterning is definitely floral in nature. On my bowl the pattern on the outside is much different then the pattern on the inside, the bottom lip that my bowl rests on is also patterned, a fact that I find out when I turn the bowl over. The bottom has a matte finished, it is unglazed. If I wanted to I could eat ice cream out of my bowl. I find the object I hold in my hands at once simple and complex. I find it beautiful. I am so glad that I am allowed to hold it.

This is the reason I wanted to talk to Naomi, she makes great pots, and I think that’s really something.

You mean real art not pots

Annette Monnier: So I basically invited you here today to ask you why you make pots? I ask because you have a MFA and I think most people make a distinction between functional objects and fine art. . .

Naomi Cleary: You mean real art not pots.

AM: You said it so I didn’t have to, but yes.

NC: I guess a lot of times one thing just leads to another and you go to art school and you take certain classes and you end up liking the material.

For me I was in graduate school and I couldn’t take the jewelry elective because it was full so they put me in crappy ceramics which I did not want to take and I somehow just stayed there. I like the process of making things out of clay. I like working with the material. I’ve always liked domestic objects and the personal relationship we have to the things that we use everyday. The things that we keep close to our bodies.

I think food and eating and dishes and the body and family. . . it’s all wrapped up in there.

Another related fact is that I want to make three-dimensional objects because I want to put a pattern on them. I don’t like patterning flat surfaces, it doesn’t do the same thing for me. I like things that you can pick up and turn over and discover other parts of them by holding and turning. Often times with art objects you can’t do that. The object sits on a pedestal and hangs on the wall and there is really only one way of viewing that object.

Q: Where are objects worth more? A: On the wall.

AM: Not to drive this into the ground, but would you ultimately say that one art form is better then the other functional vs. non-functional?

NC: I think it depends on what you are talking about, but in terms of perceived value I think that anything that hangs on the wall is going to be worth more. You can make a plate or a coaster or you can make a tile that hangs on a wall and the tile that hangs on the wall is always going to be worth more money because that tile is creeping into this fine arts realm where objects are worth more.

AM: Isn’t that frustrating to you?

NC: Yeah. Yeah, it frustrates me. I think that I also have to say that I’m not entirely committed to only dishes though I have been making them for awhile now.

AM: Would you rather be making other objects?

NC: No.

Or yes. Doesn’t. . . sometimes it’s hard to switch gears but I could re-format my studio and just make forms and pattern them.

The amazing bonus

AM: It seems like the heart of your art is the pattern, I know you research patterning and grab source material from a variety of cultures to create your own motifs. It seems really personal. . . for instance you have a motif I’ve often seem on your pots tattooed on your arm.

The painted decoration on your pots is very aesthetically pleasing and it is as you say; it improves it that there’s an inside pattern and something on the bottom to discover when you turn over a cup or bowl. . . it’s just an amazing bonus that you can also use the object.

NC: Isn’t it crazy that it’s like a two for one deal but that means it’s worth less? Just pattern would probably be worth more.  It isn’t really even money it’s value. Scratch money, it’s just valued more highly.

It’s all really hard

AM: If I were you I think I’d be a little bitter and I guess I was wondering if you were. . .

NC: Bitter?

AM: Yeah. You make some wonderful art objects and I’m finding that even the words I’m using like “art objects” seem like they might be a little insulting. . . what you make is art, but for some reason there has to be this distinction.

NC: Is artful the same as art? You know, either way is really hard. Art artist, craft artist, functional artist. . . it’s all really hard.

Buying less shoes and making it work

AM: Do you feel like you’re a part of the “indy craft movement”?

NC: I think I’m using that because it’s there to use. I don’t think that my work fits into the general style of let’s say The Renegade Craft Fair. Even though my work is not very traditional ceramic pottery it’s very obviously being made by someone who’s formally trained and has knowledge of ceramic history. It just doesn’t fit.

