Monocultured

I was invited to a group exhibition in Marstrand earlier this year, and last weekend I travelled there for the opening. Marstrand is an island a bit up the coast from Gothenburg, part of the northern archipelago, and in the summer its population of ≈1500 swells to include thousands of rich people who like to park their boats and buy expensive art. Or rather, they like to dock their yachts and buy expensive windbreakers.

We were ten artist from the KKV graphic workshop who’d put together a show, and the day after the opening I was guarding the exhibition. Having put on my most charming T-shirt and demeanor, I welcomed fifty or so visitors during the day, answering questions about techniques to the best of my ability (having to admit that I know nothing about photopolymers) and generally being pleasant and accommodating to all prospective patrons.

I was out of my element. Most of the others exhibiting had done this before, but besides their experience I found the lack of irony the oddest. Most people I know would balk at titling their works “Revenge” or “Woman” and would certainly not expect me to keep a straight face if they did. Having said that, the works represent a tremendous amount of labour, because heaven knows lithography isn’t a time-efficient way of creating images.

I’m mostly doing screen printing — when you do it as an artist you call it “serigraphy” — and it’s a messy process prone to failure and general fucking-upingness. Last time, the paint I was working with was giving me lip, and with the addition of a poorly cured screen I only got ten good copies out of 10 hours worth of printing, and close to fifty large sheets of shieet.

On the day I was guarding the exhibition, I had to compile a new list of works and their asking price since some changes had been made, and I started thinking about how the prices related to the works. People who are not used to buying art might dismiss pricing as a result of wishful thinking and whims of artists, but there is a pattern to the pricing which I’ve been trying to suss out. On recommendation of Jazzin over at Faas I started in on Why are artists poor?, a book by economist and artist Hans Abbing. I’m only through the first few chapters, but his discussion on the value and pricing of art mirrors what I’ve been thinking whenever I take a step back from the screenprinting vacuum table, surveying the value that I’ve somehow added.

Except what someone would expect to pay for the materials — paper, screen, chemicals, paint, studio rent — I’m adding my own time and labour, as well as whatever skills and knowledge I can verify or we can agree upon. This is measurable and would be quite easy to put a price on using the same model as you’d use for evaluating how much to pay your carpenter, for two differences. It’s difficult to estimate how much demand there is for art, and there’s also very little to judge a “proper” artist by, allowing for an unlimited supply of people who would consider themselves artist. “I could do that, and so could my dog and therefore it’s not proper art!” so to speak.

So that which sets the work of an artist in general apart from a carpenter — the aura using Benjamin — is not appraised by traditional supply & demand if we’re talking fine art, but rather a gray area of value embodied. What is the value added that isn’t measurable straight on? (This doesn’t necessarily apply when it’s a particular artist who is in demand, since per definition those who hold that specific artist in demand view an art object by that artist as having a value intrinsic to that relationship, and there’s only so many works one person can produce.)

Regardless of what in a work that we like, we might divide our way of arriving at the value in a few different ways, which will put us in different segments of art buyers.

1. The work is beautiful in itself, with as little reference to the notion of “art” as possible. (–Seurat-Le Bec du Hoc à Grandcamp renders the cliff and waters beautifully.)

2. The work is good because is comments on itself and gives an interesting understanding of what “art” is or could be. (–Georges Seurat demonstrates how by viewing we create a coherent image)

3. The artist’s story or oeuvre is interesting enough to confer value to the individual work.
(–Let’s hang this sucker next to Renoir just to piss Seurat off!)

As an example, lets say that I take fifteen of the twenty copies that exist of a certain print, and staple them up downtown as “regular posters.” What the weather doesn’t destroy, some kids take home, and I’m now left with five posters out of a set of 20. For all intents and purposes I might as well just have produced five copies to begin with, which would have merited a higher price per copy.

But since the 15 copies that weather and kids took were not bought at my set price — in fact, the audience for “taking a poster off a wall home” and “buying fine art” doesn’t overlap much — this would very likely be considered by prospective buyers as an indication that I myself don’t accept the face value of my own art and I’ve now sown distrust among graphic buyers regarding my artistic credibility and/or the merits of my work.

There’s of course a possible positive corollary to this destruction: My stapling of the 15 posters could be considered as an “artistic action in itself” and indirectly increase the value of my remaining five posters.

