Chris Rywalt, Franklin at Class, 2010, Conté on paper, 5.5x8.5 inches
I attended about three hours of #class yesterday. Franklin all but requested that I write it up so here I go. I'm not sure it's a good idea (or a good investment of time) but I'll do it anyway.
What is #class? Basically, William Powhida and Jen Dalton took over Ed Winkleman's gallery, painted the walls with blackboard paint, put some tables and chairs in the middle of the room, and called it #class. Over the course of the past month they've invited various people in to talk, discuss, hang out, do yoga, draw on the walls, and so on.
Let me explain how I was feeling going in: I was a little uncomfortable. I was going entirely to support Franklin. I had no desire to go myself. I'd written bad things about some of the people there. I'd stopped speaking to some of them. So I went in expecting a negative atmosphere. I figured there would be some heated discussion, maybe some serious disagreements. I was hoping there'd be a fistfight, because that would be cool and old-fashioned, something that could go into the art history books, like when Willem de Kooning punched Clement Greenberg in the Cedar Tavern. So I tried to prepare myself mentally for it. I thought about what I might respond to various things people might say. I arranged possible arguments for topics that might come up. I tried to concentrate on absorbing other people's statements slowly, because I've found that I tend to accept what people say without fully grasping it until much later, and only then do I understand where we disagreed. So I wanted to make sure I thought more deeply about the conversation as it was happening instead of getting too caught up in the moment.
All of which turned out to be wasted effort because absolutely nothing interesting happened at all.
I arrived about a half hour before the end of Ben Davis' talk on "9.5 Theses on Art and Class". I recognized about half the people in the room: James Wagner, Barry Hoggard, Joanne Mattera, Man Bartlett (he had his furry hat on), Ed Winkleman, William Powhida, Jen Dalton, and of course, Franklin. Shortly after I sat down Piri Halasz arrived, introduced herself to me, and found a seat next to me. Ben was standing and mostly leading the discussion, which had wandered into whether the government should pay people to be artists or not.
I realized as I sat there listening that I actually didn't mind the very basic idea of #class, which was getting a bunch of people together to talk about art. Here I was, getting a chance to meet Piri, who I'd only known online, and seeing Franklin visiting from Boston, and saying hello to Joanne, who I like very much. Just putting people together that way, it's a good thing.
I realized what I object to about #class is the insistence that this be art. It's not art. It's talking. I feel no need to expand the definition of art to include a conversation, a shared meal, or a happening. Or I should say I feel no need to accept the expansion that's already been going on for the past sixty years or so. In fact I think it's a good idea to start narrowing the definition down again, throwing out things that have been dragged under the umbrella of art. And this group of people sitting around bullshitting? It doesn't have to be art.
You can go and sit through the hours of video of the event if you feel so inclined. At 1:12:45 you can see Franklin wave to me as I walk by the door (he had a view of the street from his perch) and at 1:13:04 you can see me walk in and sit down right at the bottom of the camera frame. From then on you can stare at my bald spot. Note that I pull out the New York Times crossword and completely fail to fill in any answers.
While I sat there I checked out the blackboards around the room. One of the attendees had brought in her kindergarten class earlier so the boards were filled to kindergartner height with drawings, all of which together had more charm, energy, intelligence and fun than anything anywhere else in the room. You know how the anti-art cliche is "My kid can do that"? Well, your kid can't, because she's too creative.
William Powhida, Ed's Rules, 2010, pencil, colored pencil and watercolor on paper, 14x11 inches
Ben's session ended and some people left and some stayed. William Powhida came over and introduced himself to me and I introduced him to Piri. He shook my hand. Bill said something to Piri about how we'd argued a bit online but that was closest we came to that fistfight. (I always want to be one of those people who looks at the proffered hand for shaking coldly and with scorn but it never works out. I always end up shaking hands.)
Somewhere in there Agni Zotis came in, which was kind of funny, since I only know her because John Morris rented her gallery space for the Blogger Show back in 2007. How she ended up at #class I don't know, except that maybe the art world really is a small place.
Also George showed up. I have no last name or link for George because I don't know anything about him, except that he wears a hat and used to comment a lot on Franklin's blog. We'd all argue and everyone else can't stand George but I don't mind him.
