Local(i)ty 2
by Carin Covin
I am interested in the intersection of the diary form, in the genre of the lyric essay and visual language. In 2012 I had an interchange in my creative practice. I became interested in a book list for a thematic residency at the Banff Centre[i]. The book was covered a wide scope of topics related to studio practices and critical theories and including:
This book list intersected with my contemplation of the works by three BC-based artists, Nora Curiston, Brenda Feist, and Laura Widmer, providing me with current critical underpinnings for viewing and interpreting their works.
Dr. Sarah Thornton book Seven Days in The Art World explores how insular the art world can be, and is often a description of how the dynamics of creativity often include the politics of taste, status, money and wardrobe.
Boris Groys suggests that Art Power is a complex machine that articulates works inside the art market and outside the art market – each location producing aesthetically different works and concepts. Both authors and art theorists Boris Groys and Kenneth Goldsmith investigate concepts of authorship in their writing. Groys sites how Duchamp changed the artistic map by his Readymades concluding that the creative act can be an act of selection. Goldsmith suggests, and this is really an oversimplification of his ideas, that we are all reinventing western thought that began with the concepts of Plato and Socrates. Goldsmith cites Jonathan Lethem who suggests that “ideas in literature have been shared, riffed, culled, reused, recycled, swiped, stolen, quoted, lifted, duplicated, gifted, appropriated, mimicked, and pirated for as long as literature has existed”[ii].
Reena Spaulings, a novel by the Bernadette Corporation examines authorship in a wonderfully novel way. This book is intended as a work of fiction, and its design is to have 150 writers, professional and amateur contributing to the overall narrative.
Jacques Rancière in his work The Emancipated Spectator channels these ideas into the politics of the viewer and he suggests that perhaps the pluralistic nature of contemporary art and the politics of art have lulled us into becoming passive consumers of images.
In the book Video Green Chris Kraus describes a triumph of nothingness, which speaks to identify the makers of meaning. It becomes a bold critique that investigates gender, commodification, and spectacle.
The last two books on the reading list are The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee and The Psychic Soviet by Ian F. Svenonius. These two books are strident manifestos that rail against capitalism, globalism, and any form of power, perhaps a precursor to the many pluralities of the Idle No More movements.
Local(i)ty[iii]
For me as a viewer, these three artists, Nora Curiston, Brenda Feist, and Laura Widmer, have compelling creative practices that reflect the ideas which also reflect a range of contemporary concepts and issues found in the contemporary art historical and critical discourse today. All three artists sustain a creative practice outside of large cultural centres. And I think that we can all agree that these large cultural centres understand themselves as the makers of meaning with regards to the contemporary issues surrounding art.
From 2010 to 2013, I did research under the umbrella of the Island Mountain Arts Toni Onley Project[iv]. The 2012 Toni Onley Project was the year that Curiston attended. At the first day of the project, everyone presents their ideas and work. When Curiston began her talk, she stated “That I make my viewers angry”, and I knew that I want to know this artist and include her in a project I wanted to create and write about.
This is the piece that made a viewer angry. It is titled Structure for Supporting a Narrow Column of Air.
- Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith
- Seven Days in the Art World by Dr. Sarah Thornton
- The Emancipated Spectator by Jacque Rancière
- Art Power by Boris Groys
- The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee
- Video Green by Chris Kraus
- Reena Spaulings – a novel by Bernadette Corporation
- The Psychic Soviet by Ian F. Svenonius
This book list intersected with my contemplation of the works by three BC-based artists, Nora Curiston, Brenda Feist, and Laura Widmer, providing me with current critical underpinnings for viewing and interpreting their works.
Dr. Sarah Thornton book Seven Days in The Art World explores how insular the art world can be, and is often a description of how the dynamics of creativity often include the politics of taste, status, money and wardrobe.
Boris Groys suggests that Art Power is a complex machine that articulates works inside the art market and outside the art market – each location producing aesthetically different works and concepts. Both authors and art theorists Boris Groys and Kenneth Goldsmith investigate concepts of authorship in their writing. Groys sites how Duchamp changed the artistic map by his Readymades concluding that the creative act can be an act of selection. Goldsmith suggests, and this is really an oversimplification of his ideas, that we are all reinventing western thought that began with the concepts of Plato and Socrates. Goldsmith cites Jonathan Lethem who suggests that “ideas in literature have been shared, riffed, culled, reused, recycled, swiped, stolen, quoted, lifted, duplicated, gifted, appropriated, mimicked, and pirated for as long as literature has existed”[ii].
