An image of a set of conditions (as in “medical imaging”) is an overview of these conditions which summarizes them. In this way, generally, images are the concise products of analysis; they simplify to explain and provide summary.

Mark Lombardi: “World Finance Corporation and Associates, ca. 1970-84: Miami, Ajman, and Bogota-Caracas (Brigada 2506: Cuban Anti-Castro Bay of Pigs Veteran) (7th Version)” 1999. Colored pencil and graphite on paper. From the website of Pierogi Gallery

This simplicity is due in part to the substance of an image: an image is the singular, unified impression produced by a set of elements working together. This “working together” can be seen in the interrelationship of brushstrokes in a painting and between the individual words of poetry.

This is why it makes sense that images come to be called “works” of art, but when someone steps back from a work of art to say, “It just works,” they are expressing not only the labor occurring in this work, but also the ease.

David Shrigley: “Cat,” 2007, Taxidermy, wood, acrylic paint. Image courtesy of the artist's website.

The experience of taking in an image is always simple and direct, like “getting” a joke: when you understand, the understanding appears as a kind of completion all at once and you begin to laugh (if it is a good joke). In the same way, if an image doesn’t “click,” it doesn’t work as an image. It stays as just a picture or just a collection of plain objects without any relation to each other.

The image of a work of art is actually made of many smaller ones (think of the many frames in a film or the many vantages around a sculpture or adjustments to the lighting on a painting and etc.). Unsuccessful work is merely a collection of images which together do not create a cohesive larger one.

Stuart Sherman, Still from The Twelfth Spectacle (Language). Performance recorded on video in 1980. Image courtesy of Galerie Emanuel Layr

These larger images may not make themselves immediately apparent, however, and the best usually hold their viewers at a distance. Often they do this by surrounding themselves with smaller images that seduce a viewer into sticking around long enough for that tantric “ah-ha” moment to occur in its own time. For example: if something looks enough like a classically “good” piece of art, someone might look at it long enough to suddenly notice something else about it. The moment can linger or fade or expand or echo from that point but, whatever the case, the “ah-ha” explodes into being within an instant.

The act of suddenly simplifying the parts of an image is necessary because what an image’s elements do together on their way to becoming one is naturally cumbersome, incommensurable and difficult. In other words, the working together of images’ materials is not clear to begin with: work, like life in general, is a discontinuous, messy process that is inherently not simple. Though it may seem obvious to say so, work is not naturally easy; for the purposes of an image, however, one’s work must become easy (for the viewers, at least).

In art as in writing, style is a kind of varnish that conceals this discontinuity: written words don’t form sentences together without style between them, and the use of style toward this kind of simplicity decides a sentence’s effectiveness. The images then evinced by a sentence are more or less evocative—more or less vivid—as an effect of style.

Hedwig Houben: “About the Good and the Bad Sculpture” video still, 2009. Image courtesy of the artist's website.

The same is true of the forms employed in the service of every other art. Style smoothes over the work of bringing elements together into a singular, continuous whole or, in other words, it conceals the work in an image and brings it ease. Even though it necessarily strips away meaning in the simplicity it provides (which is something that happens in all summaries), style is what makes images work at all. In the end, art is about finding a form to accommodate messiness, fitting it to stylization.

Rob Pruitt: The Andy Monument, 2011, image courtesy of Public Art Fund's website, photo by James Ewing

At the same time, the idea of being an artist is itself an image, and it too is subject to stylization: this is the purpose of things like artist’s statements and CVs. The most effective artist statements give the impression that one’s work is consistent and coherent, and the most effective CVs convey the singularized impression that one’s experiences with and relationship to art are continuous and direct (like a story that can be concisely told in a straight line from beginning to end).

In presenting either or both in various forms, most artists’ websites make the same claims about life and artwork, additionally presenting documentary images of works which (hopefully) back up the simple claims a statement or CV make. Better yet, like the smaller seductive images surrounding those grander images which need time to make their slower impact, these documentary images can teasingly refuse to expand on or verify the claims of a CV or of an artist’s statement. In fact, some of the most successful artists live without a web presence at all: the less direct information about an artist’s work that is widely available—and the less direct what information that is widely available is—the better.

Adrian Piper: “Catalysis III,” 1970, document of a performance. Image courtesy of Brooklyn Museum website.

