P'unk Avenue Window

ZINES!

What purpose do they serve now that everything is a blog?

You actually have to go to a drop point to get a copy. It might even cost money. It doesn’t alert you when new content is available. It can’t be monitored by Analytics. It promotes deforestation. It ends up in a bankers box full of other flyers/posters/postcards/love letters and gets moved from apartment to apartment. Papercuts.

BUT!

When was the last time you felt nostalgia for a blog?

I don’t even know what any of the blogs I read look like. They’ve been anesthetized by Reader (thankfully). They have no physical properties, no color, no smell, they consist of pure nonlinear information—that stuff that makes us Literate Culture people txt each other to death and interact with all of our friends simultaneously in tabbed chat windows.

Here’s were the vernacular of materials comes in. I like the rare moments of being a graphic designer that allow me to be more of an industrial one. Objects are engineered, even if they are mostly two-dimensional. Publishers lose money on hardcover books, but there is a transcendent quality to reading one, touching book cloth. Size matters too. W magazine is so huge you forgive it for having 200 pages of ads and 5 of editorial content.

Speaking of zines, I picked up the new Megawords recently and (content aside) I enjoyed flipping through. It was printed on that matte paper with the waxy ink that smells like crayons. It’s my absolute favorite paper/ink experience. I feel like a kid with a coloring book and a box with twelve perfectly conical Crayolas.

Now that paper is nostalgic, or retronovative, what do we do? I say we fight. I’m starting a zine called Poster. Guess what, it will unfold and one side will be a huge print. The other side will have sweet content. It’ll use recycled paper with hippy ink. It’ll be impossible to re-map-fold. It’ll make you feel something while you read it, and maybe even after.

I’ve been having an ongoing dialog/freakout with myself regarding authorship and creating content.

My degree is in folding metaphorical envelopes and I’m tired of licking them. I want to be a letter writer, but I have nothing to say.

But maybe that’s the point. For the sake of argument, there have only been a dozen or so original (archetypal) films ever made. Following those have been scores—six hundred or so a year—of genre films. Many of which are formulaic, the smarter of which do that reflexive meta Charlie Kaufman thing, where they acknowledge the formula. Fifty or so years of French films have used the modes of production over plot as vehicles for morality.

Maybe this is ok. Our brains are relational. We make connections and use them to process new things based on our previous experience. In the animal kingdom this probably helps animals decide what to do when they encounter an unfamiliar predator. In graphic design, museum art, music, film, and literature this is called vernacular. With culture ever reproducing, remixing, co-opting, we need these similes and metaphors.

When reviewing a movie for a friend I say, “it was sort of like Alien, but with that drug-stupor Spike Lee steadycam thing.” Or a band, “they’re kind of like Black Dice, but fun like Black Eyes, with the train wreck theatrics of Black Lips.”

At some point the snake might finish swallowing itself and we’ll be released from this cycle. For the time being I’m just going to have to keep making better envelopes with totally rad security patterns.

Katie Murken is a friend of P’unk Avenue. Geoff and Alex worked with her on the Debtor’s Inheritance project two years ago. She is currently the head of 2D Foundations at Tyler School of Art, leading classes in digital tools and printmaking.

Alex and I met her for some breakfast-for-lunch and continued a conversation about art and criticism begun while ice skating two Fridays ago. I took some rushed short-hand notes, so much of the following is paraphrased and polished to make us sound eloquent.

…

KM: I just got back from the Millay Colony [Hudson River Valley artist residency program] juries and enjoyed hearing Chris Stackhouse speak. His writing is really good. He expressed an interest in Philly.

RB: Yeah, I’d like to get in touch with William Pym and do a gallery tour or something.

[segue into talking about curation as creation]

RB+AG: But Does It Float is really great, pulling together beautiful editorials of contemporary and historically relevant art and design. Sometimes they are posting photos of the signage and wall cards from an installation, or the work of a seminal architect with his or her photo. Jason Kottke is about to give a lecture at SVA on curating the web. That should be really good.

KM: That sounds interesting. I just walked through one of the “Notations” shows at the PMA that Carlos Basvaldos curated. This idea of criticism AND creation through curating the permanent collection has become really relevant.

RB: Like the Vic Muniz show at MoMA [appropriately titled Rebus].

[Rick gets caught up in the theory of theory]

AG: I think you need to get away from the theory of theory.