Reena Spaulings, a novel by the Bernadette Corporation examines authorship in a wonderfully novel way. This book is intended as a work of fiction, and its design is to have 150 writers, professional and amateur contributing to the overall narrative.
Jacques Rancière in his work The Emancipated Spectator channels these ideas into the politics of the viewer and he suggests that perhaps the pluralistic nature of contemporary art and the politics of art have lulled us into becoming passive consumers of images.
In the book Video Green Chris Kraus describes a triumph of nothingness, which speaks to identify the makers of meaning. It becomes a bold critique that investigates gender, commodification, and spectacle.
The last two books on the reading list are The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee and The Psychic Soviet by Ian F. Svenonius. These two books are strident manifestos that rail against capitalism, globalism, and any form of power, perhaps a precursor to the many pluralities of the Idle No More movements.
Local(i)ty[iii]
For me as a viewer, these three artists, Nora Curiston, Brenda Feist, and Laura Widmer, have compelling creative practices that reflect the ideas which also reflect a range of contemporary concepts and issues found in the contemporary art historical and critical discourse today. All three artists sustain a creative practice outside of large cultural centres. And I think that we can all agree that these large cultural centres understand themselves as the makers of meaning with regards to the contemporary issues surrounding art.
From 2010 to 2013, I did research under the umbrella of the Island Mountain Arts Toni Onley Project[iv]. The 2012 Toni Onley Project was the year that Curiston attended. At the first day of the project, everyone presents their ideas and work. When Curiston began her talk, she stated “That I make my viewers angry”, and I knew that I want to know this artist and include her in a project I wanted to create and write about.
This is the piece that made a viewer angry. It is titled Structure for Supporting a Narrow Column of Air.
I mention the concept of the viewer here, as Local(i)ty afforded me the opportunity to be the viewer. In the original essay and publication I mention that I agree with Roland Barthes, who suggests that the personal lens of the individual, formed through a unique set of experiences, defines how the individual sees and interprets the world around them. Curiston exhibited this work at the Penticton Art Gallery in 2009, and one viewer was quite incensed, and needed to talk to the curator Paul Crawford to explain that she knew that this was not art. Fair enough, we all know what we know. As a viewer, I have had the privilege of navigating the university system, and coming to an understanding of how the arcs found within western art history have allowed Curiston to understand this found object as exactly as she has titled it. This work directly references Marcel Duchamp, who, through his conceptual investigations, has gifted artists the opportunity to make art by designation and to assign meaning to a found object that can be opposite from its original intention.
Authorship is quite a contentious concept, especially now, in the 21st Century. The Post Modern Era, we, as artists can appropriate an idea or concept that has appeared before, and by this act expose hidden or lost histories that span issues of the politics of colonization, gender and power structures of culture. By doing so, artists produce works or ideas that has become pluralistic because of this examination. In his 2007 book titled The Ecstasy of Influence Jonathan Lethem examines appropriation throughout the centuries, which appeared in literature, music, and visual arts. He politely suggests that we are all plagiarists. When I was writing the first essay for the project Local(i)ty, I found that Cursiton, Feist, and Widmer were, in their own way, investigating these interesting ideas surrounding the concept of authorship.
In 2011, Nora Curiston produced a series where she painted objects to look like themselves. Here, she has painted a chunk of rusted metal to look like itself. Curiston has effectively effaced any authorship of artistic production. In an era of guarded artistic authorship, the subtleties of this work, much like her work Structure for Supporting a Narrow Column of Air work to least confirm our expectations as viewers.
Authorship is quite a contentious concept, especially now, in the 21st Century. The Post Modern Era, we, as artists can appropriate an idea or concept that has appeared before, and by this act expose hidden or lost histories that span issues of the politics of colonization, gender and power structures of culture. By doing so, artists produce works or ideas that has become pluralistic because of this examination. In his 2007 book titled The Ecstasy of Influence Jonathan Lethem examines appropriation throughout the centuries, which appeared in literature, music, and visual arts. He politely suggests that we are all plagiarists. When I was writing the first essay for the project Local(i)ty, I found that Cursiton, Feist, and Widmer were, in their own way, investigating these interesting ideas surrounding the concept of authorship.
