The class collectively believes there are some imperfections in the form of the art critique . Yet, this form is all they know.The class’s list of what critique presently claims to be is overarching and sometimes specific. The classroom’s list of what critique could be is truncated.
But how do we invent forms external to present consensus and experience? How do we articulate an abstract hunch that things could be different? Is this not the nature of the political imaginary?
Please post your own specific fantasies as to how we can critique the work that we observed/experienced/bared witness to/ watched on Friday. (Lydia, Shawn, Aaron, Noemie)
CLASS FANTASIES AROUND CRITIQUE
THE CRITIQUE IS NON VERBAL
THE CRITIQUE IS VISUAL
THE CRITIQUE IS A POETIC RESPONSE
THE CRITIQUE WILL BENEFIT THE COLLECTIVE GROUP
THE CRITIQUE WILL BENEFIT THE INDIVIDUAL ARTIST
THE CRITIQUE WILL BE A WRITTEN INTIMATE RESPONSE CURING AND/OR AFTER THE WORK
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my fantasy critiques:
Lidia: i want to respond by bringing food that “relates” to the human body and eating it myself in responce to your performance, and seeing what others choose to consume (from one body to the next)
Sean: I want to have a video conference as the form of the critque, and have some people in the multiple channel chat that are oblivios to what our discussion is about…
Noemi: i really dont know what to recreate for your project…it was beautiful and i loved the subtle movement that the “bodies” created. i would like to see them as live paintings hung up in the wall…like a Bill Violia installtion
Aaron: I am so confused, and like to stay that way
FANTASY FOR NOEMIE
Noemie: Noemie is asked to technically walk each of us through her process of constucting this video where she shot and edited the work. Each of us must remake her work.. She hands us the raw footage and makes us make the exact same work. Once the effects have been dissected and we have handled all of the raw elements , then where will we stand with it? Will NB then pass out a cliff note versions of Rosalind Krauss and Clement Greenberg discussing form?
FANTASY FOR LYDIA
Lydia: I experienced Lydia’ work less than I could or should have because of the omnipotence of her camerawoman. the camerawoman made herself obvious and this was too bad because I am interested in ‘revulsion over distance’. I would like Lydia to restage the work (for te critiqu) and each of us will reshoot her with seperate cameras at the same time. We will give all documentation over to her and she will be able to examine the different ways we see her and this and how it could be seen.
FANTASY FOR AARON
Aaron: Because it was not the work Aaron had planned (as described to me in a studio visit) I kept waiting for the other work to emerge out of the body of this work. It did not. It was akin to the time taht I watched a dystopian thriller where I erroneously waited for Clive Owen to give birth to the child that would save the world. Clive never distended or dilated. Once I realized that this was another narrative that would only be taht narrative, I had to reset myself as viewer. It was too late. I need to watch it again and would like to.
However, I now know that Aaron prefers others’ critiques rather than a critique of his work. This is why I have spent the bulk of this speaking about Clive Owen. I enter at an angle.
For his critique, I would have him watch the critique of his own work through a two way mirror. He can face it without being present. An actor will play aaron and he will be presenting it as his work. Aaron will get a sense that the work is both his and not his.
FANTASY CRITIQUE FOR SHAWN
Shawn: It is difficult to fantasize in the wake of Julie’s fantasy. She declared, in class, her desire to have Shawn’s protagonists’ join the critique of their work. This is central to that which reverberates through the work. I would like to, rather, propose an event that would take place after the critique Julie has already detailed for us. We will screen a documentary made about the life of Diane Arbus. It details the ways in which she heads to those who are traumatized by their bodies and positions and how she flirts with being both hypocrite and genius. Where does Shawn stake a different path than Arbus (conceptually) and when does he trip into her wake? We would discuss the differences and parallels in taht context at the Spectacle Theater.
FANTASY CRITS
Lydia: Everyone receives a mystery egg before the viewing. It is up to each individual what they will do with it and at what point. It may break accidently. Or someone with unbearable urge will open it, because they can’t handle the pressure of unknowing.
Shawn: The guy in your video, and his son or ‘son’, will be present.
Noemi: No one can use their hands to describe things.
Aaron: We will talk about your work in the standard Cooper convention without knowing that it is yours.
ShawncSmith-
Aaron- I want to watch on youtube, where we all find it on our own.
Lidia- at a potluck with a lot of food.
Lydia- I want us to each watch it again with Lydia, one on one, and discuss the work as it progresses, as she progresses through the casserole.