In creating the image of an artist’s life in the arts, the choice to present or conceal information is a stylistic technique. When successful, it makes a working process that is necessarily disjointed appear seamless, eliding this work’s relationship with the discontinuous messiness of one’s life. CVs, statements and websites help make the image of just being an artist “work.”

The expression “The pros make it look easy,” however, simplifies all of these ideas about work. Just like an image that works, this expression turns paragraphs and paragraphs into a few concise words, even if much of the meaning is lost in translation.

The inspiration for this piece came when author Joshua Weibley was paid by MoMA to perform two artists’ work. During the course of one of these performances–when he was employed to execute Roman Ondák’s piece “Measuring the Universe” during the summer of 2009–he collected about 30 tourist photos of himself in action from online image-sharing websites. The images in the post come from the collection of tourist photos.

Take art as a series of images and take an image as the interrelationship of elements working together to form a singular impression: this definition accounts for images in painting that coalesce from brushstrokes, images in literature that coalesce from words and any other images produced by whatever means in the name of art.

Tourist photo of Weibley, left, working at MoMA for artist Roman Ondák's Measuring the World.

This “working together” of elements on their way to constituting an image betrays the nature of images in art: they perform labor to produce meaning. (This is part of the phrase “it just works” that one might say when stepping back from a work of art.)
Now, meaning aside, value is applied to work speculatively. $15.00, for example, may be assumed to be the value of what a factory worker produces in the period of an hour, but that much value may not in fact be produced by the worker being paid it. The only constant material attached to $15.00/hr that can be verified is the presence of the worker. When there is no worker, there is no pay.

Roman Ondák's Measuring the World, at MoMA, 2009

Because the presence of its workers (or performers) is the basis of performance, what is produced in performance work is inseparable from the process of producing it. This is to say that performance is inseparable from its value: it is immediately value-able, which is then to say that its evaluation is a part of the performance as well.
Appreciation—a name for evaluation which happens to imply monetary value—is, in fact, a parallel performance and like performance art, it is a kind of labor which can be held up for evaluation. “I value your opinion” is one (probably less than trustworthy) example of this kind of valuing being, in turn, valued.

detail, Weibley's hand at work for Roman Ondák's Measuring the World at MoMA, 2009

All evaluations are not held equivalent though. Different opinions carry different import or value as an effect of the person whose experiences they emerge from. Connoisseurs, for instance, are so because they are known to have a critical facility (sometimes called “critical capital”) built up in experience: they know what they are looking for in something because they have a history of association and familiarity with it. Likewise, seasoned performers’ actions are preemptively treated as precious and their experience in practice allows them to know (so to speak) how to act.

Roman Ondák's Measuring the World, at MoMA, 2009

It has, however, already been said that value is speculative: in evaluating it, one can have expectations of a thing based on past experience (which does heavily inform one’s perception), but one cannot know without experiencing it. This is how, similarly to performance, all that can be verified of evaluation as a process is the presence of an individual or body performing it.

Work in translation, Roman Ondák's Measuring the World, at MoMA, 2009

Unlike other art forms submitted to the process of evaluation, performance disappears as quickly as it appears and what happens in that appearance can only be generally anticipated by a performer, much less so the audience. The work might not go according to plan, but that will simply become part of what receives value then and there.

Weibley takes a break from working in Roman Ondák's Measuring the World, at MoMA, 2009

No-one knows with any certainty whether a performance will be good, bad or if it will be met with indifference. All that is certain is the image of performance work these concerns provide. Two parties (performing bodies of the piece and those in the audience) will be present together in the occurrence of two valuable working processes unfolding simultaneously in a beautiful, momentary symmetry.

The art scene in Philadelphia is marked by an expanding community of artists, artists’ collectives and artist-run organizations, galleries, publications and events. Word gets out, but proper documentation is important for an accurate picture and for the future. In a publication recording its 21-year history, Vox Populi Gallery has provided a record of its own history as well as that of the other artists’ organizations established in Philadelphia since the founding of Painted Bride in 1969.

Visitor at Vox Populi Gallery, photo courtesy Jonathan Monaghan

Vox Populi; We’re working on it is fully-illustrated in color, with two pages devoted to each of the current members, double-page spreads of exhibitions of Vox alumni and others in curated and juried selections, a review of video lounge presentations and a variety of historical photographs.  Andrew Suggs, Vox director, has done an enormous job in gathering a wealth of information, essays, and illustrations from a large number of contributors.