If I made wood-grained cups with birds on them I would get into all the craft shows I’m sure and those would be great things to sell. . . I don’t really fit in that market and that actually makes me mad sometimes.

AM: Almost.

NC: Yeah. and a lot of times I really struggle with that because I don’t really fit into that market but I don’t really fit into the traditional pottery realm either. I hope I can sneak into both.

It just comes back to what I really want to do and why not spend my energy making the thing that I really want to make? It just comes down to figuring it out and maybe buying less shoes but making the work I want to make.

Naomi on Ceramics Arts Daily

Buy and see Naomi’s stuff:

The Clay Studio

Naomi on Etsy

Naomi’s website

If the art world was a High School and the students in it were the mediums in which an artist could work, video, sculpture in general, and installation would currently be vying for the title of coolest kid. Each medium fashionably dressed with a hint of outsider rebellion even though they are firmly aware they fit right in. Screen-printing is the highly amusing social butterfly who fits in with everyone. Painting might be like a head cheerleader or have some position on the football team, drawing/works on paper might be her slightly mousier best friend (adjust metaphor if she is a he) who sometimes looks longingly across the cafeteria at “the cool kids.”  Specific mediums such as glass, ceramics, comic books, and dance would all be various forms of “nerd” groups, soundly immersed in their individual dungeons and dragons type hobbies. Each of these groups have their own little economies and at times may be thoroughly unaware of the fact that the rest of the school has such a high opinion of themselves.

To understand why I think Dirt on Delight is so cool it is imperative that you continue thinking of the art world as a High School in which clay as a medium is an unloved and misunderstood outsider. If you do not keep this in mind you will still find an awesome and educational exhibition. (Libby, on this very blog, has taken great lengths to showcase some of the exhibition’s highlights, here.) You must understand that in my Art World High School, institutions like the ICA hang out with the cool kids and don’t usually walk over to the clay side of the cafeteria. Dirt on Delight is equivalent to Veronica Sawyer (Heathers) deciding to hang out with her old pal Betty Finn.

Following my metaphor, we find that our lives are often enriched by hanging out with “the nerds.”  Betty Finn was a much better friend then any of the Heathers; Lindsay Lohan became a monster when she hung out among the in-crowd in Mean Girls, Napoleon Dynamite. . . etc. Of course there are people who will applaud the ICA’s “generosity” in using it’s popular status to bring clay into the fold and then there are those who will claim that they only did it for a bet (She’s all That), and though they have come to love clay now, they have not loved clay as some have loved clay–in fact they even gave clay a make-over to fit their personal contemporary image of her, they could not love pots or cups. They could not love clay as a “nerd.”

In the words of Levar Burton, don’t take my word for it, some amazing reviews have been written on the subject:

Clay’s Big Day
The Art World Is in a Place That’s Very Familiar Ground in the Realm of Ceramics
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer

Those diminished expectations seem to have infected potters, too. Judging by this show, the discipline that gave us ancient Greek amphorae, Renaissance majolica, the tea bowls of Japan and the constructivist coffee sets of Kasimir Malevich now seems content to treat clay as fun stuff to fiddle with. In art schools, the “serious” art students call their pot-throwing colleagues “mud bunnies.” “Dirt on Delight” shows its artists living up to the insult: Their work is mostly about dug-up mud, and what a craftsman’s hands can do to make it weird, wacky and, of course, dirtily delightful. Those notions have ruled ceramic art for such a time, they’ve become its most entrenched cliches — and like all cliches, they’ve lost whatever impact they once had.

Crucible of Creativity, Stoking Earth Into Art
By Roberta Smith
The New York Times

The show’s determination to integrate ceramics into the art mainstream is nothing new. But its refusal to do so simply by slipping some universally agreed-upon ceramic exceptions into a show of painting, sculpture and so forth is close to groundbreaking.

