{"id":4490,"date":"2011-05-26T22:47:02","date_gmt":"2011-05-27T05:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=4490"},"modified":"2011-05-26T22:48:56","modified_gmt":"2011-05-27T05:48:56","slug":"change-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2011\/05\/26\/change-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Change everything."},"content":{"rendered":"

Weeding through personal papers the other day, I came across several small index cards on which I had noted art project ideas. The cards date from the late 1970s, perhaps 1978 or ’79. I would have been 22 or 23, and at the time I was struggling to make sense of an artistic career. Until 1980 I was a student at Munich’s State Academy of Fine Arts, assigned to the Danish constructivist sculptor Robert Jacobsen<\/a>‘s studio.<\/p>\n

Within the context of Munich-style traditionalism, Jacobsen’s modernism (he was linked to COBRA) wasn’t celebrated as much as it was tolerated. So, while most of the Academy’s other sculpture students worked traditionally, I belonged to Jacobsen’s “far-out” gang, within which was the even smaller tribe I settled in: the people who read theory and were determined to elude what Theodor Adorno called “the culture industry.”<\/p>\n

\"\"And so, our work – my work – had to be challenging, and (because we were trying not to be co-opted) hermetic. But part of me hated the hermeticism, which, as the daughter of people who hadn’t even been able to finish high school because of financial pressures, I saw as elitism, pure and simple. Rather unfortunately, I fell into trying to square the circle (what an idiot I was) by trying<\/em> to make challenging art that had pretensions to being politically correct.<\/p>\n

Please don’t ask me what that actually could have meant. It’s blindingly obvious now that the average working class Joe or Jane (if s\/he even exists) does not give a rat’s ass about high art. But at the time, I really believed (7\/8ths-heartedly) that art could change people’s perception, and that by changing their perceptions, artists could change the world.<\/p>\n

I could have been happier if I’d just dropped another tab of acid. But I digress…<\/p>\n

I worked with packing cardboard, which was cheap, relatively plentiful, lightweight, and (this was important later) easy to toss. Working with cardboard on a fairly large scale allowed me to tackle things like spatial perception, which I hadn’t been able to test properly when I was still making models out of balsa wood. The cardboard essentially allowed for what we now might call rapid prototyping. It also allowed me to wander down some obscure paths…<\/p>\n

At one point I began to introduce color into the cardboard constructions. From the index card headed The Blue Theme<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

– the artist as reprocessor of information, even previously common-property information, i.e., hit pop songs<\/p>\n

“Crystal Blue Persuasion”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Um, yah. Modernism and Mass Culture<\/strong><\/em>. Funny, I designed and taught a course on that at MIT many years later…<\/p>\n

More on the color blue:<\/p>\n

Colour as thing – back to the “blue theme”: make cardboard support surface sculpture, and apply the blue theme, blue stroke, blue surface, …whatever. Next, a second, identical support sculpture, the blue cut out removed, lying in front of it; third, this theme continued, the blue further refined & developed as thing.<\/p>\n

The entire thing presented as series, as steps, together:<\/p>\n

[and here there are tiny little sketches, as per photograph, below]<\/p>\n

frame support becoming predominant support, supporting support, yet being blue, bluer than blue, thus displaying its thinginess.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I built some pieces to approximate the idea. Below, some color slides (2 1\/4 inch format), pardon the lo-fi quality… I just taped the positives to a window pane and used my iPod Touch to photograph them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another card, headed Yellow<\/strong>, but no evidence remains of any work carried out on this theme:<\/p>\n

As the blue wedge triumphs over the cardboard triangle, geometric and hard-edged, so yellow must from the start be a wholly 3-dimensional shape, diffuse, being outside + objective and at the same time all-encompassing + therefore subjective. Like God, or a glass perpetually overflowing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was an atheist even then, so I’m not sure exactly how I meant that reference to god, except probably in reference to how other people<\/em> experience transcendence.<\/p>\n

Too much of what I was doing was about other people. What other people might think about my work if it was too conventional. Or too avant-garde. Or too hermetic. Or too political.<\/p>\n

Or just weak and a not particularly strong<\/em> artistically…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another card, without a\u00a0 header. Maybe it should be Danger<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

The incorporation of danger into an art work. The daily threats and anxiety experienced by the artist transposed into the work, making it a transmitter of that anxiety, that danger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well. Maybe I should have electrified one of my sculptures and dangerously and anxiously shocked<\/strong> viewers. I was thinking about electricity, albeit for a video piece (I was convinced at the time that video could be the new sculpture).<\/p>\n

\"\"*<\/p>\n

I still like the thoughts noted on this next card, a lot:<\/p>\n

Infrastructure as art medium?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A card about the Paris Metro<\/strong>:<\/span><\/p>\n

The Paris Metro as medium. All those buskers, beggars and theatre players, graffiti artists, etc., using the Metro so that it has become the ultimate transportation network: it transports ideas, music, events, information and people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, I still like this idea. Seems to me it’s indicative of a longstanding attraction to urbanism and cities.<\/p>\n

I also have a number of index cards that detail my ideas about video. But they’re very obtuse (and if you read this far, you’re probably thinking, “More<\/em> obtuse???”). When I worked on (or thought about) video (and to a lesser extent, photography), I tried to marshal time as an element of the video medium, which (as I noted above) I considered a new form of sculpture. It just got pretty hairy. Obtuser.<\/p>\n

I think a lot of the same sort of obtuseness (hermeticism) my 22-year-old self expressed in 1978 still thrives in today’s art world. Alternatively (and quite possibly worse), it’s also ok for art to be entirely unserious<\/em> and just “fun” or consume-able<\/em>. Goes down easy. Doesn’t get stuck in your craw.<\/p>\n

Too bad. I still like the idea of that glass, perpetually overflowing, though – a plenitude that changes everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the late 1970s I was a student of Robert Jacobsen’s and made modernist sculptures out of packing cardboard. Earlier this week I came across note cards and photos from that time, which prompts me to ask, “has much changed in art?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1823,1325,678,1242],"tags":[31155],"class_list":["post-4490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-canada","category-housekeeping","category-ideas","category-just_so","tag-art_student"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4490"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4514,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4490\/revisions\/4514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}