Amy Adams (former Vox director) has written a very clear history of the organization which makes an excellent case study in artist-run organizations. She describes Vox’s growing pains and successes as members adjusted to a changing mission (moving from open membership to peer-review), financial needs, group decision-making, urban gentrification, incorporation and changes in the art world in Philadelphia and beyond.

Opening at Vox Populi, photo courtesy Jonathan Monaghan

Art historian and critic, Paul Galvez, discusses a history of 20th century artists’ collectives, from OBMOKhU in the early Soviet Union to Warhol’s Factory with its model of art as business. He also discusses Philadelphia’s self image and its uneasy relationship with New York and New York publications of record, with their national audience (hence the real concern with what is written in the New York Times, despite the stature of the stringer who likely wrote any particular article).

An essay by Richard Torchia, artist and gallery director, covers a history of artist-run spaces in Philadelphia followed by a time-line with a paragraph-long description of each organization, extant and defunct. Torchia includes a series of serious and provocative questions including Do artist-run spaces, by definition, need to be non-profit?, Given the pre-condition that selling art is not a viable goal in a city without a sufficient collecting population, what are the criteria for measuring success in a community with so few platforms for criticism and discourse? and Are we approaching a point at which there are more individuals on stage than in the audience? Torchia’s contribution is generous to his readers and to anyone who wants to catch up on an otherwise unavailable history of the past 50 years of grass-roots art activities in Philadelphia.

By choosing to present its own history as thoroughly embedded in a longer and broader story, Vox Populi represents the artist-run organization at its best: inclusive, community-oriented, mentoring the next generation and a crucial resource for the larger community that wants to follow the area’s art from its points of origin.  Thanks to all involved!

Anri Sala ‘Dammi i Colori’ (2003). View of Tirana as pictured on the cover of “Communities of Sense”

Communities of Sense; Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, Beth Hinderlitter et al, eds. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0822345138

This volume of a dozen essays and one interview grew out of a conference of the same name held in 2003 at Columbia University. It takes up the ideas of political philosopher Jacques Rancière as a means of theorizing the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the global world. For those writing about art who have followed a largely-Francophone sequence of theorists (Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Bourriaud…), Rancière appears to be the current favorite.

Several contributors, including Rancière himself, discuss the relationship of aesthetics and politics from the Enlightenment to the present. Rancière suggests that art offers a space for disagreement and the expression of minority opinion within a non-hierarchical and collectivist politics.  Alexander Potts, whose writing has a clarity that is exceptional in this compilation, looks at the Romantic artists’ rejection of the reigning aesthetic as a background for recent anti-aesthetic impulses. He uses the work of Hegel to examine Delacroix and Turner’s rejection of the totalizing aesthetics of Classicism; Potts uses specific works as examples of paintings that are de-centered, violate unity of time, depend upon the accompaniment of texts and involve ironic humor.

Louise Lawler ‘ Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut’ (1984)

A number of contributions look at specific examples of art as political dissent on the one hand, and artists as participants in community-formation directed at social change on the other.  T. J. Demos writes about Dada events as political antagonism via transgressive acts which inherently re-configure the relationship between art and politics. Toni Ross attempts to understand the aspect of Louise Lawler’s photographs that exceeds their function as institutional critique. Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga examine Marjetica Potrc’s work with a community group in an outlying area of Caracas as an example of an artist’s involvement in what they term an experimental community; her participation addressed problems in the world at large and at the same time generated work that circulates within the traditional spaces of the art world.

These essays will be useful for readers who want to follow current theoretical approaches to art, but I must admit to a fair degree of skepticism about the whole project. The authors are largely senior faculty at universities, surely as hierarchical as any current institutions; they write about a politics of the left, which is inherently populist and anti-hierarchical, in a dense and exclusionary language. I am also prejudiced in being an adjunct faculty member, the proletariat of higher education; yet I don’t see such senior faculty at the barricades on behalf of just compensation or communally-shared  resources and decision-making within higher education, a sphere where they enjoy real power.