Shawn- Everybody critique in the dark
Aaron- I think we should give Aaron some arrangement of images (found or created) that respond to the video he showed. (I’m still thinking)
Noemi- (I’m still thinking)
My hunch: talking about and re-formatting “critique” only perpetuates it. I think “critique” is archaic and problematic and far too general of a term to use in order to satisfy the highly nuanced needs of students. Why do our reformations and “creative solutions” for critique refer to themselves, in a kind of ouroboros, as “fantasy CRITIQUES”. Why can’t they be separate things entirely? Why can’t we leave “critique” in the dust? Maybe this issue of semantics is petty, but I feel stumped by all this meta– this “critique of critiques”. This doesn’t seem to be fighting fire with fire– it seems, rather, to be fueling a holocaust.
I also feel that we’ve been assuming that “critique” is the epitome of our education at art school. I think the notion that critique is CENTRAL to education at Cooper is too reductive and puts unnecessary limitations on our discourse. If the critique never ends, is it still critique? What if what happens after the critique (if there is an after) is much more valuable experientially and far more stimulating? Isn’t that just talking or having conversations with one another? Don’t the discussions we have outside of the classroom operate kind of like an open forum? Don’t we do that everyday already? Can’t we just “shoot-the-shit” as they say? I feel like we tend towards that anyway– weren’t we all eager to participate during our meeting 3(?) weeks ago at the Spectacle Theater when we were given the space and time to simply talk about Jackie, Noemi and Yarminiah’s critiques and our thoughts about the class and our work? I got the sense that the critiques we had experienced didn’t satisfy—they needed follow up, a conversation.
Perhaps the answer could be far closer to us than we think–i.e) the conversations we already engage in/the spaces for talking that we give ourselves and create for each other, that have been shadowed by or made secondary by “critique”.
my fantasy is that there is no fantasy—nothing more fantastical than the exchange of ideas that takes place in and amongst us on a daily basis outside of critique.
general thoughts on crit: the critique asks that we speak to the viewers of the work which is usually in a class setting separate from the outside world. it is self referential and has the potential to get too art talky and too much about the class. since loads of people go at one time and 30 + minutes are spent on discussion, crits can get long winded and boring if everyone in the class isn’t in it, or interested in the work. so i suggest that in the act of viewing the work prior to critique those who simply just don’t like the work or find it boring just walk out the instant they become disengaged. this is rude and real. this is what happens in the real world. we live in the real world.
critique could be anti classroom and only for the public, where each work presented (whether finished or not) is presented to an audience of people we dont know, the task being to find a new community each time to see the work and have dinner and casual talk instead of cold “sit down and analyze the shit out of this work” critique.
fantasy crits:
noemi- we will go to a kindergarten class and show your video and have young students critique it. we would all be eating brightly colored cupcakes and nothing would be taken too seriously or over thought or overspoken. it would be an enjoyable day.
aaron- we each would have first class airplane tickets that would fly us back in time to the exact second before the photograph was taken, we would hand paint each person to create the effects made in the video. meaning we would have invisible paint. we would each make up our own story about why the two men were moving the box.
lydia- the crit will be at a small diner that has the feel of a home. we will all eat delicious pie and talk around your work , but never are we allowed to mention the work directly. it will be about good food and
shawn- your work would be publicly displayed in the subway station in times square right next to the man who passs out pamphlets about sinners going to hell. the critique would require that students in class interact with the public ( subway commuters in transit) and bring them to watch the video and have a conversation with the stranger about thoughts/ opinions on the person in the video.
Lydia: We would watch the video. Then be handed paper and pens to write a flowchart of our thoughts as we watched it. Have a few minutes of silence to think about the video. Pass the papers to the person to the left and read. Write a little bit on this other persons notes, about what thoughts you had since moments of silence and since reading their thoughts. Then give the papers to Lydia, she will read them later. Talk if people want, but not mandatory.
Aaron: We would watch the video with everyone on computers in the computer lab. People would know that they needed to find something online/ a picture video etc that they would send Aaron in response. They could be searching while the video was playing. Aaron would sit in a place where he couldn’t see what people doing on computers. We would send the responses anonymously.
Shawn: We would have to, after class-that night-go to the video chat website(cam4.com) and watch something. Respond to the thing we watched, by documenting after it’s done(no screenshot/screencapture) but also not with text. We would send this to shawn, post it to a place on the internet(this site?)where only our class could access it.
LYDIA: Because there was a lack of sound in your piece I’d like to have everyone make sounds in response to your work.
SHAWN: I want us to be able to talk to the guy himself and for each of us respond to his photos
NOEMIE: I’d want crayons for everyone to draw your piece but we could only write words with no pictures.
AARON: I’d like for everyone to write a poem for your work to be read out loud while we play it.
