The Estheticist: Cut Erasers, Gun-Shaped Cakes, Overrepresentation and Roses
An art advice column.
I am part of a private Facebook group for art teachers who share learning resources and art activity ideas. A few days after the election, a first-year high school teacher posted a photo of an eraser that had been cut to small pieces by a student with a pair of scissors. She asked: “Just …WHY?”, adding later that she is facing a lot of behavioral issues in her class and that she doesn’t have any budget for art materials so she was understandably frustrated. She got an outpouring of supportive comments from other teachers, sharing her view, along the lines of “this needs to stop.” However, another teacher chimed in, writing: “yesterday one of my amazing middle school students did this. When I asked her why, she said she felt anxious about the election and needed a fidget. […] I wonder if we could encourage this self-soothing behavior by creating a station with recycled items to cut up.” I would love your thoughts on whether there is any benefit in encouraging destructive behavior in art classes to help students.
—Art teacher
As I believe you already infer, the second teacher’s response is the more sensitive and insightful one of the two. In psychology, there are a variety of positions regarding the controlled use of anger to get emotions out of our system (like rage rooms, where you go to simply break things and release stress); opponents of that practice argue that supporting destructive behavior only increases the likelihood of its recurrence in the future. But there is an intriguing case to be made to channeling rage into a creative activity: in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2007) author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich looked at it from a communal and ritualistic standpoint. In fact, when you think of it, there are many collective cathartic rituals based on the idea of destroying evil (for example, in Mexico, a big one is la quema de los judas, held on the last Sunday of Holy Week, consisting in burning or exploding the image of the devil).
Last, but not least: because the concept of art is traditionally linked to the idea of building something new, the term is almost always employed in a positive context. However, artistic creativity can and often involve taking things apart or outright destruction, from Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning drawing to Fluxus artist’s destruction of pianos to Ai Wei Wei’s destruction of an ancient Chinese vase. And an important principle of constructivist learning theory (and also of psychologists like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with his concept of Flow) is to identify existing interests and helping students pursue them in a productive way. So, I would encourage art teachers to explore ways in which students can process their feelings and emotions through non-traditional art activities that might involve a process of taking apart something, for example, forms of woodcarving, or— if you really have budget constraints and want to take advantage of the season— something simple like ice carving.
We often hear the expression "underrepresented artist" but we rarely hear "overrepresented artist". What would be a good measure for each? When is an underrepresented artist no longer underrepresented, and when is an artist overrepresented? Is there a happy medium?
—R. Mutt
You are right in that we hear a lot about underrepresentation and we need to pay more attention to overrepresentation. The problem with under/overrepresentation is that it is something that can neither be determined with a single formula, nor is it subjective (which is often thought of that way precisely because it is hard to measure). Most of the times, overrepresentation is the result of market demand— artists who are seemingly present everywhere in museums, biennials, and in the art market— and their ubiquitousness is as much a result of their increased visibility as it is a sense of FOMO on the part of tastemakers who want to ensure they are not left behind in embracing the latest fashion. This, to an extent, can be measured by the mere accounting of the frequency of certain names in biennials and museum exhibitions.
As to underrepresentation, there are a wide variety of metrics that can be used to determine specific questions of representation. We can objectively argue, for example, about the historic and contemporary underrepresentation of women artists in museum collections, based merely on numbers. The more important question is what constitutes a balanced idea of representation and how that impacts the character of what is being presented. For example, in the case of regional biennials, when the emphasis is to achieve an equal political representation of each country (i.e. when you can only select one artist from each country), you would end up with a strange assortment, wherein you pick, say, the most critically acclaimed artist in Brazil (pop. 216 million) alongside the most critically acclaimed artist of Monaco (pop. 36,000); a criteria by which you would hardly come up with a balanced curatorial proposal.
As to “a happy medium”: fact is that there are always more artists who are underrepresented than those who are not, given that so many significant oeuvres, historical and contemporary, are overlooked. So, more than a happy medium, the best practice is to fight overrepresentation with dedicated research, not lazy and instinctive emulation of what is popular elsewhere.