In short, I like Dirt on Delight. The exhibition has expanded the dialogue along the lines of fine art and craft and though we still have a long journey ahead of us it has paved the way for understanding between the various mediums of art. Someday our High School will be a better place. Go see it before it’s gone.

The following is a transcript of a telephone conversation I had with Marisa Olson.Feel free to download the podcast if you prefer to listen, but I must warn you that the quality of the audio is appallingly bad.

The first question I asked was supposed to be “What is New Media Art?”, a question Marisa, classified as a new media artist herself and also curator-at-large and staff writer for the new museum’s new media component; rhizome.org, is in a better position then most to attempt to answer. However, I forgot to turn on the recorder for most of that answer.

Marisa, who lives in New York and has recently taken her oeuvre on tour to Paris, Berlin, and Cincinnati, Ohio, is in no fewer then two exhibitions in Philadelphia at the minute. A solo exhibition of her work, “Background Information”, opens at the Esther M. Klein Gallery TONIGHT! (she is also in Bitmap at Drexel):

New Media can be old

Annette: You mentioned earlier that New Media art doesn’t necessarily have to deal with new technologies because a lot of the [technology] used in [what's classified as] New Media art is now old. I noticed in your personal artwork there’s a lot of nostalgia, maybe, for artwork gone by. Could you address that issue?

Marisa: You mean for media that’s gone by?

Annette: Yes [sorry]. For instance on your blog you have an image of a [cassette] tape with your name on it which looks sort of “bubblegum pop”, and I noticed you’ve done a lot of drawings based off images you found on the internet that were of older headphones and recording devices. . .

Marisa: Yeah. That work that I’ve done with mixed-tapes and headphones and that sort of thing, it definitely initially came out of a space of nostalgia, but as I worked more and more with it I’ve asked myself why I’m so interested and I’ve realized that I’m more into media change then anything. I’m more interested in what are the cultural or political forces that compel people to keep upgrading and keep making the new ipod or the new device that makes the old one obsolete. More so, what happens to those old things? Do they just end up in landfills?

These drawing’s that I’ve been making, these monitor tracings–sorry it’s really loud outside–

Annette: s’ok

Marisa: In a way they are about the google image search and the way the internet is becoming this depository for our memories of these things, these things that are sort of “out of sight, out of mind”. The other thing about these drawings is thinking about the monitor as the newest technology in the lineage of technologies that have assisted artists, like the camera obscura, the overhead projector, that kind of thing. It’s all kind of about the evolution of technology.

I’m really nerdy

Marisa: I’m really nerdy.

Annette: Actually, I was wondering how nerdy you are? Do have, like a degree? How much technology do you actually understand? I realize that you have to be able to manipulate it. . .

Marisa: When I was a little kid I was a total computer-programmer nerd on my Commodore 64 and now I write a lot of html, everyday, by hand, but I’m not like a hard-core programmer by any means.

Annette: Well html is kind of old isn’t it, if you were [hard-core] you’d be writing in something crazy, like not even Java Script anymore I don’t think. . .

Marisa: Yeah. I can’t really do any of that stuff. But I can understand what it can do and have conversations with people about it, which I like. I like learning more, it’s kind of mystifying and really interesting.

Speaking of degrees, I don’t really have a degree in computer science but in the course of working on my PHD one of my official field titles was “The Cultural History of Technology” so I have spent a lot of time studying the history of batteries, televisions, telephones, and video games. . .

Marisa Olson, Free Gift Economy, 2007, screengrab AFC, stolen from artfagcity.

24

Annette: Is that like studying “The History and Philosophy of Science” or something?

Marisa: Yeah. Exactly, it’s very closely related.

Annette: I always liked those kind of courses. That sounds pretty cool.

Marisa: Yeah, me too. Thomas Khun is one of my favorite writers, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

Annette: Oh, yeah. I remember reading that in a class called something like “History and Science of Philosophy 101″ or something.

Marisa: I re-read it every single year. Twenty-four is my favorite page.

Annette: I have no idea what that refers to but I’ll look it up.

