When Was the Last Time You Had a Heapin' Helping of Links?

Robert Boyd

Don't tell the IOC, but Brian Piana is making unauthorized Olympics art. In his patented style, he is using the conversation about the Olympics on Twitter to create these Frank Stella-like concentric squares. He writes:

Medals (After Stella) pulls its composition cues from Twitter, presenting a changing array of concentric squares in gold, silver, and bronze. The piece searches Twitter for recent tweets containing the words “olympics”, “medal”, and at least one of the three medal colors. New qualifying tweets appear in the outer-most ring and are subsequently pushed towards the center.

You can see the latest permutation here, and Piana posts some recent versions here.

San Antonio's Loss is Houston's Gain. Look, running a gallery in Houston is no bed of roses. Bryan Miller Gallery didn't close because Bryan Miller couldn't handle all the success he was having. And yet, we get galleries moving here from other cities. First Art Palace flees Austin for Houston, and now David Shelton is moving his gallery from San Antonio to Houston. As tough as the gallery environment in Houston is, it may be worse in Austin and San Antonio. ["David Shelton Moves to Houston," Rainey Knudson, Glasstire, July 26, 2012]

Roger Langridge has excellent taste and staggering mimicry skills. And Tripwire, a magazine that I've never read and that at first glance doesn't really seem like it's aimed at me, has excellent taste for publishing Roger Langridge. That is all. [Hat tip Fantagraphics]

Rockwell Kent in Philadelphia. This post from the always-interesting Printeresting makes me wish I had been in Philly last month. The great print-maker/illustrator Rockwell Kent had a big exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Kent is less well-known than he should be--his story doesn't fit in with the standard modernist narrative of 20th century American art. But he was one of the greats. ["Rockwell Kent at the PMA," Printeresting, July 30, 2012]

 Monitor Man Bartlett's daily expenditures in excruciating detail at Occupy Man. Man Bartlett doesn't do anything short of obsessive. Anyway, here's a very nice video about Man Bartlett. ["VIDEO: Artist Man Bartlett Turns Social Media Into Playful Social Critique," by Kyle Chaka and Tom Chen, Blouin Artinfo, July 25, 2012]

Miao Jiaxin at Box 13 (NSFW)

by Robert Boyd

Is it possible to be shocked or scandalized anymore? If so, Chinaman's Suitcase on view now at Box 13 might be the show to do it. On one hand, we live in a society where sex is pervasive. Nowadays, TV shows will have characters explain what is going on while having sex--a device called sexposition. As I was driving home from work, I noticed a grand new building being constructed on the side of a freeway--a strip club to be called "Lust." Lust will be the 26th strip club in Houston (by my count).

But Chinaman's Suitcase included a concept so amusingly perverse that I had never even considered it before. Artist Miao Jiaxin calls them "ass prints," but that phrase seems rather tame. Ass prints are what are left on the windows of Fondren Library when the Baker 13 make their monthly streak across the campus of Rice University, wearing only shaving cream. It would be more accurate to call what Jiaxin has produced "asshole prints."


Miao Jiaxin and Eijane Janet Lin, Collaboration No. IV (Assprints), 2011, archival inkjet print

Jiaxin's collaborator on Assprints is Eijane Janet Lin, who like Jiaxin got an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2011. (Interestingly enough, she is also a graduate of Houstons's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.) The photo depicts Jiaxin about to apply lipstick to Lin asshole. The pair are surrounded by hundreds of prints that seem to be lipstick on tissue, presumably from her asshole. These prints look similar to those made when women "blot" freshly applied lipstick with a napkin. As Jiaxin performs this procedure, Lin--dressed in sexy stockings and a bra-- is using a small computer with a coffee cup handy. It's as if the whole process is boring and she needs something to do while Jiaxin makes his prints.

But in fact, she was actually online (her image being streamed) as this was happening, as this video from Lin's website shows.



Lin was on a sex cam site called Cam 4, showing the ass prints as they got made. Simultaneously on the site was a wide-angle view from the side showing the action basically from the same angle as the image in above. So this was a performance recorded for the art gallery crowd, but performed live for the sex cam crowd. There is an implicit challenge here--to create art what will appeal equally to both audiences. They both have highly different expectations and criteria. And both audiences are somewhat outside of the mainstream, but in very different ways.


Miao Jiaxin, Happy Together (detail), 2010, two archival inkjet prints

What does Jiaxin do with these asshole prints? Happy Together suggests that he scans them, colors them, and creates collages from them that resemble bouquets of flowers. There is irony in using assholes to depict a bouquet of flowers. Maybe Jiaxin is challenging our idea of beauty. Or maybe he is challenging himself to make something beautiful out of such unpromising raw material. (Artists who work with garbage, refuse and debris do something similar.) Maybe he's just fond of assholes.