You can read Franklin's talk when he posts it on his site. His position wasn't a surprise, that conceptualism makes for bad art. He approached this by taking a satirical tone, saying that conceptualism is great, and then going on to explain why it's great, which is that anyone can make anything into art with no effort at all. Someone had written high up on one wall "IRONY IS: OFF" and Franklin, as he began, got up and erased OFF, writing in "ON".
I have to admit that I found Franklin's reading his essay off the paper to be less than exciting. His delivery wasn't helped by his occasional pauses for laughter which wasn't forthcoming. Piri and I certainly chuckled at some of it, and others around the room did at other parts, but I think there simply weren't enough people in the audience to have that necessary critical mass. The group was classroom sized, which is, I think, exactly the wrong size for a talk like Franklin's: You either need more people or fewer.
Things picked up after he'd finished reading and began speaking extemporaneously. That's when the Franklin I'd expected arrived, intelligent and witty and interesting. Unfortunately that's when everyone else got a chance to speak, too.
If you've ever attended a town council meeting, school board meeting, PTA meeting, recreation soccer coaches' meeting, Boy Scout camping trip planning meeting, or any other of the various meetings that dot the American social landscape, then you know exactly what the discussion period was like. I can sum up the problem in three sentences: Everyone has ideas. Everyone wants their ideas to be heard. Almost all of their ideas are stupid.
The trouble is most people pick up ideas the way they might pick up burrs on their pant legs as they stroll across a meadow. They don't know what they are, exactly, how they got there or what they do, and they don't know what to do with them, but they're willing to pluck them off and throw them at you. People think they understand these ideas but they don't; they've collected them somehow, can't really think about them properly, haven't fit them in to anything else, but will freely bandy them about as if they know what they're doing. They're so ignorant they don't even know they're ignorant. They end up dealing with concepts that have troubled the finest minds humanity has ever produced, but since they have no idea of any of the work that's gone into these concepts, they come to their own unfounded and inane conclusions and feel they've done some fine thinking.
For example, one fellow claimed that one plus one equals two might have some different meaning in another culture. One lady declared that ideas have aesthetic qualities, apparently having decided that she can just redefine the word "aesthetic" to her own liking. Bill started talking about a priori knowledge. All of this was covered by Kant in more depth than any of these people will ever comprehend. You can't argue with them -- the only thing I could imagine is telling them to go read Kant's Critique of Judgment and come back when they understand it. Personally I'm still working on it.
At one point in his opening essay Franklin listed several possible arguments a conceptual artist might use against a critic of their work. But he failed to anticipate the best argument yet, which is simply to claim that you're not a conceptual artist at all. Franklin carefully defined conceptual art as art which hinges its success primarily on its ideas. This passed without comment initially but later a few people objected to this. As near as I could figure it, at least three attendees felt that conceptual art was about more than ideas and wasn't what they were doing anyway.
Jennifer Dalton, Who's pissed at #class, 2010, Pencil on paper, 19x22 inches
Jen Dalton actually claimed -- and unfortunately the recording stops before this point so I have to quote from memory here -- Jen said, "I'm not a Conceptualist. I really care about how my work looks!" And I could only think, Oh my god. You really care about the aesthetic quality of your pie chart illustrating the percentage of male artists supported by their spouses? That means your work fails on every possible level! I mean, honestly, does Jen really believe that she cares about how her work looks the same way, for example, Morris Louis cared about the way his work looks? How do you argue against this level of delusion?
The answer is, you don't. You sit there quietly in the back, under the surveillance camera, and you say nothing because you realize it's hopeless. These people have burrs to throw around and they're going to throw them and what are you going to do? Throw your own? Better to opt out.
The high point, for me, was when Ed, apropos of nothing, while Franklin was talking, got up and wrote on the blackboard over Franklin's head -- I think this was after the video stopped recording -- "BEAUTY = PATRIARCHAL" and under that "COMPELLING = NOT" followed by ditto marks. This was after a couple of the not-Conceptualists discussing with Franklin got it into their heads that conceptual art isn't about being "interesting" so much as it's about being "compelling", although what the difference is, and what it has to do with the patriarchy, I don't know. The fact that "BEAUTY = PATRIARCHAL" completely undercut everything Franklin was saying about beauty -- that it's a human universal, that it transcends culture, that it's worth achieving, that it's the highest goal of true art -- didn't seem to faze Ed in the least. This is how you get a reputation for being even-handed -- by being very fast and subtle in your under-handedness.