Execution is essential to understanding. The way in which an idea is conveyed, a picture made, or an installation constructed greatly influences the viewer’s interpretation of the piece. This is true regardless of artistic intents or aesthetic penchants. Even with supplemental information, such as wall text or artist’s statements, poorly executed work will be neither convincing nor appealing.

The limits of our curiosity and imagination require craft to make up that deficit.[1] If viewers are not stimulated by what they see, they will struggle to form a relationship with the work. Viewers must also be able to translate sensory stimulation into some sort of meaning, be it independent of or in harmony with the artist’s motivation for creating the work. If this translation does not happen the viewer-object relationship becomes only a passing fling.

Of course, successful execution is highly subjective. Artists spend entire careers refining their craft. They repeat subjects and replicate styles endlessly toward perfection. Aesthetic and cultural trends change over time, making that search for ideal execution all the more difficult. These unfavorable odds aside, Philadelphia currently boasts several exhibitions that rather successfully assert the merits of good execution and its place in contemporary art. Among them are Tristin Lowe’s Mocha Dick recently at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the work of Myra Mimlitsch-Gray at Wexler Gallery, and Lee Stoetzel’s Big Bike at the Galleries at Moore.

Mocha Dick is a white sperm whale 52 feet in length. That Tristin Lowe, working with the FWM studio, built the whale with industrial felt, thread, zippers, and an internal vinyl support system changes little. Mocha Dick is still a whale. The fibrous felt really appears to be blubbery skin. Cleanly stitched lines meander the body like scars and wrinkles. Appliqued barnacles pock the surface, as do the inset holes and protruding bumps that make for convincing wounds and healing tissue. Overall, each curve and contour, volume and mass, is true to nature. Even the zippers, functional necessities for joining separate pieces of felt around the inflated core, create a texture that, if not anatomically accurate, at least follows the animal’s structure with graceful subtlety.

Tristin Lowe, Mocha Dick, industrial felt over inflated form

Lowe’s attention to detail makes viewing Mocha Dick feel like an encounter with a whale. To marvel at the artist’s skillful work is to contemplate the bodily equivalent each stitch represents. It is an experience more authentic than seeing Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which consists of an actual dead tiger shark in formaldehyde. (As Hirst’s shark continues to decompose, that comparison will only become truer.) No, the felt whale is not real, but Lowe allows viewers to suspend disbelief and imagine that they are confronting the leviathan that tormented sailors in the South Seas and later inspired Meville to write Moby-Dick. The emotions or thoughts this interaction might generate – be they panic, intrigue, compassion, or loss – are precisely what Lowe seeks to elicit.[2]

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray’s altered kitchenwares at Wexler Gallery combine recognizable objects with improbable shapes. Bowl and Saucer is made of “given silver by Sharon Church” set into a silver base. Suspended at irregular angles, the bowl and saucer seem truly wedded to the slick pool below. Other objects, all cast in iron, resemble hearty cookware deformed beyond belief: twelve elongated Brat Pans hang neatly in a row on a wall; Freestanding Skillet sits upright on its one flattened, stretched edge; Four-Handled Skillet merges (or splits) two two-handled skillets, themselves total oddities.

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray's Bowl and Saucer, courtesy of Wexler Gallery

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray's Brat Pans, courtesy of Wexler Gallery

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray's Four Handled Skillet, courtesy of Wexler Gallery

These conundrums of silver and iron straddle a boundary between real and absurd that is mitigated by expert treatment of material and proportion. Bowl and Saucer is in fact an actual bowl and saucer made for Mimlitsch-Gray by another artist, but the silver dishes have been arranged to produce curious effects.[3] The scene is in one sense magical, the instantaneous transformation of molten silver into finished goods, and back again. Yet it also illustrates the mundane task of washing dishes. Meanwhile, Mimlitsch-Gray’s iron objects, which are entirely custom cast, seem somehow utilitarian despite their lack of function. The Brat Pans almost beg viewers to fry up foot-long sausages, or find three friends to help make a big omelet in Four-Handled Skillet.

Big Bike, by Lee Stoetzel, is a fixed-gear bicycle unlike any other. As the name indicates, it is massive, roughly twice normal size. From stem to crank and wheel to wheel, Big Bike is also built entirely of wood. The inclusion of so many small details – from the individual chain links to the rear tire’s air valve – might propel viewers to climb on and ride away. If only they were so tall. Stoetzel’s choice of wood, though, is of equal note. Fractured mesquite, a natural degraded wood, has a grain marked by irregular holes and grooves. In Big Bike, such material inconsistencies translate as the grime and wear expected of a city bike. They also streak across the object like lines simulating motion.

