Wednesday, September 29, 2010

From Finish to Start

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Noise to Solipsism:
an incomplete explanation

  

Solipsism

[sol-ip-siz-uhm]  Show IPA
–noun
1.
Philosophy. the theory that only the self exists, or can be
 proved to exist.

2.
extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's 
feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption.
sol·ip·sism    (sŏl'ĭp-sĭz'əm, sō'lĭp-)    


n.   Philosophy

1.                The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2.              The theory or view that the self is the only reality.

Word Origin & History
solipsism  
1874, coined from L. solus "alone" + ipse "self." The view or theory that self is the only object of real knowledge or the only thing that is real.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper 





Encyclopedia
solipsism
in philosophy, formerly, moral egoism (as used in the writings of Immanuel Kant), but now, in an epistemological sense, the extreme form of subjective idealism that denies that the human mind has any valid ground for believing in the existence of anything but itself. The British idealist F.H. Bradley, in Appearance and Reality (1897), characterized the solipsistic view as follows: "I cannot transcend experience, and experience is my experience. From this it follows that nothing beyond myself exists; for what is experience is its (the self 's) states."
Learn more about solipsism with a free trial on Britannica.com.
Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 



   
Noise to Signal

In the summer of 2007, I hefted my newly arrived issue of Artforum down the hill from my mailbox in the boonies to my house, also in the boonies. Its unwieldy weight spoke of market forces and inspired me to regard it as subject matter.  Concurrent with the ballooning of the American butt grown on food devoid of nutritional value and the booming of an American economy on top of a house of cards, the magazine had been getting fatter over time through the accretion of advertising content.  

On that scorching South Carolina summer day, I knew that the heft of my new Artforum issue was not due to the weighty subject matter discussed within, but to a super-abundance of ad pages.  Mine was not an original insight, and in fact, the editors and readers of Artforum are sufficiently self-aware to have discussed this from time to time within the pages of the magazine itself in the form of letters and editorials.  But this particular issue was so huge and awkward to carry and to read that I felt compelled to make my own small visual statement about it.

The first thing that struck me about the 2007 summer issue, as mentioned, was the ratio of advertising content, 385 pages, to the content one ostensibly buys the magazine for, 142 pages.  And this struck me particularly because Artforum, especially in the last eleven years under the editorship of Tim Griffin, has been a publication in which contributors have often written explicit criticism about the effects of commercialism not only on the art world but on the social landscape of the world at large[1].  Given the drum beat of the kind of criticism the magazine promotes, extricating, from my mailbox, this issue that like an obese person had outgrown its form and function due to its implication with commercialism struck me as amusing. Right there and then, I decided that I wanted to appropriate it and make a piece that made the ratio of ad pages to non-ad pages visually apprehensible to the viewer.

Those familiar with Artforum know that its pages are, in form, perfectly square, and that the spine and some of the graphics within the magazine change colors from year to year. The color used to indicate the 2007 Artforums (or is it Artfora?) is a bright red that, ironically, is read by my Photoshop as being “out of gamut” and thus irreproducible within the CYMK color space used for commercial printing.  I decided that for color on my project I would limit myself to shades of this red and that the book I would eventually make would also be a square, but a smaller one.  I reduced the size by half in order to make my version more intimate, and for the simple practical reason that in reduced form I could easily print its pages on my home printer.

I started on my project by mapping the magazine’s content in a piece that I have unoriginally named Noise to Signal.  On a large piece of paper I used pencil to draw 271 rectangles, each divided into two squares to represent pairs of pages of the summer 2007 issue when open.  I then numbered the 542 squares consecutively to represent all the pages in the magazine including the inner covers.  I painted the squares representing critical content in varying shades of red to indicate that these pages were different from the ones left white, as well as, to reference the color used to denote 2007 issues.  I left the squares representing the advertising pages untouched because, although I find the ads in Artforum beautiful and informative in their own way, I really do buy the rag to read the articles.  It is the pages colored in red that are the ones I look forward to reading when I receive my magazine in the mail.  As map, my drawing contains information about where to find these pages that are not strictly commercial.

In form Noise to Signal looks like it could be just one more minimal/conceptual drawing on paper produced within recent art history. But if the viewer, by engaging with the rest of the installation, grasps the simple code behind the drawing, he or she will, at a glance, be able to quickly discern the ratio of ad to non-ad pages, and maybe, like me, marvel at this ratio, and finally, just like the magazine often does in its critical content (the red squares), wonder about the implications of commercialism on post WWII art.

After mapping it in two dimensions, I started the work of deconstructing the magazine and trying to map it in three.  I decided to make a book that in form would, also at a glance, do the same thing that Noise to Signal did in informing the viewer about the two different kinds of content within its pages. The pages in my book that represent the explicitly commercial pages in the 2007 summer issue of Artforum are, as in Noise to Signal, mostly white and with the words “PLACE AD HERE” printed on them, while the other pages have text and images and are printed in a value of the red scanned directly from the magazine.  A quick glance at the closed book from the sides immediately makes the ratio of ad to non-ad pages apparent.