Actions such as the one above will affect your status among artists and buyers. But price seems to have a particular place in how some kinds of buyers value works, and it seems possible that if your prices are too high you are pricing yourself out of the market, but if your prices are too low, you are pricing yourself out of a market. In other words: If you’re too expensive, your patrons will wait until you lower your price — the demand is still there but it doesn’t agree or can’t meet your price. But if you price yourself below a certain level, you can’t easily hike your prices up again since you no longer have the same market available to you. Your “price slumming” has left you tainted, as it were.

Back again to the “creating value” part. If “art value” only is “social value” then we still should be able to agree on what exactly it is that we’re valuing. And here I guess that people have different understanding of what art is. Many people have an understanding of art as something that has to do with pure æsthetics. Ignore the notion that æsthetics are socially constructed, and you have people talking about beauty and form and colour and so on. Listening in on the conversations at the show, many people expressed their approval of certain works as being very “energetic” or “pleasing”, and having read over the descriptions of the work (someone wanted to express their interest in dancing, for example) they could judge a work on how closely the work aligned with their own ideas of how dancing might be represented.

I think my works failed on the expectation that proper graphic art shouldn’t be too funny. “Funny” means that there’s a joke that you have to get, and if you don’t get it you’d have to pretend-laugh and you don’t want to be found laughing at a fart joke, and so you don’t laugh and then the work’s not good. (I could be over-thinking a bowl of sour grapes here.)

No-one asked for prices on the three graphic works I participated with. No-one bought anything at all while I was there in fact, but did check out a few of the other works and asked for prices. No-one was thrown by the prices, and this could have three possibilities.

1. They agree to the worth of the work in itself. (This is worth 3000SEK to me)
2. They know the graphics market and know that the prices are within range of what could be expected. (This would usually cost around 3000SEK)
3. They don’t want to admit otherwise, for personal or social reasons. (I don’t want to seem uncultured, but Jeezus Christ on a crutch I wouldn’t take it if it was free)

I’m thinking of tiering some works as an experiment, and see that might work out. When you’re working with print you can do drastic changes in material without changing your matrix, so I’m thinking of doing a set of more expensive prints alongside cheaper ones, without losing any artistic aura in the process, but stratifying them socially.

The show was a learning experience, and I’m even more motivated than previously to make good work and let it find its market organically rather than shoehorning it into a pre-existing mold. And of course, if you’re interested in acquiring a poster, get in touch.

It was a bargain. We will give you our lives; we will spend our lives obediently doing things we wouldn’t choose, things that probably do not really matter to anyone. And in return we will get money. And money will take care of us
→ Shareable.net, Benjamin Rosenbaum: The guy who worked for money

Dead bodies alone, are not that fascinating or scary or whatever you think they might be. They are just what they look like, lifeless skin suitcases. Without the life in them, they’re nothing. I think a person needs life and a body to be a human being. Without one of the two they are just meat furniture that needs to be moved before it starts to stink, or starts to rot, or starts to rot any more in any case.

→ My life with death: mylifewithdeath.blogspot.com

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

→ Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens: Topic of Cancer

An artist can only add shit to shit. Dinos once said, ‘Our art is potty-training for adults.’ He got that about right.” The Chapman brothers are trying to help grown-ups be more civilised? “We’re not here to help,” he giggles. “We certainly don’t care about moral instruction. Our interest in morality is not in being moralists, but in how morality works as a functional pacifier.”

→ Guardian.co.uk, Stuart Jeffreys: How the Chapman brothers became the brothers grim

Moreover, “57.6 percent of the respondents agreed that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely. Slightly more than half agreed that ‘there is too much freedom of expression’ in Israel. The poll also found that most of the respondents favor punishing Israeli citizens who support sanctioning or boycotting the country, and support punishing journalists who report news that reflects badly on the actions of the defense establishment.”

→ Judy’s world, Judy Mandelbaum: Yes, it can happen there: Artists envision “Israel fascism”

I consider myself a reasonably bright person, who works hard to make something people like. When I’m old and crumbling, I want to be able to feel that I had a successful life in which my work brought happiness to a lot of people.

→ The bottom feeder, Jeff Vogel: Sometimes it’s OK to pirate my games

So, yes, there is reason for Israelis, and for Jews generally, to think long and hard about the dark Hitler era at this particular time. For the significance of the Gaza Flotilla incident lies not in the questions raised about violations of international law on the high seas, or even about “who assaulted who” first on the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, but in the larger questions raised about our common human condition by Israel’s occupation policies and its devastation of Gaza’s civilian population.