In 2011, I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Pitt Rivers Museum on a performance titled Beyond the Idea of the Tour, where I presented a cake in the shape of an AK-47, inspired by the museum's collection, as part of an educational activity. Recently, I saw that another artist in Mexico is working with a similar concept to mine, specifically creating cakes in the shape of AK-47s and other weapons, and I was wondering how you see this coincidence. Do you find it interesting that this idea is being revisited or is there any perspective that you think I should consider in this regard?
—Veronica Córdova de la Rosa
It is very common to find similarities between one's work and those of other artists, whether those works were made before (assuming you were not aware of them prior) or after ours. In many cases the similarity is actually a coincidence, where there is no way the artist would have known about the other work (either because it has not circulated much, or it was made a long time ago and has been somewhat forgotten). Other times, recurrent themes in art are such not necessarily because artists are actively imitating one another but simply because those themes are ubiquitous in contemporary culture.
In other cases, a work may seem very similar to another on the surface, but the social, political, etc. context can be very different. I have touched on this topic in a column titled The Menard Syndrome. There are several reasons why certain visual themes or conceptual strategies become recurrent. For example, and pertinent to your case, there are several examples of works by artists who make edible sculptures: in Mexico the main example is the work of César Martínez, who for decades has made these edible works as socio-political reflections of late capitalism. In the early 2000s, Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda ordered a cake from the Mexican bakery La Ideal in the shape of Sebastián's El Caballito (a large sculpture in Reforma Avenue in Mexico City), which functioned more as a mixture of tribute and parody. As to weapons, there is yet another artist, Robert The, who in the '90s began cutting books into the shape of guns—a series that became very popular in the realm of artists' books. And so on.
Although there are indeed cases of blatant plagiarism, I think that most of the time many of us produce works that we think are original but that are subconsciously using ideas or images from works we saw previously.
I don't know what the case might be with a cake in the shape of an AK-47. In general, outside of instances where an image is copied verbatim (which constitutes direct copyright infringement), there is not much you can do about it as an artist, other than ensuring that what you have produced in the past is properly documented and publicly shared for the record.
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I have 300+ [artist’s name withheld] paintings that legally belong to his sister. Since [the artist’s] death in 2006 she has not contributed any money for storage, handling or conservation. She did compensate for shipping two paintings and an old toy truck. I sold about 20K worth of paintings last summer and used the money to start an art gallery and for advertising for an exhibition of the artist’s work. Remnants of that event are on Facebook and the past issues of the Brooklyn Rail. Meanwhile his sister took tax deductions for contributions to museums which I, with the help of several people, arranged. All good. What I need to do now is get rid of the rest of the paintings and prints. Must be a statute of limitations on this kind of property, possession being 9/10ths and all. What does an artist do with another artist's art?
—S.P.
In this situation you are not merely a fellow artist, but you have been acting, wittingly or not, as executor of an artist’s estate. From your description, it appears that this artist died without a will; should that not be the case, the executor of the will should bear the legal and financial responsibilities of preserving the artist’s estate. From your description it appears that you have informally assumed that role, yet you do not have the legal obligation of managing this artist’s estate, nor do you have ownership of the works, unless if the artist’s sister chooses to donate or sell them to you. I would suggest that you work with a lawyer to ensure that the remaining works are transferred to the sister and she takes on the responsibility of them. The sister should be asked to produce a written declaration with her intention of what to do with the artworks (whether she wants to transfer ownership, donate them, etc.). If the sister is unresponsive or indifferent, you might have to petition the courts for a declaration of ownership; after which you might sell, donate or dispose of the works in whichever way you find most appropriate.
Is there Art in Nature?
—Peter Nesbett
The 17th century mystical poet Angelus Silesius answered this question best in a book titled The Cherubinic Wanderer (Der Cherubinische Wandersmann), published in 1657:
Die Rose ist ohne Warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet,
Sie achtet nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet.
("The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms,
It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen.")