Marisa: It’s just this line about how science is trying to force nature into a conformed thought. It’s all about how science as a field is trying to confirm existing ways of thinking, existing paradigms, and you have to wait until enough things don’t fit into the box until you change the box. I dunno. I like stuff like that.

————————————————————————————————

[Cut out in acknowledgment of all of our sort attention spans

And, just a recap of all the myriad of things Marisa has been up to this summer.]

————————————————————————————————-

Conclusion

Annette: I just want to end with a little bit more about your show at Esther Klein Gallery that is coming up on Friday. It’s called Background Information, what sort of spurred the ideas of the work in the show?

Marisa: All the work in the show revolves around images pulled from the internet that are not really meant to be looked at directly. I’m going to do a wallpaper installation of the background image on my myspace page, which a lot of these animated .gifs are referred to as wallpaper files. I’m actually making wallpaper out of it.

Then there are are other things like a flickr space search bale, it’s an image that flickr uses to cover up “inappropriate images”, or a comparison of the background images that really hide in the background of the web-pages for McCain and Obama, just showing only the background and you can kind of think about whose is whose, and other kinds of images that are meant to be peripheral rather then foreground images but have a kind of duty and cultural relevance of their own.

There’s also going to be a video animation that uses only icons from my facebook page.

It’s kind of a double entendre, background information in terms of background images, but also background information about myself and the kinds of web pages I’ve been looking at. It’s kind of a self-portrait in a way, the type of material that I tend to surf.

Annette: Yeah. Especially coming from your myspace page, that seems pretty auto-biographical.

Marisa: Yeah, even though looking at this wallpaper of glittery stars isn’t going to tell you that much about me, but that’s kind of funny too because I think that the whole discourse of auto-biographical art could use some critique.

END

On Sunday I helped fellow Copy gallerists Nick Paparone and Jamie Dillon christen their new outdoor sculpture, Born to Be Wild at Abington Art Center’s Sculpture Park. Born to Be Wild is a great hairy mound of dirt and grass with a bell on top of it that brings to mind games like “king of the hill” or that weird sense of achievement you get from walking up an incline of some sort. The bell works as an affirmation of your achievement, an audible “I was here”.

It occurred to me that I ought to mention going out to Abington as a day trip that will help you beat the summer heat. The sculpture park is in a beautiful woods with lots of tree coverage. Trees provide much needed oxygen and shade that you don’t really get from the City of Philadelphia.

Sylvia Benitez’s “Hatshepsut” is among the many sculptures also on view at the park

Grove
60×84″
2008

I have gotten into the nasty habit of popping in on really outstanding shows just a couple of days before they close. This is alright by me but particularly bad for you, dear reader, as you will no doubt be perusing this post as the minutes tick away from the time you have to see the paintings of Kate Bright at Locks Gallery. As it stands you have about a week which is more then I can say for those of you wishing to catch the delightful Jennifer Bartlett exhibition (read about it here), upstairs at Locks only until this Saturday Friday! when it will begin to be replaced by the no doubt just as exciting exhibition by Joy Feasley.

It’s not quite warm enough yet for Ms. Bright’s (her name is so apt I am tempted to think of it as a pseudonym or “stage name”) scenes of glittering snow falling on trees to be maddeningly escapist, but the silence of each image still tends to suck you in until you can almost hear your own footsteps breaking a fresh layer of snow in an isolated and enchanted forest. If the canvas wasn’t covered in glitter, the image would be downright scary, or perhaps it is even creepier because of it. They are each so subtly done, that I almost don’t want to think of the “cheapness” (here the word cheap has nothing to do with price because in reality this much glitter is expensive) of the material. I have never seen glitter so elevated and though comparisons to Karen Kilmnick have to come to mind (for the paintings are so very girly and glittery that you also think of unicorns and fairies and castles and ponies) I don’t know that I have ever been tempted to ever proclaim the use of glitter in Karen’s paintings “sublime”.

