The market rate for political expression

Naughton, Nicholas "One day in the rose garden", collage, 2010.

I met an artist named Rollin Bemish yesterday. This post isn't about him, but he did lay the tracks for what I'm thinking about now, and with thoughts plunging ahead, I thought I would jot down some ideas and links for y'all to check out. He is in Kansas City for his show at La Esquina called "a glimpse within". It's a group show, with some interesting work I have to say. It's a group show curated by Caleb Taylor that includes painting, collage, illustration, video, and the sculpture is quite nice. Undulating waves of reeds swaying from side to side over and over. Just the mechanical structure is something to see.

Anyway, Rollin approached my work with a different style than I've had in recent studio visits. It's nice to have a more academic studio visit from time to time. I felt a bit self conscious about calling my work political, especially socialist (the bomb that he dropped on me), but I was happy that he reminded me of the current call for artists for the 2011 Berlin Biennale. As I've been reading, the curator Artur Zmijewski is known for his theory of politics and art, something I love to mull over, especially his idea about 'duty and rebellion'. I've had quite a few conversations with people this week about selling art, about taking a commercial approach in art practice, and the various pros or cons relating to that choice. I'm also constantly considering my socially motivated art objects in the context of a market. Of course, the predominant direction of a lot of contemporary artists is towards the new media, towards experienced based art, or towards collectiveness and sustainability. All of these modes of working subvert the capitalist art model, or simply do not adhere to a structure that allows for the work to be easily confined within the commodity distinction. Challenging the system for the sake of doing so isn't that interesting, but work that's honest that does that can be astoundingly good, and much of it is completely ephemeral. It's not that artists are always searching to defy commercialism, we contribute to the larger conversation and over time this evolves beyond our current systemic boundaries, though it has been proven over time that collectors and institutions will find a way to monetize just about any object or experience. A great example is the collection of performance art, or the acquisition of the '@' symbol at MOMA. Pretty soon the smell of a fart will be bought and sold, or a twitter account will be collected and stored for posterity. Piero Manzoni already sold a can of his shit, so anything is possible.

The curator Zmijewski says this of Duty and Rebellion...

...Grzegorz Kowalski and Maryla Sitkowska mounted [an exhibition title] on the centenary of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw: Duty and Rebellion. Even though the exhibition concerned the academy as an institution, its title was indicative of a split present within art. A split that allows art to „work for” the state and the national economy, to serve society as a shaper of environments, producer of visual information systems, designer of interiors and industrial goods, in short – to do its duty. On the other hand, art is kept from lapsing into dependence on the authorities by its rebelliousness, because it insistently challenges the taboo, nurtures dreams, proliferates freedom, and produces social knowledge, (art can be said to be an open university of knowledge). Art constantly offers and denies its services to the powers that be. In doing its duty it usually does not cross a certain line marked out by shame.

It really falls in line with many of my conversations; the perceived back and forth seesawing of our activities as artists. On one hand, I have to eat and if I have an inkling of what might sell, or my work is received well in a certain gallery or market-driven space, than I should probably pursue it to continue making and doing what I love. On the other hand, I want to make challenging expressions that are not bound to the restrictions of the white cube. Ideas that ride on the fringe of art and its overlaps with other fields like science, music, and philosophy. Maybe collaboration or collective expression is a goal of this direction, but the main issue is that making work about experience alone is something that isn't going to pay my bills or allow for me to continue making things. I have to then spend more time hustling at a job to support this need to create outside of a commercial art system. With less energy, output is down, thus the quantities of ideas will be less explored, or the monumental scales that I crave to achieve will not be brought to fruition.

I've realized that over time, it's not pertinent to continue on in this direction unless one has a job that can truly support the luxury of non-commercial creation. I see it as a task of making what one wants to make, sellable or not, and being organized in finding the way to doing it sustainably. Art is a business after all.