Final Fantasy:
Shawn: I keep going back in forth about whether or not I think we should critique this project in an open chatroom where anyone can join in and speak, or if I think we should discuss it in complete darkness. Thinkin’ about anonymity and conversation.
Lydia: In a dark room each classmate, one by one, watches Lydia’s video with her and they talk about it as it progresses and then the classmate that’s not Lydia leaves and another one enters. This cycle happens once.
Noemi: As Noemi sits with each classmate in privacy, they watch her piece twice. The first time in silence and the second time, the classmate critiquing, or with the help of Noemi, they create a new soundtrack for the piece, trying to be as discursive as possible by humming or whistling or clapping or making some kind of noise that moves towards expression but is not confined to being linguistically coherent.
Aaron: Aaron receives mix CDs from everybody. Crafted with care and thoughts of his piece. Each CD has three movements.
OR: Aaron gives everyone the image that he used, and keeping in mind what each person perceives Aaron’s goal in the piece to be, they try to get to achieve the same by taking some other visual route. They return the piece a week later.
Lydia, my fantasy is that you would host for the class would have a very greedy potlatch and then deny us any eating utensils. you will lecture in a harsh British accent about table manners. We must defend ourselves.
Shawn, everyone from class would partner up and give each other make overs and fuck our own creations.
Noemi, we will have a silent critique, using physical gestures to respond. we would have to begin sitting in close proximity on the floor- the choice would have to be made by an individual to create physical distance as comment.
Aaron, we will go to the grand canyon.
Lydia, my fantasy is that you would host for the class would have a very greedy potlatch and then deny us any eating utensils. you will lecture in a harsh British accent about table manners. We must defend ourselves.
Shawn, everyone from class would partner up and give each other make overs and fuck our own creations.
Noemi, we will have a silent critique, using physical gestures to respond. we would have to begin sitting in close proximity on the floor- the choice would have to be made by an individual to create physical distance as comment.
Aaron, we will go to the grand canyon.
I was going to write something but I feel that I would just be repeating what Moriah has already voiced.
I thought these two things about John Cage and his interest in mushrooms were tangentially related to our discourse on critique:
http://www.mundusloci.org/fungus/culture/cage2.htm
Shawn: I want everyone in the class to have a handout of the man’s monologue. Everyone rearranges the words within the monologue to create their own reality, or “reality”.These are read individually to Shawn in a small bedroom with no doors or windows.
Noemi: We are all in a large white room. We’re all laying on a giant bed and your video is being projected onto the ceiling. The class watches for a while until everyone falls asleep. When we wake up we tell each other what we dreamed or how we slept.
Aaron: Together we all time travel back to being adolescents. We all settle in a suburban house in the Midwest, no one else lives in our neighborhood. We watch your video three times a day, morning, noon and night. When we have grown all grown old (Everyone 60 yrs +) we meet back at Cooper and go to the sculpture classroom and discuss your work.
As you know I am skeptical of “creative responses” but here is a good one from history. I found it in Rebecca Solnit’s book – River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
“In 1872 the whole world seemed to be in motion, but one moment of stillness punctuated the year. That August, on the Yellowstone River, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull and his tribesmen were fighting the soldiers protecting the Northern Pacific Railroad builders. A railroad line was being laid through what had been the last remote region, the last place in which the Plains nomads could live as they had lived. Earlier that summer Sitting Bull, whose very name described a buffalo, had declared at a peace conference, “I want those roads stopped just where they are, or turned in some other direction. We will then live peacefully together. If you stop your roads, we can get our game.” General Sherman replied, “You cannot stop the locomotive any more than you can stop the sun or the moon, and you must submit.” Sitting Bull was not ready to submit.
In the middle of the fight on the Yellowstone River, he laid down his gun and his quiver, walked toward the white soldiers, sat down on the grass and lit his pipe. Two Oglalas and two Cheyennes came and sat down with him, and he passed them the pipe as the bullets whizzed overhead. Reckless bravery was required for that act, which harks back to the intertribal battles where counting coup and winning honor for bravery were goals as potent as killing the enemy. But it suggests an even more powerful yearning for a reprieve from history and its hectic pace in the 1870’s. It was as though through courage and will the five men stepped off the runaway train of history or even stopped it. Perhaps in that interval they had time to see the grass clearly, to look at the sky, to think about where they stood, in the landscape as well as in history, to remember their lifetimes of roaming across such grasslands, fording rivers, following buffalo, of living in what then seemed to be the cyclical time of the seasons before the linear time of history caught them up. It was late to be fighting railroads. In 1872 the Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud and his followers, who had fought the UP so valiantly, had already taken the train to Washington to pursue their rights by other means. They ended up in the gold speculator Jim Fisk’s box at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.”