Twist & Go

Coming up....review of Jonathan Yoerger M.F.A. thesis exhibition "Twist & Go."

James Franco: Who Knew?

I’ve been doing some thinking about (gasp!) James Franco as a lightly complex way of easing back into writing after my blog hiatus. I’ll use him as a jumping off point. Although, gathering from the responses from many of my artist friends when I mention his name it seems as thought they would prefer a jumping off point as well, perhaps off a bridge. So, to kick off some serious blogging in 2011 I begin here, or there, or maybe everywhere.



On top of wearing an array of wigs to the Sundance Film Festival for his screening of “Three’s Company: The Drama” Franco is now slated to teach a course on himself at Columbia College Hollywood called “Master Class: Editing James Franco…with James Franco,” where students works to create 30 minute documentaries on Franco. Apparently, he is also keen to TA a course at Yale as well, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate, will co-host the Oscars and is traveling the solo exhibition “Dangerous Book Four Boys” to Peres Projects in Berlin beginning in February. Not to mention, teaming up with performance artist Kalup Linzy on co-projects including albums, films and live performances. This all comes post solo exhibition at Clocktower Gallery in New York City last summer, the releases of Howl, 127 Hours and The Green Hornet all in 2010 and a forty-one episode stint on General Hospital that landed him in many homes across America. Essentially, if you didn’t know Franco before chances are you do now.

My interest does not reside in loving or hating Franco, because frankly (no pun intended) I really don’t know how I feel about him, but rather in trying to extract a point of interest from his vastly prolific cacophony of projects I've found myself suspiciously intrigued by him. Perhaps that is what is so interesting, the fact that he interests me. I mean who doesn’t want to be struck by curiosity in a field they love, he just happened to step into mine along the way so now I am being dragged inquisitively throughout the rest of his oeuvre.

Sometimes I wonder if it is all an elaborate performance. One that could culminate in Franco creating his own documentary of the documentaries made by his students. Or maybe I am reading into it all a bit too much and he was simply bored at the moment with acting and wanted to try his hand at a few other disciplines of which his star status afforded him the necessary access. Either way, it is a healthy interest folks and even one that has quite possibly spurred a renewed interest in collaborative models. I surely won’t be stalking his movie sets nor traveling to Berlin to see his show. However, I will continue to delight in artists and projects that pique my interest and send me off onto modes of thinking and development in my own practice. And I will most definitely be adding Freaks and Geeks to movie night with my friends.

In conclusion, let this be a launch pad, a starting gate or an off the line topic that will propel this years blog to new heights and begin to gather some substantial feedback from readers.

Art in the Culture of Continuous Spectacle

An early draft of a prospectus for SECAC 2011 - Suggestions, criticisms, comments welcome!

Spectacular Voice: Art Criticism’s Itinerary Beyond Postmodernism

How is contemporary art criticism coping with the continuous spectacle brought on by the dominant climate of Internet media and the sustained art fair sensation? Immediate access and mechanical reproduction via the Internet and an inflation in commodity culture reflected in the rising number of global art fairs has certainly had a noticeable impact on the homogenized quality and shift in contemporary art criticism. This essay will seek to present dialogue surrounding the argument of the connection/disconnection between contemporary art criticism and art; affirming the progressive absence of a critical edge as we consider art moving beyond postmodernism.

Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of Altermodern helps to reexamine this contemporary phenomena—of the spectacle’s insistence on extracting the viewer from reality—by prompting the artist and viewer to reconsider their position beyond capitalist globalization and forge an itinerary, or path with which reconnects with a mode of “authenticity.” As an example, the art fair sensation is dominant and now largely dictates forms of ideological art criticism steeped in commodity, written about rampantly in platforms for contemporary art criticism like newspapers, magazines, catalog essays, and the Internet, while held to a skewed notion of “multiculturalism.” This has resulted in a homogenized criticality and modes of representation on the part of the artist and critic.

Modernism’s once avant-gard, timeline-based surge of new theory and art movements that championed universalism in the 20^th century moved into a post-history or postmodernism since the 1980s that revealed a breakdown of linearity into a cultural hybridization .[i] This of course has shifted the critical edge and academic voice in contemporary art criticism to one that blankets art and aesthetics as a reflection on Utopian ideology rather than a modern notion that “traverses time” one that “considers a mode of thought that assumes the shape that circumstances impress upon it.”[ii] Bourriaud suggests that rather than revert back to the “totalitarian temptations and colonialist claims of the modernism of the last century,” it is possible to “take a step beyond postmodern borderlines” and consider the reconstitution of modernity.[iii]

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[i] Bourriaud, Nicolas, The Radicant (New York: Lukas & Sternberg), 13.

[ii] Ibid., 15.

[iii] Ibid., 16.