KM: Yeah, I think slideshows and imagery are going to be necessary at this Junto to give context to the stuff you want to critique.

RB: I agree, definitely. I guess I am fixated on critiquing criticism. It’s just that the latest Art Forum has something like forty pages of writing and more than a hundred pages of ads. [It's become the Vogue of art criticism]

KM: Have you guys seen any of the Art 21 programming on PBS? [Sadly, no] What about the Biennials? Are they doing anything interesting for you?

RB: I liked the Whitney last year, I hated the 2006 one. I just feel like two hundred years ago the critics had artists wrangled, and it made the work narrow. Now the work is very broad and the critics are at the artists’ mercy. We need a Baudelaire to balance things out.

KM: So you’re into this Clement Greenberg thing? It seems like there’s a lack of critical expertise to discuss work that can’t be framed within Modernism.

RB: Critics haven’t updated their vocabulary. There’s almost no frame for this stuff. Going to a New York gallery can be an Emperor’s New Clothes experience. We went to art school, but feel stupid there. The wall cards are written by the artists. That feels really inappropriate. Critics need help us synthesize the work into something we can relate. Create an inclusive public vocabulary. A wide audience is going to these Superstar Retrospective shows, but missing out on all the more difficult work.

KM: I think there is a difficulty in translating something visual to something literate. The interview can be a really good critical tool. Asking questions of the artist can be an opportunity for straight talk.

RB: Yeah, I’m really interested in replacing the audio tour with the sound experience of replaying a gallery walk with Curator, Artist, Critic. Experiencing the work as you hear their dialog about it.

KM: When reviewing a show, nowadays, there is the curation and presentation of the show. That adds a layer of opacity over the work, it can make critique more difficult.

AG: Is there anything I said in there [gesturing to my notebook]? Damn, no AG’s.

Last night, in considering possible post topics for today, I emailed myself the following:

Creating space to experience art, Bresson walking slowly backwards out of the room so as you want to follow him, Eno wanting to leave things out, while players want to hear themselves play. Making a cool medium from a hot one. Film with the lights off. White websites. A new function of modernism, subjective, interactive. John cage, lettng the audience hear itself, it’s contribution to the music. Trying to squint your ears to eaves drop after thinking you heard your name. Drawing in the audiences attention. Having them come to you, never demanding it.

Private, personal, contemplative aesthetics, subjective, conversational.

This morning I forwarded that to Alex, asking him to run a litmus test on the idea:

Just pick something that isn’t an argument built on top of your deep
vocabulary. If it can’t be said with simple words, fuck it.

What I mean is this: we eat carefully presented meals slower than we inhale reheated chili. When my mashed potatoes have a leafy garnish stuck in them I feel the need to meet the chef halfway. It makes me eat with as much care as went into the preparation of the food.

When a doctor whispers instructions in that hush way that gives us goose bumps we listen intently to every word. When our parents used to scold us we shut off and let the scolding wash over, perhaps some of it was absorbed as vibration through our skin.

In art this idea is leveraged through the use of negative space. We fill in the parts that are empty. In music we use the negative space to anticipate the next note. It creates drama. When something appears deliberately sparse or still we engage it to find out why it is so.

To expand on the examples I listed last night: I love Robert Bresson’s films because he makes us do work. He used non-professional actors, calling them models. They deliver their lines flatly, they move stiffly, the camera moves very little. He creates a very deliberate mystery with all of this negative space and we get sucked in to equalize the pressure.

In an interview for Tokion magazine a few years ago, Brian Eno mentioned an essay by Warren McCulloch called What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain. The premise is: our eyes constantly fight off habituation. If we stop scanning a room the rods and cones stop transmitting new information. A frog’s eyes habituate on purpose. It’s what makes the fly buzzing about the main object of the frog’s interest. This idea has been put to use in Eno’s minimalist music for quite a while. He creates a ground for our ears to absorb, then plays with themes and accents that float above that ground.

That bit of positive space surrounded by negative is our fly. When it’s left room to breathe, we gobble it up.

A few reasons why I don’t interact with contemporary art criticism:

A lot of it sucks. To be more specific, a lot of it is self-serving. A lot of it has agenda of a White House Press Secretary, never badmouthing the regime. Some of it is hiding in the back pages of text-heavy egghead magazines. Some of it remains unread in the forewords of over-designed exhibition catalogs shrink wrapped on museum gift shop shelves. The rest of it exists in the audience-of-one land of blogville.

