Alfredo Jaar

I'm not really a fan of the artist questionnaires in Frieze. Sarah Lucas is a fantastic artist and I've kept her riveting self-portrait (above) on my wall for years, but who really cares what Sarah Lucas wishes she knew? (The fact that the answer is "Everything I don’t know, I suppose" is hardly encouraging).

But I keep reading the feature because every now and then a gem comes along. Alfredo Jaar's turn is one such find, even though he basically wishes he knew what Sarah Lucas wishes she knew:

I became an artist because I do not understand the world. Everything I know I learned from being an artist. And I am still learning. I wish I knew more of everything.

The difference being that Jaar starts with a disclaimer, a direct rebuke to philosophers of science and sociobiology like Lee Cronk who neatly section art off from any question of understanding the world:

In the arts and humanities, in contrast to the sciences, the goal is not to expand and refine our understanding of the workings of the universe in which we find ourselves, but rather to produce things of beauty and meaning and to understand the significance they have for people.

I challenge you to explore Jaar a little further and see if he doesn't challenge Cronk's simple dichotomy.

More Libya

Struck by another photo from the death of Gaddafi, this one of the dead leader surrounded by a constellation of cellphones.

Libya

For those who don't know, former Libyan leader has been killed. There's the obligatory bloody trophy shot, captured on cellphone video and flashed around the globe (The Atlantic has a comprehensive selection of images including the kill shot), but I'm more interested in the profusion of photographs from the warzone. In one compelling shot (above), a rebel fighter serenades his comrades as they fight a pitched street battle. In nearly all photographs, fighters record each other with camera phones and lightweight digital cameras (see two examples below). These are examples of battle being performed as it's executed, the ultimate example of the 'Rambo syndrome' that sees fighters worldwide modeling themselves on Sylvester Stallone's caricature of masculinity.

Update - see this post on Conscientious on the believability quality of cellphone footage.

Science and art

Robert Irwin. Way Out West.

What happens when artists move into high-tech scientific set-ups? As a variety of artists head for a residency program at CERN, their stay will be limited to three months:

"When they're working with physicists, there's a tipping point where artists want to prove that they have the brains of the physicist. The minute they do that they start to lose their artistic creativity."

That's according to Ariane Koek, head of "international arts development" at CERN. I think back to the days when James Turrell and Robert Irwin headed to Garrett Corporation as part of LACMA's Art & Technology program, an episode chronicled beautifully in Lawrence Weschler's Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. Irwin's exposure to science certainly changed his art, but his art also changed the lives of the scientists he worked with, at least one of whom dropped his science career for a life of transcendental meditation.

Panoramic ball camera

File this under the latest line of gadgets that expand the realms of what's possible in portable filming. BLDG BLOG writes about Jonas Pfeil's "throwable panoramic camera," a ball that captures a panoramic view when tossed in the air.

Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin in conversation:

As the project gets underway, the script disperses: sometimes the centre drops out and no longer even ends up in the final work. I write alone, but what’s actually shot and edited into the movie is also the product of synergy between the script, situation and performers. Within the work there are platforms for free agency, for people to create something new, for meaning that I never necessarily intended to be there.

Links

• The New York Times reports on the find of a neolithic "paint factory."
• An unusually clear and in-depth discussion of the Prince copyright case at Brooklyn Rail.
• A great interview with Eliane Radigue:

This immediately opened up a new world; it’s enriching once you’ve educated your ear to that, because when you’re annoyed by the sound of the street you can make music out of it. You can make music out of almost everything! So the discovery of the wild electronic sounds was important, namely the ones like feedback, which are accidents, garbage sounds, but they contain a lot.

Art and Athens

Stefania Strouza. The Condition of (Im)Possibility. 2010.

The arts seem to have flourished in Greece, even as the economy has tanked. Artists and filmmakers have joined their Arabic and Chinese compatriots in crafting an explosion of ground-up art that examines social ills as an increasingly prevalent condition of daily life. I'm particularly taken with the work of Stefania Strouza, a trained artist-architect.

Link

The Atlantic has a short article on the first computer-cataloging of art museums.

Andy Warhol and Liz Taylor

Check out Liz Taylor's note of thanks to Andy Warhol after she acquired her own versions of Warhol's 'Taylor' pieces.