Lee Stoetzel, Big Bike, fractured mesquite, up until July 4 in the Window on Race

Because Stoetzel has modeled his giant wooden bike so perfectly after its smaller, mostly metal relative, the difference in material and size are all the more evident. Were the wheels not true nor the frame correctly proportioned, this would not be so. But since such inaccuracies do not cloud the viewer’s engagement, they may instead contemplate how Stoetzel’s use of wood and enlarged scale influence the object’s reading. Is Big Bike just fantasy, a once functional but now deteriorating relic of an extinct superhuman race? Or is there a socially relevant parallel between the natural materials and cycling’s environmental benefits? Perhaps a more physical reading is instead expected: the bike, though ostensibly fragile, is sturdy, a powerhouse both on the streets and in our imaginations.

Taken as three separate examples, the work of Tristin Lowe, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, and Lee Stoetzel together exemplify how careful execution can be the foundation for expressing abstract and transcendent ideas. They also point to the use of illusion as a key device for instigating a deeper art experience. More accurately, they maintain altered illusions, wherein normalcy is upset in limited ways. Flesh becomes fabric with Lowe, Mimlitsch-Gray disfigures familiar cookware, and Stoetzel replaces one part metal and rubber with two parts wood, but other variables remain constant. The unchanged and recognizable characteristics end up being the viewer’s introduction to the work.

This modified illusionism, and the degree of precision requires, also highlights each artist’s use of materials – fabric, metal, and wood – traditionally assumed under the heading of craft. While such usage in contemporary art is nothing new, craft remains a tricky word. It refers to a set of practiced skills, a process by which something is made, or even the visual qualities of a finished product. It also identifies certain categories of objects and specific historical movements. Most provocatively, and somewhat perplexingly, craft is regularly used as a foil to art, implying that since craft is very focused on materiality, then art asserts meaning beyond itself.[4]

This belief is prevalent, however generalized it may be. Art is commonly understood in terms of broader concepts, as most exhibition labels, artist statements, and art history books will attest. Craft, on the other hand, seems contently introverted, focusing on physical characteristics to the point of fetishization. This dichotomy is flawed, though. Not only does it allow art to be sloppy and permit craft to be dull, but it encourages polarized camps of allegiance. Worse, it ignores artists like Lowe, Mimlitsch-Gray, and Stoetzel who, in refusing such definitions, create work that is both intellectual provocative and visually striking.

John Vick is a curatorial fellow in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He has a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Notes:

[1] Our busy and distracted lives and interactions are also limited factors – see the May 22 posting “One Quiet & One Loud.”

[2] More of Lowe’s finely made, full-scale felt sculptures were on view at the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery. The works there relating to Mocha Dick prompted similar feeling of unlikely confrontation. Lowe’s quotidian objects, such as a chair and whiskey bottle, also on view, emphasized the beauty of his handiwork and suggested a softer, even tired, version of reality. Also see Libby’s review of the FWM show.

[3] Such usage is reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing or Martin Kippenberger’s Modell Interconti, a 1987 table made from a Gerhard Richter painting.

[4] Note for further reading: The recent book Thinking Though Craft, by Glenn Adamson, does a lot to address the complex interplay between art and craft. It is excellent in both content and organization. Rather than try to precisely situate one term against the other, Adamson considers general perceptions of craft and gives examples of where such principles intersect with modern and contemporary art. A more thorough review and summary of the book can be found in the September 2008 issue of Art in America.

Successful artworks seem to fall under one of two humors – they can call attention to themselves overtly or be so plainly understated as to provoke curiosity. This has been true of modern art for quite a while. Consider the simultaneous success of the frenetic work of Jackson Pollock and the contemplative work of Mark Rothko. At present, when images, video, and sound are more readily available then ever before, art’s ability to demand attention or stand quietly waiting to be engaged seems all the more important.

This is especially true given the way in which much contemporary art is seen. Most people visit galleries during crowded openings or events. In Philadelphia, the Vox Populi and Copy galleries are perhaps most notable in this regard. First Fridays there are massive parties. (And they have only grown with the arrival of new upstairs neighbors Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Progressive Sharing.) As people work their way through the galleries, looking at and/or listening to what is on display, they are also searching for the people they know. Socializing blurs the art experience.