That refers to the formal branch.

The good kind is overheard waiting in line for the bathroom at openings. It’s spontaneous and unsolicited. It’s snarky, but good-natured. It’s conversational, between friends.

Art pushes a lot of envelops. Art that engaged the audience, turning them into a community of participants, came into vogue in the early nineties. Way before digital social networks. So if art makes a solid attempt at staying ahead of the curve, why are the apparatuses with which we digest and reflect on it so Victorian?

There are exceptions. Jerry Saltz (of NY Magazine) is funny, accessible, and relevant. His most recent column provides an apropos critique of exhibition space— the imposing, expansive, anachronistic kind in which most art is still viewed. A lot of contemporary art is critical of previous movements, or self-critical. And we are certainly not want for publishing/conversation platforms.

Here’s what I want:

For critics and gallery types to take off their black sweaters, roll up their Paul Smith sleeves, and give us some straight talk. Match the criticism to the audience, to the work. To stop taking the art speak lexicon for granted and using an appropriate frame for the conversation.

For museums to stop being so museumy, especially when exhibiting contemporary work. Some “art as reliquary” objects are appropriate in hush rooms protected by a rectangle of sandpaper tape on the floor, but others beg to be discussed, to be engaged. Audio tours are a joke. Who cares what the unoffensively British lady has to say? I want RFID museum plaques that let me passively engage a historical work, to learn about the collector, the artist, it’s exhibition history, all information they already store in a database somewhere. What’s the provenance? Where’s the marginalia?

OR… to fix the audio tour. Invite the curator to take a walk through an exhibition with a critic or interviewer and record the conversation. Let me listen to an audio tour of discourse about the show. Let me hear the interviewer call bullshit on the curator. Give me the inside scoop. Why is the white cube so blackbox?

I’m pushing for this to be the topic of our next Junto. If I can convince anyone else that contemporary art criticism is relevant, that is. I want to call some bluff and create some room for constructive shit talk.

Last Saturday John and I saw Thurston Moore and Mats Gustafsson at the International House at 37th and Chestnut. Thurston is obviously most well known for his involvement in Sonic Youth, but has also spent the better part of thirty years running his record label Ecstatic Peace!, produced a number of solo records, and dabbled in the free jazz scene. Mats Gustafsson is a Swedish free jazz saxophone player. It was a free jazz show.

It was my first free jazz show. I attended with an open mind, half fearing it would be an unironic mimic of the Bill Pullman jazz scene in Lost Highway. Thurston and Mats took the stage, picked up their instruments, and started to produce a cacophony of squawks using chopsticks on the guitar and eastern African click-type noises from the sax, respectively. It progressed thus for ten or so minutes alienating my ears, getting them fairly accustomed to 80dB nails on the chalkboard.

Then the show started. Mats switched to playing a photo theramin, making complex waves of white and grey noise, which played against Thurston’s kneaded guitar feedback. I started to feel drawn in by the inclusive envelop of sticky noise. It was around this time I got a text message from John sitting four seats down:

This initial set ran for about 45 minutes, ebbing and flowing between thick, lush, womby noise and the trebly terror of a dentist’s office in a machine shop.

After a short break, the encore. Thurston quietly signaled with three extended fingers that this would be a short, short, three minute, short piece. Mats used his thigh as a mute, creating a very convincing ship docking sound. He then started a feedback loop with the theramin, some sort of distortion pedal, and a digital delay, taking it closer to his amp for another layer of feedback. Thurston spent a moment playing with the quarter inch jack on his guitar, then touched the head to the top of his amp. This created a sympathetic feedback loop with Mats’s in a totally incomprehensible magic wand sort of way. This big sticky peanut butter sandwich of noise progressed and throbbed for a minute or two. Thurston ground his guitar against the top of his amp, scratching and dragging them around, then let the feedback rest and swirl a bit.

He walked to the center of the stage, bent down toward the shared surge strip, and flicked the power.

The notion of popularity used to be a hierarchical, fascistic one. Stereotypes were developed and fine-tuned in popular culture and broadcast media. We then absorbed them and the privileged among us went to the mall to buy what we were sold while watching TGIF.