Miao Jiaxin and Eijane Janet Lin, Collaboration No. V (Stripper), 2011, archival inkjet print

Collaboration No. V (Stripper) is another audacious, funny image. Jiaxin and Lin are in a nondescript room. Jiaxin has the clothes and props to signal decadence--slacks, dress-shirt and loose tie, sunglasses indoors, wine glass and big cigar, stripper giving him a lapdance and perhaps weirdest of all, a revolver.  The revolver gives him kind of a gangster look, like a character from a John Woo Hong Kong action film. The fact that he has the gun aimed at his own head (but without his finger on the trigger) implies that he is a self-aware gangster--a live-fast-and-die-young sort. If that's who you are, best to maximize your pleasure today--Jiaxin is living life to the hilt in this photo.

But the really weird part is Lin, the stripper covered with money. Stripping is all about money--the stripper extracting as much money as quickly as possible from the client. And part of this is accomplished by tease--get the client excited enough to keep buying dances, without ever actually fulfilling him. But the problem in this piece is that for this transaction to occur, the client needs to take the money off Lin. For her to become progressively more exposed, she has to lose her money. The money would therefore flow in the wrong direction, from stripper to client. The circumstance portrayed here is a topsy-turvy version of the real thing.

Chinaman's Suitcase consisted of videos of performances, video stills of performances, and a performance, I Have a Dream. In I Have a Dream, Jiaxin slept through the entire performance. While he slept, a video camera put his image up on the social media site Chatroulette.


Miao Jiaxin, I Have a Dream, 2012, live performance and live-feed broadcast

The Chatroulette screen was projected on the wall. Chatroulette is a camera feed and instant messager application. What made it different from Yahoo or MSN messager was that your chat partner is randomly chosen. If you aren't interested in that partner, you can instantly change to the next randomly chosen partner. There are two things about this. First, if you go on Chatroulette, you will likely not see anyone for very long. If you aren't instantly what your randomly chosen chat partners wants to see, he (and it's 99%+ male) will quickly move on to the next partner. Second, you will see lots of random dudes masturbating.


Miao Jiaxin, I Have a Dream (screen detail), 2012, live performance and live-feed broadcast

This was a fairly tame Chatroulette chatter (his penis was inside his pants instead of out). This exhibit had more dicks than any I've ever seen. If you look at the image above, you will see that the chat partner is visible in the top panel while Jiaxin is visible in the bottom. But also visible are two people watching the performance. So all those masturbating chatters suddenly saw a bunch of people in a room standing around a guy asleep on a comically small bed. I wonder what they made of it. Were they even curious? Apparently not for most of them. They moved on after a few seconds, never pausing in their desultory wanking.


Miao Jiaxin, Money Laundering (still), 2011, video documentation of a performance piece

Not all of the pieces in this show involve dicks, assholes, and/or strippers, but the hint of the illegal pervades much of the work. For instance, Money Laundering was a performance of a very literal interpretation of the metaphorical act. (Money laundering involves taking money earned illegally and disguising its origin so that it seems like legal earnings.)


Miao Jiaxin, Chinaman's Suitcase (still), 2012, video

Two of the pieces have specifically Chinese content. Chinaman's Chance showed Miao Jiaxin carefully spraypainting the carcasses of several ducks. (I couldn't tell whether they were real ducks or not.) He then put them in a suitcase and carried them through the streets to a food store, where they were hung up in the window. The video concludes with people reacting to the colorful ducks.


Chinaman's Suitcase from Miao Jiaxin on Vimeo.

The names uses a somewhat derogatory term for a person of Chinese descent that dates from the 19th century wave of Chinese immigration. And the image of ducks hanging in a store window is a stereotypical image of those urban neighborhoods that often end up with the name "Chinatown." That Jiaxin is playing around with stereotypes is obvious, but I don't quite get the colors. They're funny--they turn this food item into something obviously inedible.


Miao Jiaxin, Mom's Suitcase (still), 2012, video

A suitcase is the primary prop in another video, Mom's Suitcase. The repeated use of the suitcase in his videos reminds one of of his multinational existence as an overseas Chinese man.  In Mom's Suitcase, he crawls into a large suitcase wearing a suit. His mother then cuts all his clothes from his body with scissors. Then we see his mom dragging the suitcase with Jiaxin through the streets of Shanghai. It's a heavy case and you can see her struggling with it. Mama Jiaxan is definitely a trouper! This piece has a hint of the idea of smuggling in it--human smuggling. (Money Laundering also refers to smuggling, but indirectly. Much money laundering involved smuggling ill-gotten cash into countries with very secretive banking laws and then depositing the money in one of those banks.)


Mom's suitcase from Miao Jiaxin on Vimeo.