Eventually the discussion wound down. Afterwards I got to chat with a few different people. Piri had left early to see a few shows while she was downtown but Joanne was still around. While we were talking one of the other attendees interrupted us. She'd mentioned she was working on her doctorate during the discussion so Joanne politely asked her about her thesis. I knew this was a mistake. The woman rattled off the title of her dissertation -- sadly I didn't record it for posterity -- and Joanne meekly replied, "That went over my head." I could've told Joanne it didn't go over, it went under her head. The title was that thoroughly, inexpressibly stupid. Well, what would you expect from someone with a homemade business card declaring themselves to be an "Ecological Artist"?
Anyway, in the end it didn't matter if the average IQ at #class approached room temperature. Not only did no one know what they were talking about, none of them had any ability to affect anything, either. You'd be better off attending a colloquy of capybaras on the topic "Towards a Clearer Understanding of the Steering of Ocean Liners". They'd have more basic comprehension of the subject and be more capable of affecting it.
Behind me on the wall was written something along the lines of "We've been accused of being whiny so for the last four days SOLUTIONS ONLY!" In that spirit let me offer this solution for everyone who attended any part of #class. In fact, this is my solution for anyone who is dissatisfied with the state of the art world, a bad review they received, or, really, anything at all. Here is my solution: BE BETTER. Not better than you were yesterday. Not better than you thought you might be. Not better than your neighbor or better than your mother expected. No. Measure yourself against the best and try to be better. You'll most likely fail, but that's okay. Keep trying. All that's good in the world has sprung from that one impulse: BE BETTER.
Favorite line:
"Anyway, in the end it didn't matter if the average IQ at #class approached room temperature. Not only did no one know what they were talking about, none of them had any ability to affect anything, either."
I also thought your analogy about how people pick up ideas being like burrs was excellent. The astounding part is that these ideas are often so entrenched in a sudo-intellectual skull's that on closer examination the thought more closely resembles a religious belief than an actual coherent idea. This explains the fervor and righteousness that ensues whenever their ideas are questioned.
Here the problem was that Franklin tried to stoke the fire with a pinky finger sized fire bellows. Most people respond to irony with a pat on the head, that's cute, attitude. The fact that NY hasn't produced a significant artist in 40 years can't phase these people because they wouldn't understand the question. Let alone recognize an artist of that caliber if they saw one.
Your solution is the best and only solution.
I watched most of the video, but I had to skip over the self congratulatory circle jerk session that spanned the first couple hours.
Interesting, Chris. I guess I didn't expect as much as you did, so I wasn't as disappointed. I merely went to hear Franklin speak, and I found his talk worthwhile (though he needs more practice at reading from a prepared manuscript, so it doesn't sound quite so much like that's what he's doing). Meeting you & Joanne & seeing what George looked like were additional plusses that I hadn't anticipated. I was as irritated as you were when "beauty = patriarchal" went up on the blackboard. I'm not a patriarch & I still love beauty! Maybe I'm a matriarch, but that use of "patriarchal" had nothing to do with reality. It's just name-calling, part of the same tired pomonian way of trying to smear modernism as old-fashioned & politically incorrect.
Chris, your drawing of Franklin is also really nice.
Chris, you should have said more. It is not hopeless. There was a lot of vacuum there just begging to be filled. When it IS filled, it will not be by epiphany, but rather drop by drop. You have some drops to contribute and I wish you had.
As far as Franklin's delivery goes, the only person I've known who could read from a prepared text as if he were speaking naturally was Clement Greenberg. That was because he took pains to write as if he WERE speaking. The fact he was prepared with a short statement helped focus what had become a rambling amoeba like event that merely filled the time that passed into something that could be paid attention to.
And Lucas, as well as Chris, like it or not, the people in that room are the people that must be addressed. Their IQ's are not in the 70s. Ultimately, they it is art itself that will have to do the job, but silent sneering does not help at all. I know because I do it all too often myself.