Those fascistic systems rely on random punition to enforce cultural norms. If you didn’t have a Stussy shirt you were a loser; if you had one, but didn’t skateboard you were a poser. Hecklings came when you least expected, and were most easily avoided by getting a skateboard and a Stussy shirt and spending two to four hours a day learning to kickflip.

Skateboarding and sixth grade power structures are an edge case, however. By-and-large America has become a super power by employing the inverse of a fascistic system. We have the lottery, we have coupons, sweepstakes, Publisher’s Clearing House, random acts of kindness, e-cards, candygrams, Amazon wish lists. America is built on conformity by random reward, we never know when we’re going to get ours, so we’d better keep our heads down and get that gold star for the day. It’s a sort of cultural Stockholm Syndrome. (I first read about this idea in a super old issue of Hermenaut magazine, which is most definitely now-defunct.)

Zeldman Minus Zeldman

So, the last few years have seen technology rapidly increase the democratization of everything. Access to media and deceasing costs of production have caused an increase in the rate of “aristocratic inflation.” It’s a lot harder to flaunt your privilege when everyone (in the ever-expanding middle class) has a flat screen TV, computers with internet access, cell phones, etc. I read yesterday that private jets are on fire sale since the stock brokers had to give them up.

Now then, if you can leverage this new democratic paradigm of popularity, you can quickly gain influence. Influence has long been the hidden spoil of war. What good is land if not for the cooperation of its inhabitants. As we all become more and more plugged in, more cerebral, war becomes an intellectual battle of influence. Whoever speaks loudest (and with the most valuable message) gets the readership, gets the militia. Ideas can’t be shot at and ideology can’t be blown up.

Since no one is forcing you to read this or that you now get a choice—unless your government is trying in vain to filter your consumption. This places the burden on the influencer to create quality content, to have the best ideology, to give out random rewards.

It’s easier to achieve and maintain popularity, and perhaps that popularity is now more rightful. But wait, if everyone becomes popular, then no one will. We will be Commander in Chief and Private First Class.

Forward this to ten of your friends or no one will post on your wall ever again!

So, the tricky people that defined the word semantics thought they could keep things simple by limiting its definition to the study of the literal meaning of words, leaving the interpretation of figurative meaning up to the folks in pragmatics.

But who studies the contextual meaning of words? The hermenauts look at the whole text and more recently even concern themselves with multimedia, but they aren’t looking through the text. Linguists look at language in social context, but what about aesthetic context? We’ve all been told that the form is central to content and meaning, but what exactly is its effect?

There is a way to break down the aesthetic context of messages and to determine the stylistic etymology of various forms. Currently this is done in art criticism, but doesn’t share across the hallway to the language department.

As modern art purged formal content and started eating its own plasticity, new discourse emerged to contextualize the new functions of art. Painting about painting, the Hip-hop remix, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, all that stuff.

My point is this: since the terms “graphic design,” “graphic arts,” “visual communication” came into existence people rarely read/view/absorb undesigned texts. They are increasingly aware that they are viewing designed texts, they’ve seen the Helvetica documentary, they like this logo and hate this one.

How do we begin, then, to parse the meaning of the aesthetic context of all of this designed information? If I make a word red or bold or blurry it changes its interpretation and thus its meaning. Why red? Why bold? Why blurry?

Ironically, pictorial imagery and symbolism developed before language, maybe we just forgot to pay attention to red and bold and blurry while we absorbed everything via romantic longhand set in Caslon.

I won’t bore you with too much of a history lesson, but through a certain sequence of events we (you and I) have taken over the role of industry (since industry totally sucked in 2008).

For the purpose of this post, “media” and “technology” are going to mean the same thing. (Everyone and their mom should totally read Understanding Media, it’s excellent.) They both represent any extension of humans, like a wheel lets us move around quicker and easier, extending our range. Paper, the same thing, you can give a note to a messenger and he or she can deliver your thoughts to someone very far away. All media until the telegraph had an explosive effect on humanity—better roads made for faster travel, the printing press let thoughts travel those roads, money allowed for power transfer and commerce to spread across regions. This explosion facilitated nationalism and shortly thereafter imperialism.

Electric media had the opposite effect, the complete implosion of culture. The telegraph connected people across the atlantic, making global synchronization possible. The radio, telephone, movies, television, cell phone all furthered the trend.