I was most drawn to a canvas entitled Grove in which a cleared path appears between the trees and turns left until it disappears from your line of sight. For some reason I remembered those paintings by Henri Magritte in which a canvas is placed in front of an opened window. Those paintings always scared me to death and I can’t quite come to grips with why I think of them in the same sentence as Kate Bright.

LeRoy Johnson: Call and Response
Little Berlin
Closes May 21

I’ve taught in the same program as LeRoy Johnson, the Claymobile, for about three years now and though I’ve meet him once or twice the only things I really “know” about him are little bits of information I’ve picked up from his teaching assistants. He’s an older African American man (This press release for an exhibition of his at Swarthmore College describes his “50-year journey as an artist”, so I’ll put him down as 50+), who started creating art as a potter. I mention the fact that LeRoy is African American, male, and a potter because people have often commented to me that the combination is rare. I’ve been told time and again by the people who have worked closely with LeRoy that “he has his own way of doing things” but whatever this means, it seems to be a good thing most of the time because although they may sigh, everyone says it with a smile.

I had assumed, because he’s taught clay sculpture to the urban youth of Philadelphia and because he has such a close relationship to the Clay Studio, that LeRoy creates pottery. I was wrong, and the show I viewed recently at Little Berlin; LeRoy Johnson: Call and Response, pretty much chalks LeRoy up to legendary in my book. Mr. Johnson uses “urban debris” to create art the mirrors the experience of urban life in Philadelphia. I am told that even his paintings and collages are on recycled or found canvas or panel, then covered over with various substances. The resulting sculptures and paintings look like what they are; something born of the bombed out and not-so-pretty neighborhoods of Philly.

LeRoy Johnson’s mixed media sculpture, R.I.P, is reminiscent of a abandoned warehouse/street corner and acts as a memorial to the dead, both anonymous and legend.

This detail of R.I.P. highlights a familiar scene in Philadelphia; the street corner memorial.

Which is not say that Call and Response is all serious gloom and doom, or even pessimistic in any way. LeRoy’s realistic subject matter, compounded with the fact that he works to better the neighborhoods he talks about, though sad in places, seems tinged with hope for the future. Some of the works, like a series of “Men with Hats” or five paintings entitled “Happy Happy” seem downright playful. Overall Call and Response seems to be an accurate take on Philadelphia’s problems by a person who has continually shown his love and devotion to the area around him. Philly could use about twenty more LeRoy’s, but the city is lucky to have just one.

Revelation

Three out of a series of five paintings titled; Happy Happy.

(In) Between: Contemporary Interpretations of Vanitas
Wexler Gallery, May 2nd-June28th

While I don’t think it’s necessary to travel to The Met to see a Damien Hirst shark suspended in resin, I find it reasonable to travel the couple of blocks to 2nd street to see some some DH sculptures and a print. Damien Hirst is where he isn’t supposed to be and his artwork being down the street in a little gallery I would usually never go to has all the glitter of spotting an Olsen Twin with Chloe Sevigny at Johnny and Brendas.

While I would never think to question it in New York, in Philly I doubt the authenticity of Damien Hirst skulls in my neighborhood. I do not mean that I believe the sculptures and print at Wexler Gallery to be fakes, I simply mean to point back to my prior metaphor; If you see Chloe Sevigny or an Olsen Twin at J&Bs you do a couple of double-takes and ask yourself “Is that really who I think it is?”. At the Met the Damien Hirst is expected, just another piece of art in a priceless collection of masterpieces, at the oscars Chloe Sevigny is just another starlet, but in Philadelphia at a little bar/gallery both are a spectacle.

And not to take off on an unrelated tangent about fakes, but it is much easier to get away with that sort of thing in Philly. . .