I don't want to say I understand what Jiaxin is trying to express in these works. Certainly has has something to say about sex and social media, about the condition of being an overseas Chinese person and about crime. But what precisely is not obvious. But so what? This work was immensely amusing and thought-provoking. Any artist who can sleep through a performance and still keep his audience entertained is some kind of wizard.

Pinterest and Art

by Robert Boyd



If you haven't been living in a monastery for the past few weeks, you've probably heard of the latest iteration of social networking, Pinterest. Pinterest is a website that allows you to toss up images from other websites into little collections called "boards" (i.e., bulletin boards). I think the idea of these boards is semi-aspirational. Like a board called "Fashion" might be used as a way for the board owner to keep visual notes on fashion she would like to have for herself. I use "she" deliberately because Pinterest appeals primarily to women users. Common users' boards are fashion, makeup, hair-styles, and home decor. And fundamentally, it seems strongly oriented towards consumer products and consumerism in general. (Read more about Pinterest here.)

But it strikes me as a particularly useful social media site for fans of art as well as art professionals. What it does really well is to make it easy to post an image that you like. And any plugged-in art lover is always coming across images that she likes. Here's how my Pinterest space looks.



I have seven boards (at present). "Art I've Seen and Liked" the one I pin to most. If I see something I like on Hyperallergic, for example, I'll "pin" it to that board. And if someone looks at the image and likes it, they can click through back to the original Hyperallergic post. (I mention this because in one way, Pinterest allows you to swipe images, but I think it ultimately benefits the site you swiped from if viewers click back to the origin.) It goes without saying that I also post images from posts on The Great God Pan Is Dead. So far, the traffic back to this site from Pinterest is modest, but every day I get new "followers" on Pinterest, so I expect that to grow. (Below is the "Art I've Seen and Liked" board.)



This seems like the obvious benefit--any artist who blogs or has a Tumblr or Flickr account can spread her own images of her art via Pinterest. Likewise galleries and museums which host images on their own website. Pinning them onto their own Pinterest pages pushes them out into the world where they can be followed back to the source. The ease of use of Pinterest (by far the easiest of all social media that I have tried) combined with the emphasis on images make it, I think, an potentially powerful tool for people in the art world.

Self Portrait #1

by Robert Boyd


TouchGraph visualization of all my Facebook friends

Portraiture is constantly being redefined. I remember in an art history textbook in college seeing two portraits of a 19th century Maori; one by a European artist and one by a Maori artist. The European artist depicted the Maori man in a three-quarter view, in a naturalistic style. His facial tattoos were drawn in detail, but as a pattern on a solid object--his head. The Maori artist drew the Maori man's eyes and mouth in a somewhat simplified way but drew the pattern of the tattoo exactly. Because the two artists had different ideas about representation and identity, they approached their shared subject in vastly different ways.

One way of depicting a person is to present data about that person. Therefore, a data visualization could be considered a portrait--at least at this point in Western cultural history.

The image above is a visual depiction of all my friends and networks from Facebook as calculated by an app called TouchGraph. TouchGraph looks at all your friends and how they relate to all your other friends. It tries to color code them according to certain associations. How this sorting works is kind of mysterious. For example, the light blue group is mostly family, but also includes a guy I knew in high school. The green is a lot of people from Houston (if not currently in Houston) and includes some people I went to high school and college with, others I know from here and there, and lots of people in the Houston art scene. But the orange group is also people from the Houston art scene, as is the little two-person magenta group. The red group are mostly people who come from the world of comics, but also includes a large subset of people I went to college with. The dark blue group is mostly people I worked at Dark Horse Comics with--why, of all the places I worked, they would be lumped in their own separate group, I don't know. Probably the least confusing grouping are the purple people, all of whom I went to business school with.

This is free, off-the-shelf software, so I can't say I'm being particularly original in this information-age self-portrait. But I nonetheless think it is valid--as much so as a photographic self-portrait would be.

Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor

by Robert Boyd

I was at Box 13 last night and one impression I got was that there were a lot of dicks in this show. For example, all the pieces by Joey Fauerso featured a naked guy in a landscape, as in this video, The Clearing.

 
Joey Fauerso, still from The Clearing, video

Then in a show called #notmethough, curated by Cameron Blaylock and Steven J. Thomson, Jonatan Lopez produced this self-portrait, #godmethough.html, where the viewer sees Lopez's body through a bunch of tiny embedded YouTube videos, including one of his junk.


Jonatan Lopez, #godmethough.html, social media and html, 2011

Well, everything thesis has its antithesis, and as far as dicks go, Cody Ledvina's performance eschewed them, as this disclaimer implies:

Cody Ledvina, Gawd parents: I am real poster (detail), 2011

 As a board member of Box 13, I am pretty much required to take responsibility for any dicks in any piece of art we exhibit. If you were offended by the numerous dicks in this show, I sincerely want to hear from you. Write me at: Robert Boyd, c/o Santa Claus, Santa's Workshop, North Pole.