→ Haaretz, Henry Siegman: Israel’s Greatest Loss: Its Moral Imagination

“Every time I drop a bomb and kill one innocent Afghan, I set the war back — even if I killed 100 Taliban,” he says. And maybe, Grasso admits, he was a little overeager to drop bombs last year. “When you’ve got a truckload of food, everyone looks hungry. So when everything looks suspicious, when you’re looking for suspicious stuff, you almost want it to be suspicious.”

→ Wired, Noah Shachtman: How the Afghanistan Air War Got Stuck in the Sky

PRIMAL 31 (HARRIER) DROPPED (1) GBU-12 ON THE COMPOUND EFFECTIVELY SUPRESSING THE EN THREAT. EN FORCES RE-ENGAGED THE MARINES FROM THE BUILDING THAT WAS THE TARGET OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL HIMARS MISSION. E/2/8 ENGAGED WITH 81 AND 60 MM MORTARS. AT 1304, ENEMY FIRES CEASED.

→ Wikileaks Wardiary: (ENEMY ACTION) DIRECT FIRE RPT (Small Arms) 2/8 USMC : 0 INJ/DAM

Avoidance speech, or “mother-in-law languages”, is a feature of many Australian Aboriginal languages, some North American languages and Bantu languages of Africa whereby in the presence of certain relatives it is taboo to use everyday speech style, and instead a special speech style must be used.

→ Wikipedia: Avoidance Speech

This is, perhaps, the most troublesome use of a generally troublesome mark. That said, the basic rule for possessives is quite straightfoward: to denote possession, put an apostrophe and a lower-case ‘s’ at the end of the noun (ie person, place or thing) which owns. So we have: Somebody else’s thoughts on the subject of possessive apostrophes.

→ Between Borders, Brian Forte: Mind Your Apostrophes

More than half of the semicolons one sees, I would estimate, should be periods, and probably another quarter should be commas. Far too often, semicolons, like colons, are used to gloss over an imprecise thought. They place two clauses in some kind of relation to one another but relieve the writer of saying exactly what that relation is.

→ Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters, Paul Robinson: The Philosophy of Punctuation

My awesome mother gave me an ebook reader as birthday present, which sorta proves that if you bitch, whine and drop hints like a rabbit shits, someone will give in. I have tons of stuff which I’m slowly transferring to the Nook, and reading is encroaching on my podcast listening which is a good thing. There’s no app for organizing your documents on the computer, so I’m using the competent but ass-ugly Calibre for this. I might not be paying enough attention, or I might just have low tolerance for stupid interfaces, but using Calibre isn’t very efficient. Unfortunately there are no alternatives. I’ve found an app for syncing Instapaper articles which works like a charm though. (Ephemera)

All in all, I enjoy using the Nook. It’s easy enough to use and once you get used to reading on a computer device in broad daylight you’ll be annoyed with all the gadgets which aren’t legible in direct light. E ink is awesome and very pleasant to read — not quite like paper but miles beyond LCD screens. (Although if you spend your days in murky settings you might go for the backlit iPad.) It’ll be interesting to see how the usability will change once winter and darkness comes.

I jailbroke the Nook but had little use for it. Using Internet over 3G would be useful if there was a good RSS app and/or syncing with a desktop app like Evernote, so jailbreaking might become more interesting once the proper Android apps are adapted for the Nook LCD.

The battery only lasts some 400 page turns over three days, but Barnes & Noble seem to consider it within acceptable levels. I concede that it’s not an undue burden to charge the thing every other night, but it galls me that they’re advertising it as lasting for 10 days with “normal use” without mentioning that “normal use” is “up to one hour per day.” Their support personell is quick to respond but are writing straight from a flowchart — I don’t know if it’s corporate culture or unmotivated kids, but if they replaced them with scripts they’d still improve on service and “the human touch.”

Because I’m a positive and creative person I express my disappointment through poetry in odd meter. If you can get someone to read this with a deep voice and British accent I will send you a present. Until then, imagine Ian McKellen doing a dramatic reading:

Quite a device, my Nook
it’s swell in the sun!
People stop and stare,
it fails to impress no-one.
As long as it works,
it works rather fine.
So I’ve grown quite fond
of this Nook of mine.

