Your Weekend Reading - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, by Walter Benjamin, is often read in an art context alongside Bauldrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, as it discusses the presence of an art object versus its simulation or likeness. These essays will also lead you to Kandinsky's writings and John Berger's Ways of Seeing, for those of you looking for more summer reading!

"Danger Bridge Out" by Gary Stephan

A video by a painter - and one of my favorites. Watch it a couple of times to fit the text with the images. Great, great, great.

Gary Stephan in his studio

Details for our trip to Chelsea this Saturday!

We will meet this Saturday at 12pm at the corner of 26th street and 10th avenue on the southwest corner. For those of you coming by train, you can find NJTransit schedules here. You will arrive into Penn Station New York. Allow 20 minutes to walk to Chelsea - map is below. Email me or post here if you have questions.

Our day will finish up by seeing a show at THEODORE:Art in Soho and we may still get to visit an artist's studio there, too.

click to enlarge

Galleries THIS SATURDAY!!

OK, everyone, Saturday is supposed to be 80 and sunny and we're goin' to see some art! There are some really good shows up right now.

Details and directions to be posted Thursday. We will meet at 12pm at the corner of 26th street and 10th avenue on the southwest corner.

Alex Brown, Chuck Close, Fabian Marcaccio and Thomas Nozkowski at GavinLee

Donald Judd at David Zwirner

Romantic Agony at Horton Gallery

Mark Grotjahn at Anton Kern

Three things for Wednesday and Saturday

1) Bring in Wednesday a small collage. Some examples below. Varied source material is always good - some images which are abstract/texture, some which are from the news, etc.

2) Saturday we will go to see shows in Chelsea! Detailed plans to come.

3) Don't forget to bring grounds to paint and silkscreen on, and stretcher bars of the right size if you want my help stretching.

Rauschenberg

Calvert

Dexter Dalwood

Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

Reading this book by Baudrillard on whether or not we live in reality, or a simulation of it ('it is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real'), changed my life. It's difficult to read but worth it - written so much earlier than the proliferation of the internet, it seems even more true today.still from The Matrix (1999), which is inspired by Baudrillard's book

Excerpt from Simulacra and simULation

I. THE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.The simulacrum is true.

-Ecclesiastes

If once we were able to view the Borges fable (*1) in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) - as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra. (*2) Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself. In fact, even inverted, Borges's fable is unusable. Only the allegory of the Empire, perhaps, remains. Because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction. Because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This imaginary of representation, which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographers mad project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory, disappears in the simulation whose operation is nuclear and genetic, no longer at all specular or discursive. It is all of metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control - and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself - such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.

Helpful note:

Simulacra and Simulation identifies three types of simulacra and identifies each with a historical period:

1. First order, associated with the premodern period, where the image is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as irreproducibly real and signification obviously gropes towards this reality.
2. Second order, associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution, where distinctions between image and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the original version, especially when the individual person is only concerned with consuming for some utility a functional facsimile.
3. Third order, associated with the postmodernity, where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulacrum, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept.^{[2] - Wikipedia}

footnotes

1. The Borges story imagines an empire where the science of cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice. "[S]ucceeding Generations… came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome... In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar. - Wikipedia

2. Cf. J. Baudrillard, "L'ordre des simulacres" (The order of simulacra), in L'echange symbolique et la mort (Symbolic exchange and death) (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-i-the-precession-of-simulacra/

Doug Aitken

Fascinating article about a controversial new Doug Aitken piece:

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/doug-aitken/

...which reminded me of this beautiful, hypnotic multiple screen installation piece he did a few years ago of animals trapped in motel rooms. Watch the whole thing - there's a buffalo!:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ6cJaGm79E

installation view of Doug Aitken's Migration

Bring B&W images on clear acetate Monday

For Monday, bring one or two images printed on clear acetate (transparency), about 5 to 7 inches. You can take an image printed out on paper to Kinkos or any Copy Center and ask them to print it on transparency.

The images must be black and white only - no greys or gradients. The images should be a self-contained image, not cropped, so they are easy to repeat OR a pattern. Examples below:

diatom

damask

Reminder to bring supports/grounds

Remember to bring a panel or gessoed canvas to paint on to every class...

Abstract Painting: The New Causalists

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/06/artseen/abstract-painting-the-new-casualists

Chris Martin

TateShots: Dexter Dalwood

The Tate Museum in London has a whole series of artist interviews you can watch on their website (tate.org) or on Youtube. Here's one with the painter Dexter Dalwood:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSBM3NqgWSE

En plein air

Remember we're painting outside Monday. Please google these artists and study their techniques before class. Bring 8-10 small grounds (panels or canvases preferred, canvas paper ok, 5x7 inches or larger). Paint them all different solid, semi-transparent colors before class. Any colors you want - pinks, blues, yellows...

David Hockney

Maureen Gallace

Richard Diebenkorn

Video #2 for your weekend: The Artist's Life with John Yau

http://vimeo.com/m/#/24242350

Information on Cave of Forgotten Dreams

from Alyssa... "Princeton no longer shows Cave of Forgotten Dreams. However, I did find out that Montclair has some showings, below is the html address for Clearview Cinemas in Montclair. I would urge anyone to call ahead before they go." 
http://www.clearviewcinemas.com/cgi-bin/locations.cgi?id=009&flag=diplay_theatre

A Conversation with Thomas Nozkowski

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_YqtaAUuUo

Glazing Technique

Here's a nice website summarizing the glazing/scumbling technique with very easy to understand photos and information. A good thing to look over for next class. However, keep in mind that his is a rather tight, limited approach - so never think you have to make use of the technique in exactly the way a book would instruct you.

http://www.penroseart.com/vermeer01.htm

Kristin Baker, The Unfair Advantage, 2003

Welcome to Summer Painting I-IV!

Watch this preview for Werner Herzog's new 3D film of the Chauvet Caves in France, then listen to the NPR interview in the second link and post a comment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDiQ1lvBbr0

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/20/135516812/herzog-enters-the-cave-of-forgotten-dreams