The indeterminate value of propaganda and art

I've come to realize a few things lately. It's true that a French press makes one of the better cups of coffee that I've had in a while. While i do not yet have a verdict of Parisi coffee vs. KC Roasters, i think that either bean made as a home brew will prove the result of that.
Also, fresh/frozen green chile will always be better than canned. No questions there, even when it's 9 months old!
As for art, I've realized that art imagery relating to war is always propaganda. I err on the side of powerful depictions, soldiers, bodies, grizzly realities, though not too grizzly. Other artists have gone that same route, Botero with Abu Ghraib, Goya and the Franco Prussian War, or Picasso with his masterpiece Guernica. The Chapman Brothers, Kathe Kollwitz, and Otto Dix as well. But then I thought about those images, mothers searching through bodies, torture, humiliation, and horrors manifest in the form of action figurines, and it seemed to me that we are all as guilty of spinning information as the governments who spin the opposite side of a conflict.
Picture a military TV commercial or recruitment brochure, full of excitement, optimism, or positivity, and consider the nature of that propaganda and how staged it is and how it glosses over huge portions of the reality of war. Sure you can be a military doctor like the one in a photograph, but you'll be in a tent or room with screaming bloody colleagues, doing what you can to save their lives, or maybe just their limbs. My imagined visual of this is just that, imagined. My depiction of horror is just that, a depiction of horror. I often wonder if my depiction of a wounded soldier is any better than that of an actor in a military brochure, and on a virtual level I think I've come to see them as equal. Neither tells a complete idea and neither could possibly do justice to he reality that few of us will ever understand since we may never see war up close.
Check out Arundhati Roy and an article she wrote in the early days about the war on terror. I heard it yesterday in my car. I sat in my car for 20 minutes listening to it, unable to open the door to go into my apartment. I cried, I thought, and I felt helpless. It angered me, but then I thought more people should hear it. I can't name what station it was on, but I'm sure it's not hard to find.
And as for the coffee, I suppose my taste buds are different than yours, but I prefer the warmer softer Roasters. As with an image it is in the eye of the beholder.
N

Second thoughts on Green Chorizo: Part II

Over time I've eaten less meat, and this hasn't been out of a concerted effort, but more of an organic development. I grew up in Iowa after all, and meat was anything but scarce. The fact that I was two generations away from a lineage of butchers made the staple of animal protein even more prevalent. Knives were sharpened by hand near the butcher block which is a solid cross section of an old growth tree almost four feet across. Out on my own, my cooking often revolved around meat, usually chicken, which I got very good at, especially preparing on the grill. Subtle was the change, though, that meat began to appear less. My pasta sauces began to lack any sausage or chicken, letting vegetables take the center stage in a recipe. Pasta itself has dwindled to almost no presence in my diet. Again, this was not due to any effort to omit it, pasta just got replaced first by white rice and later by brown rice and quinoa.

So with all of those realizations in mind, I approached this subject of making my own chorizo. I love the idea of green chorizo, and it's a flavor combination that I haven't had, at least not in that form. My devotion to simplicity in my kitchen set up has kept me from owning a meat grinder as I am staunchly against owning specialized items like that. My habits hardly warrant something that only has one function. Storage is an issue, but also I can be realistic that I really only need a certain number of staple utensils or tools to prepare everything I will ever eat, though I wouldn't mine having a tortilla press, so it's not a rock hard rule. So I'm limited to store bought ground pork, which I found rather gross, super fatty, and really not tasty in any way. After trying to eat some of this pork in various dishes, I just couldn't bring myself to eat it, so I've been left with this recipe for green chorizo that may be left unprepared. What I turned to was one of my staple grains, quinoa, and I discovered a salad that was rather tasty, and it's resemblance to dip only made it more popular with other Mexican styled dishes.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup Tomatillo salsa (see previous post)
• 1 batch quinoa prepared (1 cup dry cooked in 2 cups water)
• 1/3 cucumber
• 2 fresh tomatoes
• 2 green onions chopped
• 1/4 chopped red onion
• 1 avocado chopped
• 1/3 cup crumbled queso fresco
• Salt and pepper

*You could also add fresh cooked corn off the cob, beans, edamame, other fresh herbs, or even grilled veggies, chicken, or tofu.

This is simple to prepare, as it's basically chopped up veggies mixed into cooked quinoa. To speed it up, when the grain was done I spread it out on a baking sheet and put it in the freezer while I prepared other ingredients. It cooled in about 15 minutes with a stir every 5 minutes or so. The cheese I added last so it didn't get too lost in the mixing. The dressing was essentially a salsa, so the whole dish had a tangy full-of-cilantro flavor. Very nice with a bean salad, warm tortillas, or grilled vegetables. We dined on this at a back alley barbecue in downtown Kansas City, highrise towers and bad graffiti all around us. I might be living in a very concrete heavy place, but it was nice to see that we weren't deprived of summer flavors and good times.

One last tip in case you have plans to make this and keep it. The veggies, especially cucumber, can be a bit fragile in the presence of lime juice or vinegar over time, so it might be better to use squash or other sturdier options as you might find mushy cucumber just a day away from when you prepared this. You could always keep the ingredients separate and make it to order, or just encourage your friends to chow down at a barbecue so you don't have leftovers. It works for a night, but plans can change and there's no reason it can't be enjoyed for days.