It is the ironic contradiction between the unease with the implications of commercialism vis à vis art institutions, of which Artforum certainly is one, expressed within the magazine’s critical pages[2] and the overly bloated form of its latest issue at the time that was the starting point of my project; but eventually it became about more than just that.  As I read the magazine, and reread it, and read it once again, and took notes on what I read, I started thinking not only about it’s history, significance in the art world, and connection to the world at large, but also about my connection to this publication. I thought hard about what Artforum represents to me personally, and about how I digest it. And I decided that my piece would also be, in (another) part, about my conversation with this historic magazine, an issue of which shows up in my mailbox once a month.


Solipsism

In the opening paragraph I mention that I live in the “boonies”, and I most certainly do.  I don’t live anywhere near a center of art connected to the world discussed within the pages of Artforum.  A world one trains for in art school.  A world of Art Stars.  A world (almost) every art student dreams about becoming a part of until the reality of what it takes to belong to that world sets in. Out here in the boonies, Artforum is my connection to that world.  By reading Artforum every month I can follow part of the conversation happening in that world, and I can feel connected to topics that attracted me to art in the first place.  

I chose to title my book and its presentation Solipsism because I read the magazine alone and create a world whose reality is all my own when reading it. Regardless of what is written within its pages, the logic of my conversation with it, and thus with the art world I glean through its pages, is entirely dictated by me out here, alone, in the boonies. But I also chose the title because sometimes, when I disconnect from the magazine and connect with the boonies, I wonder what the hell “those people” are talking about.  And in those days, when I stop thinking like “those people”, the view of the art world the magazine presents seems to me to acquire solipsistic characteristics of its own.  In some sense, the world of the magazine also exists only for itself, even if it encompasses a lot more than just one person.   

Intellectual material and beliefs specific to a group is not uncommon and is by no means a definition of solipsism.  However, such a seemingly hermetic approach to art, which in some sense is supposed to be a form of communication to an audience at large, on those days where I am “more at large”, seem, well, ironic.  And just as I was first inspired to make this piece by the irony in the ratio of ad to non-ad pages in the 2007 summer issue, this irony that manifests itself when I think about the critical content of the magazine is another part of what inspired me to continue working on it in the way that I did.

As readers of the magazine well know, the writing within the pages of Artforum can at times be obscure.  And despite the fact that there are more ads than text pages in the magazine these days, Artforum is not the art world version of Vogue.  There still are a lot of text pages, and the text within them is dense.  In order to read it, I immerse myself in it, accept its premises and argumentation, and take a trip.  When I immerge on the other side, more often than not, I feel that I’ve had an experience acquiring knowledge that, though not always easily verbalized right then and there, stays with me and informs me when I encounter the likes of it again and when I look at art.  In other words, I learn from it; and I wanted Solipsism to represent my sense of personal immersion with this kind of material.

From the very beginning, I wanted the piece to have a hand-made look even though the final product is mechanically reproduced.  I drew and wrote my versions of the pages of the magazine on cheap graph paper with pen and ink.  My drawings of the images and my (horrible) hand-writing of the text signals that it is I who have appropriated, absorbed, digested, and transformed the information into what is now “my world”.  And although I read the magazine several times, my text and drawings were done quickly and by free association; I did not want a lot of logical thinking to interfere with the way I reacted to what I was reading and seeing.  The images in my book are quick renderings, and my text a combination of visceral reactions plus passages lifted directly from the magazine that struck me as particularly impenetrable, contextually ironic, or as is usually the case, both.  I then scanned my drawings and writing, colored the pages using Photoshop, and printed them on vellum.

I chose to use vellum because of its translucency, which is so different in character from a lot of the writing in the magazine.  I felt that it was precisely this see-through characteristic that would allow me to make the content of my book look as dense as the content Artforum seems to have at times.  I chose the vellum because, although it is an extremely annoying material to use, I knew that by using it, anything I printed on one side would interfere with the things printed on the other; and that moreover, things printed on the next page would also be visible, thus confusing things some more.  But more than obscuring each other, I wanted there to be a sense of visual play between my pages. After all I wasn’t writing a treatise, I was making a work to be apprehended retinally. 

I wanted the pages of Solipsism to look a certain way and to visually capture the way I feel when I read the magazine.  I have fun reading it.  I read it through time.  The information builds on itself but not necessarily in any logical pattern. And when I put it down, I am left with a kind of knowledge that I need some time to digest before I can start applying .  I want the viewer of Solipsism to have a similar experience.  I want he or she to have fun going through the book, look at how the pages change and connect to each other as one flips through it, get something out of doing that, and then maybe even go pick up an issue of the “real thing” and start reading it so that I can have somebody to talk to out here in the boonies.
                                    


[1] A good article by Grant Marino about Tim Griffin’s tenure at Artforum can be read in the magazine section of artnet.com at http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/mandarino/magazine-rack-march7-23-10.asp
[2] To quote Grant Mandarino from Artnet.com on the subject of Artforum “It’s the best indicator we have of how fucked up the contemporary art world is.”


What follows in subsequent blog entries, though back in time, are all the pages of Solipsism, two by two.




Monday, September 27, 2010

Saturday, September 25, 2010