On the positive side, I really appreciated Chris's details about the "show". I did not know it was a gallery - it looked like a typical classroom, for instance, and since I thought it was a class of some sort due to the #class, when my mind wandered I began wondering what school it was. Given that it was a conceptually oriented show, I am doubly impressed with the response to what Franklin said. He successfully dropped a drop into the den.
The drawing of Franklin is nice, though I don't remember his nose as looking like that of an ex-boxer. Maybe the light was weird. There were several guys with shaved heads, and I couldn't tell which was Franklin until he spoke.
I wrote this as if the only reason I didn't contribute to the discussion was because I knew it was hopeless, but that's not entirely it. I'm also handicapped in a room like that because as soon as more than one person starts speaking, I can't understand anything anyone is saying. I actually have a hearing problem, which has three parts: first, my hearing is about 20db more sensitive than average; second, I hear higher frequencies than average; and finally, my brain doesn't filter out background noise as well as average. (I had very detailed hearing tests done back in the early 1990s). Actually, the audio of the recording approximates how things sound to me pretty well if you turn your volume way up. So you can imagine all of that combines with an echoey room (hardwood floor, concrete ceiling) and ten drunk, loud people to make it very hard for me to converse.
In fact, back when I was still talking to him, I suggested to Ed my own art project, which was to turn his gallery, during a show of course, into a conversation space, with floor coverings and something on the ceiling and places to lean and so forth, to allow and encourage visitors (especially during the opening) to converse quietly while looking at the art on display. If you ask me, this sound perfectly in tune with the Conceptualist enterprise, too: My work of art would be the room and the experience in the room!
Ed's only response -- he never answered either of my e-mail messages about it and only replied when I bumped into him on the street and pressed him on it -- his only response was, "Sounds expensive."
Anyway. The upshot here is, I couldn't really say much more than I did, and even that was a stretch. I could barely talk to Franklin after the thing was over, let alone try and talk to the other attendees during.
As far as Franklin's nose, it has a distinct bend to it. Looks like he broke it once. That's one of the things that made me want to draw him. He is a little more elfin in person, it's true.
As far the room, yes, it is a gallery. Just to the right, off camera, is a doorway opening into the front area of the gallery with the typical half-wall behind which you can see the office, and then a glass door opening right onto 27th Street. That's how Franklin could wave at me as I walked by, and why you can hear the traffic noise as I open the door.
Well John, if those "are the people that must be addressed" then we are in a much worse position than I previously realized. How can these people possibly matter? Their expiration date has more than passed. I don't go to my fridge and talk to my spoiled milk hoping to change its curdled ways. And I'm certainly not about to go on a milk reform crusade hoping to change the state of spoiled milk everywhere. I just go out and look for fresh milk. As you say "..art itself that will have to do the job".
Who wants to take out the trash when the entire system is a dump? As far as I can tell normal economic pressures are already correcting this unsustainable system and in the coming years I believe this purge will continue. In any event, this process is much more effective than walking up to an aging bee colony and swatting at it with stick.
The people in attendance here weren't past their sell-by date, they were never on the shelf for sale. It was a room full of people trying to become part of the art world by sheer force of will, as if by hoping for it they could become important. As I wrote over at EAG's, "I think the art world is a delusion, but not a big group fantasy, it's a one-by-one, case-by-case figment. George thinks he's part of the art world, I think I'm part of the art world, Ben thinks he's part of the art world, but we're all outsiders." As if we could become part of the art world by just showing up, or renting a store in a certain neighborhood, or making a claim on a blog. I have declared myself to be Mary Boone's peer! I am Jeffrey Deitch's colleague! Larry Gagosian is my compatriot!
I think reading you guys discussing this event on various blogs was definitely worth you suffering through it. For us readers, anyway. As a regular reader of this blog, I have a off-topic question: whatever happened to Danonymous?
Danny has been on my mind lately. I'm sorry to say I'd kind of forgotten him for a while but a little while ago I remembered. Right around then Stephanie mentioned him to me again. He's a couple of months away from graduating from nursing school. That's why I haven't heard from him; he can really only concentrate on one thing at a time. Presumably he hasn't been doing much art, either. Which is a huge shame.
I did say that the title of the woman's dissertation went over my head, but, dude, I don't say or do anything "meekly." I think you meant to say, "with a combination of disbelief and amusement."