In 2011, Nora Curiston produced a series where she painted objects to look like themselves. Here, she has painted a chunk of rusted metal to look like itself. Curiston has effectively effaced any authorship of artistic production. In an era of guarded artistic authorship, the subtleties of this work, much like her work Structure for Supporting a Narrow Column of Air work to least confirm our expectations as viewers.
In 2012, Brenda Feist took part in an Eco-Art Project in Woodhaven Nature Conservatory in Kelowna BC. Feist references authorship, by highlighting a quote from Tors Nᴓrretranders[v]. In her work, Feist recognizes the complicated authorship of her ideas. She references the idea from Nᴓrretranders that the me that we recognize as ourselves is made up of other mes that we have encountered in our journey.
As a printmaker, Laura Widmer, by the nature of the discipline of printmaking, pushes the boundaries of the idea of authorship, by producing more than one original.
The title Local(i)ty, refers to the location that these artists work from, here in Grand Forks, and in Kelowna. In a smaller centre, do we see a difference in the integrity of what art can be seen as today, how it is produced and how it can be given an audience? Ihor Holubizky suggests that creative, cultural and critical ideas found within our global discourse are constantly circulating[vi].
NOTES:
[i] The Residency was titled titled 27: Our Literal Speed: Stuff Near Art That Is Not Art Which Is Treated As If It Were Art, Is Now The Substance of Most Serious Art. The Faculty for this residency was Abby Shaine Dubin, with guests Theaster Gates, Christopher P. Heuer and Matthew Jesse Jackson. I applied for this residency and received a letter stating congratulations you are waitlisted.
[ii] Kenneth Goldsmith cites Jonathan Letham’s 2007 pro-plagiarism article that was published in 2007 in Harpers. Letham continued to explore these ideas in his non-fiction work titled Ecstasy of Influence published in 2011 by Doubleday NY.
[iii] Local(i)ty received financial support from the British Columbia Arts Council in 2012, with the award of a Category I Projects Grant. The publication was published with CC Publishing in 2013 and also has an online presence with http://localityproject.weebly.com/
[iv] The Island Mountain Arts Society runs The Toni Onley Project every summer in the arts community of Wells, BC. The mentors that ran the 2012 program were Peter Von Tiesenhausen and Sarah Anne Johnson.
[v] Tors Nᴓrretranders is a Danish scientist and mathematician who writes about realizing our human potential through our contemplation and execution of our compassion.
[vi] Ihor Holubizky writes about artists who sense of place informs their creative practice that is juxtaposed with the binary of regionalism and globalism in his 2006 publication Radical Regionalism: Local Knowledge and Making Places.
NOTES:
[i] The Residency was titled titled 27: Our Literal Speed: Stuff Near Art That Is Not Art Which Is Treated As If It Were Art, Is Now The Substance of Most Serious Art. The Faculty for this residency was Abby Shaine Dubin, with guests Theaster Gates, Christopher P. Heuer and Matthew Jesse Jackson. I applied for this residency and received a letter stating congratulations you are waitlisted.
[ii] Kenneth Goldsmith cites Jonathan Letham’s 2007 pro-plagiarism article that was published in 2007 in Harpers. Letham continued to explore these ideas in his non-fiction work titled Ecstasy of Influence published in 2011 by Doubleday NY.
[iii] Local(i)ty received financial support from the British Columbia Arts Council in 2012, with the award of a Category I Projects Grant. The publication was published with CC Publishing in 2013 and also has an online presence with http://localityproject.weebly.com/
[iv] The Island Mountain Arts Society runs The Toni Onley Project every summer in the arts community of Wells, BC. The mentors that ran the 2012 program were Peter Von Tiesenhausen and Sarah Anne Johnson.
[v] Tors Nᴓrretranders is a Danish scientist and mathematician who writes about realizing our human potential through our contemplation and execution of our compassion.
[vi] Ihor Holubizky writes about artists who sense of place informs their creative practice that is juxtaposed with the binary of regionalism and globalism in his 2006 publication Radical Regionalism: Local Knowledge and Making Places.