Second thoughts on Green Chorizo

I keep thinking about Rick Bayless, his really good cooking show, and how it reminds me of my work. I don't know a lot about Rick, but his depiction of Mexican culture on his cooking show raises the food and the people to a new level of respect. It falls in line with foodie fresh culture today, "eat local" and all that. From my experience across the border, it seems more a norm to eat what you have on hand, to eat fresh foods, and to eat local. It's crazy that we need a movement in the U.S. to bring this type of food culture about when in so many parts of the globe it's a regular part of life. Think about the salsa bar at a taco joint, and you'll see a perfect sign of this style of eating. Where we might have thought of it as a condiment bar, I think it is a sign of something more than that.

I'm not going to delve into a speech about the China Study, or about vegetarianism, I just love the salsa bar. When I have a taco in front of me and a choice of delicious toppings, a myriad of daily made salsas, green and red, and veggies I might miss on a daily basis like chopped radishes, or marinated parboiled jalapenos, I feel grounded. So this is what brought me to my recipe for today. A really REALLY simple and super good salsa using tomatillos that makes up the base for the Bayless Green Chorizo. I think it does fine on it's own, and it kills anything that comes in a jar, many brands of which I think ruin the profile of tomatillos for me and people everywhere by misrepresenting this tangy little green tomato.

Ingredients:

• 4 green tomatillos
• 4 seeded roasted green chiles
• 1 jalapeno, seeded
• 1 clove garlic
• 3 green onions
• 1 bunch cilantro
• 1 juice of lime
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• salt
• 1 tsp mexican oregano

It's simple really. Just throw all these things in your food processor. Fresh, nothing cooked, and blend well. The cilantro doesn't need to be pruned especially well, just grab the leafy top of the bunch, twist it off, and throw it in. I chopped stuff up a bit, but it's probably not necessary.

This stuff is so tangy and good, I could eat it every day. And my next recipe is something I whipped up since I bought ground pork and it kind of grossed me out. I made a salad using this as a dressing, and it really rocked my world. So I'll get to that next, but in the meantime, enjoy this one with some chips or scorched tortillas.

I've been researching Green Chile Chorizo, a recipe originating in Toluca, Mexico so I have read. I want to pair a red, green and white chorizo for a project/tasting coming up. The white recipe may be elusive, since there aren't many white meats, but we'll see. As I've been postponing more and more this cooking venture I've thought a lot about what my last post detailed. I feel it's all based in my inner dialog as an artist, but this attitude also reigns prominently in the art world at large as well.

This argument addresses IMHO art with intention versus making "consensus-friendly decoration", as the Guardian blogger Jonathan Jones puts it. I think that might be the case. I am reminded of what some friends said once, that..."the audience for artists is other artists." In my last post I mentioned Damien Hirst, the quintessential famous wealthy successful artist. I noticed today that he held an actual show of paintings done with his own hand and critics tore him apart. It was partly that he showed his work next to works by master painters, and partly that the guy just doesn't have the talent to make technically skilled art. He even said of his own color spin paintings that they were "basically meaningless." Maybe collectors don't care, but then it's obvious that an investment in art is not in meaningful expression, but in a commodity no different from a credit default swap. It turns out that skill does matter in some cases.

This brings me to other aspects of art as commodity like Jeff Koon's recently unveiled art car.

This is a real car, I think. I actually don't know, but I saw a picture of him sitting on the real thing. Yes he's rich, and yes his work is vapid. These works, Koons' and Hirst's, are signs of how strongly object and commodity are still held together, and how empty they are despite the dollar value. I hear not that MOMA is now collecting performance much like you collect a painting. They collect the instructions on what it is and then re-stage the performance when they like. How strange is that? Something that is temporal by nature is forced to become a commodity. Then they can sell it, even though it's essentially non-existent other than when it took place. It's like the shower you took today becoming art and then someone selling the idea that you took a shower to someone else. Then they pay a young sexy New Yorker to take a shower in the same circumstances and call it equal to the shower you took. Maybe there's some inherent genetic predisposition by humans to need to associate monetary value to each and every thing, but I don't know that I get this compulsion.

Now our art world is blogging/tweeting heavily about a new TV show called Work of Art, which is basically a competition by artists to one-up each other and get a big bag of money for their efforts, and maybe for being a good artist. It's so strange that this is what they claim will bring appreciation of art to the masses, making artists perform akin to fear factor or iron chef. Why not make artists cook against one another and then be forced to eat all the food before running an obstacle course? It makes about as much sense as the real show.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, nor am I sure where to go with art in general. It's not to avoid objects for the sake of it, but more to think about what an expression is at its core and why we need objects to convey that expression. Art objects are great, and you'll see that in my apartment that I surround myself by them. I just like to think about these conundrums, and the daily occurrences in the art world. When I read about ideas about reformulating art in society both within and without capitalism, like in the new e-flux journal 17, it really gets my gears going. This makes me wonder about all this stuff we make and what we do with it. What the value of this stuff is, and what the purpose of over-valued stuff is too. I need to get a few tomatillos and I'm going to make some Green Chorizo, inspired by Rick Bayless. That is something I can put a fork in, tell it's done, and then eat knowing that I enjoyed it because taste-buds lie way less than art does.