You're a good writer, Chris--smart and funny, and you know how to push buttons to get a response. Still I find a comment like "the average IQ at #class approached room temperature" to be inflammatorily incorrect. Most of the people in the room were artists who took time from the studio or another job to come and interact with other artists, to listen to a speaker, maybe discuss the topic, which the organizers acknowledged was not aligned with their own philisophy. The participants were not developmentally disabled, as you suggest. It was not a graduate seminar, either.
I applaud Ed, Jennifer and William for pulling together a month of events in a commercial gallery. I'm guessing Hashtag class didn't pay the rent or the artists, but it created a real-time, real-life community for the duration, possibly whose influence will continue among the participants.
"Meekly" was, of course, hyperbole. Sarcasm. Something funny. Certainly not intended to be accurate. As for the room temperature IQ, I guess we'll just have to disagree on it. Let's say the room was a little on the warm side. But then there was me, you, Piri, and Franklin bringing the average up. Imagine how bad the low end must've been!
I don't find anything in your list of attendee qualities to refute my IQ claim. So artists took time out from their day jobs or the studio to come and interact. Doesn't make them smart. We should give them credit for showing up?
#class probably didn't pay the rent but I have trouble believing any shows at that gallery pay the rent -- not since Joe Fig and Nancy Baker got the boot.
We have a different way of looking at things, Chris.
I think a different topic would have engendered more conversation. I think the organizers are smart and witty and willing to take chances. I appreciated the comments of the folks who spoke up. You did not speak up. (I was not a model of conversation, either, but I'm not dissing the proceedings and the participants from my keyboard.)
How many other events like this have there been? Not many. So why tear it down?
The organizers aren't dumb. They're badly misguided and they have terrible taste in art -- in short, they have no talent for what they claim is their profession -- but they're not actually dumb. You're right about that. Witty, no. Clever, perhaps. Both Ed and Bill have certainly found a way to get their names out there, but as we saw with Becky Smith, that kind of respectability can evaporate very quickly when there's nothing to back it up.
I think I explained why I didn't speak up. Under different physical circumstances -- where I could hear what was going on more clearly -- I might have. Maybe if I thought the rest of the participants were more receptive, more capable of real debate. I would've loved to talk to George more. And you, of course. But I really, really have a problem hearing. Did you notice how many times I had to ask you to repeat yourself?
We should've gone outside. It was a really nice day.
Finally: Why shouldn't I tear it down? Just because there aren't many events like this? Again: They should get credit just for showing up? This is art. You don't get points for effort, at least not on my score sheet. If you're going to base your art on ideas, they'd better be good ones, and you'd better have some thought behind them. I still won't agree it's good art, but at least we could have a nice talk about it.
In Two Coats of Paint today (www.twocoatsofpaint.com), Sharon Butler has a smart summary of Hashtag Class.
Come on, Joanne. That's not a smart summary of #class, it's a self-important, stilted summary of #class, delivered in Sharon's typically airless style and full of questionable conclusions embedded in adjectives and presented as facts. Her adoption of a passive tone and quasi-journalistic style are clearly intended to cloak her opinions behind a scrim of objectivity. I'd love to see the merciless Wikipedia editors go over her summary: "#class, a sprawling[define sprawling] and innovative[according to whom?] project at Winkleman Gallery in New York, closed last week.... For the four weeks #class was in session, the project received generous attention[define generous].... Well known bloggers[well-known by whom?].... Many artists, dealers, and journalists, previously dismissive of internet-based media[source?].... With robust participation both in person and online[define robust].... ...Winkleman, Dalton and Powhida, all social media users themselves, carefully engineered the project’s success[it was successful? Says who?].... Winkleman, Dalton and Powhida have demonstrated unequivocally[says who?] how powerful social networking tools can be for our collective advancement[what advancement?]...."
And so on. Sharon's summary is actually a summation of the hopes and intentions for #class, not its actual results. I honestly don't feel we can assess the results at this point -- you know my opinion on the matter, that #class was entirely pointless and will have about as much effect as a fly fart in a typhoon. But that's just my opinion. We won't know until some time has passed. Making portentous pronouncements in the meantime won't change anything.
OK, we're never going to agree on this.
Gallery part 2 coming?
I'm working on part 2 and a couple of reviews. Hopefully soon.