This is not a repudiation. Art’s social function is one of its most valuable features. It is, no doubt, commendable that any gallery or group of galleries can promote and sustain such events. But in accepting that, another question lingers. How does that social function influence the making and viewing of art? Two recent installations, one at Vox and the other at Copy, addressed this interaction. Though quite different, both seemed to acknowledge the opening night atmosphere, even using it to their benefit.

Linda Yun’s It Is What It Is was installed at Vox Populi during the month of February 2009. The piece included three elements: a false wall with a rectangular cutout, a strip of colorful metallic streamers strung in an arc across the cutout, and an oscillating fan mounted to a floor stand. The room was separated from the rest of Vox by a black curtain and was dark except for back-lighting behind the cutout. The fan spun, blowing air around the room. The streamers gently fluttered and flickered in the dim glow. Visitors could circulate through the room to gain different points of view or inspect the apparatus.

Despite her title’s claim and the simple materials she used, Yun’s installation did not make immediate sense. The cutout was lit to create an optical illusion (in the manner of James Turrell) whereby it appeared to be both a hollow recess and a painted surface. With the lights low and the fan on the room’s far side, the movement of the streamers seemed inexplicable. But these mysteries were eventually revealed. Walking through the gallery, the cutout became more legible as an empty space. A ring of holiday lights could be seen illuminating it from behind. Even the lazy, slightly delayed rhythm of the fluttering streamers seemed less irregular with time. Deception gave way to understanding. The installation was what it was, down to the fan’s exposed cord.

FUCK “THIS” PLACE, by Jamie Dillon, debuted at Copy Gallery on May 1. It too had three main components: a tennis ball machine, tennis balls, and a gong spray painted with the installation’s title. (For technical reasons, the tennis ball machine has since been removed.) The tennis ball machine was positioned in one corner, the gong suspended in another. Triggered by a remote control in the artist’s possession, the machine periodically shot tennis balls across the gallery. Each ball hit the gong, causing a crashing reverberation, and then bounced around until coming to a rest. Chicken wire barring entrance to the space kept balls from rolling out.

With a thundering bang echoing from the gallery every few minutes, Dillon’s installation could not be missed. Visitors were aware of it being there well before seeing it. If this built anticipation, a look in the space was instantly demystifying. The system was plainly straightforward. This shot those into that – CLANG! Watching from behind the fence as the tennis ball machine rumbled in its pre-launch routine, the viewer felt oddly sympathetic. All that preparation and expended energy for such a brief climax. The gong was right. Fuck this place.

Apart from their use of utterly banal materials, the installations by Yun and Dillon could not have looked less alike. Had they been shown side by side, their differences would have been all the more apparent. The first was hidden from plain sight by a curtain while the second used sound to announce its presence from far away. Darkness or false walls obscured the workings of one, but not of the other. Viewers could walk around the space of Yun’s installation. Dillon’s was fenced off, allowing only one distanced point of view. In terms of time (and sound), the fan blew the streamers with a consistent, predetermined rhythm. The tennis balls were shot at the gong irregularly at the artist’s whim. Even the two titles – one a deadpan disclaimer, the other a vulgar exclamation – were opposites.

Where the two installations did coincide was in their apparent self-consciousness. They were both aware of their own contrived presence and the audiences they addressed. For them, the gallery environment was an opportunity for self-enhancement. It Is What It Is did so with curious optical devices that arrested perception and stimulated inquiry. The viewer had to slow down, ensuring a more engaging interaction with the piece. FUCK “THIS” PLACE exploited the viewer’s imagination and expectations to critique the potential of art. Existing desires and practices were intensified, reinforcing the work’s premise.

The respective interactions between these two pieces and their audiences are significant because they occur via confrontation with the social nature of art. Yun defied the notion that viewers can glance their way through a gallery. Challenging people to explore the tricks of her installation, she also offered an opportunity for relevant discussion. Dillon, on the other hand, mocked the tendency for art to be ignored in favor of socializing. His installation was a center of attention that promised to disappoint over and over again, allowing viewers to keep moving on. Clever, critical, and captivating, both works stood out against the crowds.