The addition of the Internet to this equation has curbed the implosion, or at least interfered with the trajectory of all those imploding particles. Many of us no longer rely on strictly one-directional broadcast media for news and other information. The internet has facilitated a retribalization of culture, not based on geography, but interest. I can read the hipster pinko news and chat it up with my post-conceptual photographer friends, while someone else can join a vintage rifles of famous assassinations message board.

One more step back before the final step forward. All this media is primarily used for political power, the variable is how it derives influence. Mechanical technology: making war and moving that war around faster. Early electric technology: making sure the war is going well because it’s really far away now. Broadcast electric technology: unify the masses by entertaining them with all the same entertainment, it will create fraternity. Consumerism: the war is over, let’s use all this industry to sell things to people and keep the economy going.

A long long time ago we all made everything we personally needed for survival (or at least someone in the family made everything). Then we got caught up in all that war and imperialism. Then we didn’t know how to make things, but we could go to the store and get everything we need. But we felt a longing for making things. In the last two decades there has been a trend of “creative consumption” or “authentic consumption.” Thinkers like Sharon Zukin posited that we buy the sneakers that express how we feel about ourselves, shopping is a creative act.

More recently this has changed. Buying culture wasn’t enough. We still feel empty. We need to create. We have entered Post-Consumerism. I refuse to buy stuff for the logo, the logos are all crappy. The shoe companies don’t design their own shoes, they have contests to have us design them. The number of tshirts has outnumbered the people buying tshirts.

So, we have in-a-way reentered an age of localized production and mass creation, but not for the same reason. I don’t create out of necessity, I don’t create for the process, I create in order to be consumed. We enter the world of Post-Modernism, scary. We all need a consumer base. We all are that consumer base. I have a flat file full of my friends’ art. Geoff has two. We have taken over the role of industry. I can buy handmade and feel good about it. The authenticity in consumption is restored. But only as long as we keep up both ends of the bargain. We are producer and consumer, so we can’t stop doing either. The economy would collapse.

Thus enter the Weapons of Mass Reproduction. We need factories: magcloud.com,
blurb.com, lulu.com, cafepress.com, threadless.com. We need storefronts: blurb.com, lulu.com, threadless.com, etsy.com, shopify.com, our own wordpresses. We need consumers: us!

In 1977 the Centre Georges Pompidou opened in Paris. The design of a museum had not previously been approached with such an inverted set of goals: accommodate the public first, then consider the art. The museum was an immediate success as a social institution, an inviting and unpretentious place to engage in art. The chilly distance between viewer and work had been removed conceptually, it seemed to lack all proverbial velvet ropes.

Its success derives from a fusion of its functions and aesthetics. You could say it’s a naked museum, there is no façade, there are no stone columns, there are no imposing Rocky stairs. It is a seven-story metal matrix, wrapped in weaving colorful tubes that contain all the buildings life systems (electric, water, waste). That’s where Metabolism comes in—approaching the museum, you get to see its guts. This novelty has a warming effect on visitors, a trip to the conceptual art museum feels more like a trip to the how-things-work museum, engaging curiosity.

So—here comes the segue—what an interesting approach to designing everything, show them how it works and they’ll want to know more. People often call what we do here at P’unk Ave “minimalist,” but I’m going to be nitpicky and call it “essentialist.” And since that name sounds stodgy, I will not refer to it again. Minimalism implies reducing things until they avoid literal interpretation and take on poetic/interpretive meaning. “These three fluorescent lights represent the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, clearly.” We would rather do design that invites curiosity, gets people exploring, and reduces all those pesky barriers to entry.

We rarely use “design elements” in the way museums have columns and stairs and two-thousand pound front doors. We like our buttons to be round so you feel obligated to click them. We try to make it damn clear where in the site you currently are. We have a “please touch” section in many of our sites where users get to contribute. Marketing sites have no excuse to be static these days and museums should stop shushing.

Above represents the entire /images folder of a site we recently completed. There are little more than icons, buttons, and arrows (and some rounded corners to keep things friendly). We feel it’s possible to use very little, an essential amount perhaps, and still manage to create something friendly and useful.

The Centre Pompidou draws a crowd every day, coming for the art, coming to stare at the building. The public always feeling engaged in the experience, less a faceless part of the throng, that’s what the Louvre is for.