Resisting Dematerialisation with Chorizo and Arizona Ice Tea

Over the weekend I spoke with my brother about the direction that my art might partially be moving towards involving potentially performative or interactive aspects of cooking along with more typical art objects. As seen in Marina Abramovic's MOMA retrospective "The Artist is Present", performance is finally blowing up after years of occurring but never becoming mainstream (and I hate to be the one to exemplify this show along with EVERY other art blogger). Just look at the abundance of college art curricula that don't even address performance as a practice. Its specialization, tending more towards theater and dance, have left it in a limbo that many avoid grappling with, and the preponderance of bad performance art hasn't probably helped either.

Abramovic claims that performance art edges on theater, but that it is real rather than pretend. Here's a post-show interview that is kind of interesting. I'm all for it really, despite the fact that I have rarely if ever seen performance art in person. There's an excitement to it; towards it's bold and courageous display in front of audiences who may or may not even understand what is taking place. People probably have trouble with interpreting lots of art, visual, audible, or performance, but that's not the point. I'm eluding to this renewed push for relational art, where experience is the conveyance of meaning, not objectification in a white walled space. Either way is a perfectly fine way of expressing yourself, but there's a growing trend here that I feel compelled to address, and one that ties to many things going on around me.

Art and life is curiously redirecting culture towards limited edition commercial object making (much of traditional art making, ie. prints, paintings, sculptures, etc.) versus the visual and audio culture that we readily consume becoming more and more ubiquitous and available in infinite reproductions on the web. Curiously I see it tying into the financial meltdown, art pricing, and the new wave of young artists finding their way out of school into the marketplace. What I've seen in Kansas City is a young push to capitalize on commodity, to make a screen printing business in basements, or to create objects gallery ready and with that certain glossy presentation that says too clearly that they are completely comfortable with art objects as collector fodder. It seems that art and consumer culture are vying to become one, and it's apparent as well in Hirst's huge self-purposed auction or in Murakami's hand bags. Art is simply business, and ideas can sometimes be subverted in the name of the sellable.

I saw an article from The Telegraph today about an upstart book-on-vinyl production operation. It seemed like a gimmick at best, but note the printed fine art object combined with the irrelevant collector technology. How many times can one listen to an audiobook anyway? When it was done in the past, there weren't cassettes or libraries full of CD's that you can borrow once and return. This is what they claim is the purpose of this,

The Underwood discs, scheduled to appear twice a year, represents part of the growing resistance to the dematerialisation of art. By emphasising tactility, scarcity (each issue is limited to 1,000 copies) and physical beauty, it offers something that can’t be digitally replicated.

Is there truly a "resistance to the dematerialisation of art"? With all innovation there is resistance to some degree. What is the value of continuing to make art objects? Lately I was in a gallery opening and people seemed equally invested in the experience of drinking free beer as much as they were in the art-gazing. What about the value of said objects? When the economy is down, and people can't buy art, should producers of art alter their approach to fit the economic realities? This I haven't seen, and its obviously represented by the multi-thousands-of-dollars that a young person's paintings are marked at here in Kansas City. Artists were taught in recent years a pricing model that isn't relevant anymore in the wake of the financial collapse. People aren't buying art, so should we still be pursuing the showing practice of white walled high-priced art displays? I'm not saying everyone should be producing limited edition stereographs of urban eccentric naked young people (if you want to pursue that idea, you can have it!), but what are we in the art game for? There are angles to pursue to make money, and there are ideas to demonstrate through our actions as artists whatever our practice, and when we go one way in an effort to demonstrate the other, these confused efforts only result in art that doesn't say what it intends, and thus isn't as valuable as something made for more commercial reasons. Is this making any sense?

So I guess where I come to is a place where making food as art has potential to satisfy all parts of the issues that I have addressed. I can offer an experience through eating, something that to me is the most relevant and ubiquitous of all experiences besides death and sex. And if I like I can commodify this approach, but neither arm of this will interfere with the other, I hope.

As for the overpriced art being pumped out across the globe, I hope that part of the education system that guided these artists into the art world has prepared them for the reality of having to fight to survive in a system that pays less and less and supports less of the most valuable expressions being made today.

Sometimes you just need a grilled cheese

Yep. Does that count as carbo-loading?