Lee Patrick [Johnson]

I was recently in NYC and I think one piece really stood out as indicative of contemporary art: A woman, dressed and acting as security at the New Museum, randomly and perfectly on pitch breaks out in song “This is propaganda. This is propaganda.  This is propaganda… (spoken) Tino Sehgal, 2009″.

Flawless.  Clean.

Here were a few highlights from the Whitney Biannual, New Museum (skin Fruit) and the Banks Violette exhibition at Gladstone Gallery.  Other than that Chelsea was a bunch of shit.  I think ceramics was pretty well embodied as tons of junk sitting around Chelsea.  Starting at the Matthew Marks gallery with works from Ken price I remembered that anything can be made from ceramic, especially if it is going to sit around not doing anything.  The heavily visually textural works screamed boredom and an affinity towards smoking pot and sanding forms.  Then I made the mistake to check out the Anders Ruhwald exhibition.  Upon entering the poorly laid out space I unfortunately looked at the work.  My bad.  The pooly executed blandly home decor-related work made me think I was looking at a bad Crate and Barrel advertisement.

However, Overall I thought the non-medium specific sculpture was really honest (such as David Altmejd), the video work made me question materiality(Alex Hubbard) and Tino Sehgal’s work delivered.

“Like so many Americans, She was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five.  [I mentally replaced 'gift shops' with Art galleries].

“The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs” -Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History.  [I find this interesting as it refers to public art, specifically monuments in Germany]

“But the most important reason for the study of aesthetics is that it affirms psychology’s commitment to the study of experience.  Dewey (1934) maintained that out experience of art was a good place to begin to the study of human experience.  Langfeld (1920) considered the experience of beaury to be one of the most ‘Useful’ and ‘fundamental’ of man’s experiences.  James (1890) discussed aesthetics alongside the religious experience.  The critic Edman (1928) proposed that exposure to the arts clarified, enriched, intensified and interpreted human experience.  Many conjectured that the creative experience of the artist may be comparable to the aesthetic experience of the observer of art (which may be extended to include the discovery of the scientist being paralleled by the insights of the problem-solver).  Thus the study of aesthetic exerience- in the way the study of art has facilitated the study of perception (Hochberg 1978)-  may assist in an understanding of experience in general.” -Excerpt regarding Aesthetic Experience from Psychology and The Arts, David O’Hare (1981).

Site Specific art and locational identity: MiwonKwon

Context of the destruction/alteration of artwork: Meacher

the Counter Monument: Young_CounterMonument

Relational Aesthetics: Bishop

Teaching Public art in the twenty-first Century.  An Interview with Harrell Fletcher.  by Shelly Willis: WillisFletcher