Quite a device, my Nook
it’s nimble and fun!
People stop and ask,
and I recommend it to some.
As long as it works,
it works rather fine.
So despite Barnes and Noble
I’m fond of this Nook of mine.

I have no pictures of the weekend before midsummer because my skills failed me. Or in more practical terms: I relaxed the crap out of myself and couldn’t be arsed to take pictures. Sara, I and Petter left for the countryside for a couple of days, staying at his cottage an hour north of Gothenburg. I slept until late noon, had a breakfast consisting of more than oats, and then sat with a coffee on the porch, forcing my way through the shittier parts of the Nights Dawn trilogy.

The whole experience was such a sensory overload of idyllic post-card super-reality it had me giggling. It’s difficult to take such an experience seriously. It’s not only that I’m slightly high-strung and can’t really relax properly, but also because reading a book for five hours straight is something so unproblematic by body doesn’t know what to do with itself. This hasn’t happened since I was a teenager, and since then relaxing into a book has been rather more difficult.

Had Bambi showed up and fallen asleed in my lap it wouldn’t have made the place and experience any less extreme. This kind of existence is what is allured to when advertising a product which is supposed to appeal to a sense of Sweden. Only the hangover on Sunday reminded me of home, but even that was soothed by wind, water and dozing off on the porch.

Apparently, my cracking knuckles found their way into Saras snoozing. I would make for a really poor ninja, but we knew that already. Polish people aren’t ninjas, we dress in fur hats and kill people from horseback. Failing that, we charm our friends into helping us in the garden.

.

Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural operation whereby “the city” (rather than a singular edifice) embodies the essence of Le Corbusier’s technophilic proclamations that architecture should function as a “machine for living”.

→ Serial Consign, Greg Smith: Urban screens: The schematic city in gaming and architectural representation

Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.

→ Newsweek, Patrick Symmes: History in the Remaking

The first of two fingernails found at the site suggests Ötzi may have been ill. Characteristic lines across the nail suggest his immune system was compromised three times in the months prior to his death. The second nail has yet to be analysed.

→ Cosmos, John Pickrell: Who killed the iceman?

In his spare time Professor Nas is a magician. The magic he’s working for the car companies is to devise the right voice to make driving safest, certainly, but also a voice that gives the car a character that you like, so it seems like your friend, or the other half of your driving team; You and the car. As he puts it: A team-mate bucks you up when you’re down, A team-mate takes over when you need it to take over, and people looove team-mates.

→ BBC, From Our Own Correspondents, Steven Evans: Future of back-seat drivers

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Remember that allotment garden me and Olle were queuing for last summer? Well, three weeks ago I got a call with an offer to sign up for a 46 m² lot. It’s been left fallow for a year, so except a few raspberry bushes there’s not much there except w a whole bunch of weeds. I took some pictures and posted them to ask.metafilter which yielded some answers, and I’m constantly asking other people for advice, with the hope of actually learning something here.

As things stand, and with Olle away on vacation and leaving me with dictatorial power, there will be heritage potatoes, unions and possibly tulips here. Failing that, whatever will take.

I figured I’d spend this years birthday and midsummer low key, which translates into “biking like crazy around town and drinking beer in front of Farscape”, and it was interesting. There’s a post-apocalyptic feeling to a city which everyone has evacuated in favour of the countryside. It’s what the city will look like after ebola becomes airborne, minus the rotting corpses. Left behind as it were.

Just like biking at night gives you a new understanding of how a city can work, staying behind while everyone else leaves is an interesting experience. Everything seems more fragile, the sun and weeds and birds seem poised to invade. Next year I’m making sure to do something with friends, which is how I believe a day like this ought to be celebrated.

Or perhaps we can plan the perfect heist while everyone else is grilling hotdogs and getting smashed.

Petter has a taste in music. I’m not saying it’s always good, but he is a man of tastes. This taste brought us to the balcony of Henriksberg — a place for unpleasant young people, people who view of the harbor, and those who are there for the bands. We were there to watch the duo Civil Civic from Autralia, and I just noticed a writeup of their experience here: The Civil chronicle #6.