There is the fact that while there are hundreds of watch-dogs (read; bloggers, critics and fans) for any kind of scam an artist or gallery might pull in New York, in Philadelphia I might be the only one. While everyone seems to be in on a New York joke–Triple Candie was recently able to show fake art from a fake artist (The “Lester Hayes”, Holland Cotter writes about in this article on the show is completely fictitious.) people know the Sturtevant’s in the Whitney Biennial 2006 weren’t really Duchamps, the Miles Davis’ in the same show was really a David Hammons’, and all that Reena Spauling‘s stuff was what it is,– I know for a fact there have been certain “scams” in Philadelphia that have never been outted as fakes (*cough, The Golden Brick, cough*).

I’d like to reiterate that that has nothing to do with (In)Between at the Wexler, an exhibition you should be drawn to for the glitter of Damien Hirst and stay at because they have three excellent Randall Sellers paintings, and some beautiful paper cut-outs by Joe Boruchow. I’m just saying you have to watch your back when you’re reviewing art these days.

Randall Sellers, “Arrivals and Departures”, 2008

Randall Sellers, “Escape From Ghost City”, 2008

Joe Boruchow, “Morning Before Deluge (Part 1 of Vanitas: The Deluge)”, 2008

If you prefer to listen, download the podcast at oneculture.mypodcast.com.

IN WHICH THE INTERVIEWER GETS BENT OUT OF SHAPE OVER THE WHY OF A PRETTY PICTURE

Annette: All your stuff is hand-made by yourself?

Alex: Yeah.

Annette: Would you ever change that?

Alex: No. I think, well, some people say that someday I’ll get an assistant to make the work for me. . . but the time spent with the work is important to me.

Annette: Today it could go beyond that, you could get the work made in another country. Artists do that. They outsource.

Alex and friends install an exhibition at Black Floor Gallery.

Alex: I really enjoy the materials and the process of doing something. Even though it takes super-long and it’s super obsessive, it affords me time to think about why I’m making the work. It’s. . . I think a lot when I’m doing these things so it’s almost spiritual. It could be compared to doing something like saying the rosary.

It’s a repetitive process where you can just sit and think and I think it’s important because it can inform the work. Sometimes it changes the work.

I also don’t think that if I sent it away for someone else to make that it would ever satisfy me.

Annette: And I just want to say right here (because I’ve kind of been giving you a hard time) that your work does look beautiful and you’re obviously talented.

Alex: Thank you. I wondered that the other day though, when you finish a work and it’s picture perfect, it’s hard when you make this beautiful object but the only thing people say to you is that it’s beautiful.

Annette: It’s hard to get past that though, and that’s what I think I’m trying to get at right here is that there is something else to your work, but it’s so hard to get to.

Alex: Yeah. I mean. . .

I like to think the things that we look at that are beautiful are actually much more complicated, whether it’s a beautiful person , or. . . just a pretty package, that they’re actually really fucked up inside.

Annette: Yes, but that’s almost a cliche, in a way, if you see a beautiful person they’re going to be fucked up inside.

Alex: But I believe that to be very true, about everybody and thing.

Accessory

IT ALL ENDS IN A FLASH.

Annette: Yes, and I admit that can be a pretty intense thing. I think of that “Accessory” piece you recently had at Fleisher/Ollman, and what I think was a really interesting component of the piece was that it was so much fun to take pictures of. I don’t know if you thought about that while you were making it?

Alex: I did kind of.

We can talk about that piece because it’s so recent, so fresh in my mind. Originally, I was thinking of calling it “Protect me from what I want” or something like that, and I was thinking about how it’s odd to make an object to put it inside a vi-trine. You automatically put a value on it by telling people they can’t touch it and I was thinking about malls and jewelry display cases. To put mirrors all around it so people can see themselves coveting something they can’t have. . .

It makes a twisted sort of circle. It was fascinating to see all these people taking pictures of this very photogenic snake as you just said.

Annette: Well the pictures turned out great. Especially when you used the flash.

End. Listen to it all at: oneculture.mypodcast.com