Somehow that blogpost forgot to mention the sauve and strapping young men who bought t-shirts after the excellent show, but perhaps they were thinking of other things. I look fetching in my t-shirt though. I recommend that you go to their MySpace and have a listen. You can buy their albums for any amount, which is neat since they’re a live act and not another guy with a laptop. (I’m not putting down people with laptops, just saying that a band with instruments and amps has more at stake than a midi-keyboard and a pirate copy of Cubase)

They’re an independent band and seem to put a lot of effort into the whole band experience thing which I understand the kids enjoy, as should you.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Following Civil Civic, an even more party hardy band came on. Their music doesn’t carry well in a non-live setting, but the duo Fucking Werewolf Asso from Gothenburg kicked an excellent amount of arse. A drummer was exacting revenge on his drums for some past transgressions by beating the fuck out of them, and the bespectacled singer with Eraserhead hair stod with hand on hip, spewing awesome into the microphone over chiptune loops. If you get a chance to hear them, I wholeheartedly encourage you to go.

The main act was another local band with a punny name: Fulmakten. It’s a very style-conscious ensamble, and that’s the extent of what they had to offer. They were mimicking Swedish 80′s music so well they sounded like a generic tribute band, and I don’t think that was intentional. What little personality they had was contained in the splendid afro and facial hair of the singer. Then again, if you’re ever organizing a live roleplaying event which takes place thirty years ago on a cruise ship between Sweden and Finland, and are looking for that special blend of blandness, you’ll squeal in delight.

As a side note. With my 32:nd birthday out of the way last Monday, I’m wiser, closer to death, and have an updated list over who will get Christmas cards. Some will regret their lackadaisical approach to important dates.

Happy midsummer celebration, be careful out there!

— Mateusz, you handsome devil, what is it that you do for a living?

I get this question more often than you’d think, even though the phrasing might be slightly different. My mother, for example, might sigh “Have you got a proper job yet?”

Every once in a while I go through an identity reassessment, especially when sketching a new version of the blog or a business card, or when I stumble upon a piece of insight like Merlin Manns “Watching the Corners: On Future-Proofing Your Passion” — the premise of which is that we hang our identity on old merits long after those merits have ceased to be relevant.

What got me thinking was my first ever end-of-semester gift I received from the students at Chalmers.

I teach courses in photography at community collages in Gothenburg (Folkuniversitetet & Medborgarskolan), and I work as a guest tutor at the international Master of architecture and urban planning studios with Ana Betancour at Chalmers and KTH, teaching people how not to fuck up public presentations, discussing the value of film as an analytical tool in architectural practice and generally asking future architects stuff which I wouldn’t ask if I’ve had architectural schooling.

Many of them don’t seem to know why they want to be architects, nor is there any consensus regarding what an architect does, so the area is ripe for someone like me to come in and ask what they think they are doing — it’s great fun.

The photography courses present a rather mixed crowd, from people who’ve taken pictures their whole life and who just want to learn the digital end of it, to people who’ve become parents and want to document their toddlers with the shiny dSLR the friendly salesperson sold them. I draw diagrams of focal length and JPEG compression algorithms.

That’s the tofu and potatoes of my life, and it’s pretty awesome. Teaching keeps you on your toes and I’ve learned to draw on the eclectic knowledge I’ve amassed, working with people to reach interesting conclusion and alternative angles to problems. The work description could be “talking with people” but in my more interesting moments, and with enough caffeine pills, I become an apophenic Eliza, channeling the on/off-lined world.

I haven’t done freelance media work for a while, but should anyone want to give me money for recording their seminar, proofread their dissertation or photograph something I could give references and manage it. So the question of how I make money is easy enough to answer, but the problem arises when it bleeds into my understanding of who I am, especially when there’s a discrepancy.

For example: I’m not paid to do art. I occasionally apply for grants, which in a sense amounts to spec work, and I do art works and publish them on/off-line, but I’m not getting paid for it. I do it, and my formal art-education opens up related fields (e.g. the urban architecture courses) but it’s not my livelihood per se. I know that this shouldn’t bias me against seeing myself as an artist, but I have always had the notion that one is in part one’s job description, and ones job is the thing one does for money. So if describe yourself as someone who does something for which you’re not getting paid, the jump to describing yourself as monetarily worthless isn’t big. It’s a way of thinking which is hard to shake.

All this doesn’t interfere with what I actually do, as I’m doing more art now than before, but it’s a shift in perspective which I’m adjusting to.