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April 24th, 2011
Modular Screen by Moorhead & Moorhead. Click on image to enlarge. Get it here.
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Opening Lyrics to “At Long Last Love”
Is it an earthquake or simply a shock?
Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?
Is it a cocktail, this feeling of joy?
Or is what I feel the real McCoy?
No, it’s just that the world’s first webstore for customizable, reconfigurable, modular art and design has now gone live.
www.module-r.com
Lyrics by Cole Porter. Sung by Frank Sinatra. And others.
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February 27th, 2011
Jason Green, “Recurrent 2″, hand-cast and glazed terra cotta units, wall-mounted, 6 1/2 x19 x 2 in. (2008). Click on images to enlarge and play slideshow.
On Thursday, March 3rd, we will be opening our booth at the Verge Art Fair in Dumbo, Brooklyn. This is rather a significant undertaking for us, as it represents the first time we’ve participated in an organized collective art-related event. Perhaps more significantly, we’re bringing together five contemporary artists whose work investigates the theme nearest and dearest to our heart which, of course, is modularity. Now, we’ve come across other recent shows with the term modular in their title or description, but honestly, we were consistently hard pressed to recognize just how the concept related to the work being shown. So perhaps our brief showing at Verge is the first time this particular aesthetic preoccupation is being examined among multiple artists from the post-Minimalist generation since, well, since the heady days of modular machinations when people like Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd were doing their seminal work.
A lot has changed since then, of course, including the way in which the post-Minimalist modulartists approach their chosen theme. It’s our intention to discuss these changes in a series of subsequent posts. For now, we’d simply like to present images of a few pieces in the upcoming show by each of the participating artists, all of whom we’ll profile in greater depth in the later pieces.
Show Information:
Location: 1 Main Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn
Booth: Number 1
Dates/Times: 3/3-5 12 to 10pm, 3/6 12 to 6pm
Telephone: (718) 360-9305
Email: us@art-rethought.com
Fair website: www.brooklynartfair.com
ABOVE: Susan Weinthaler, “FIX”, wood, paint, epoxy, magnets on steel. 48 x 48 in. (2011). Each colored wood unit has a magnet mounted on its back side, which allows it to be moved to any position on the steel “canvas”. The images above show the same work, but with the pieces re-arranged into different patterns.
ABOVE: Moshé Elimelech: “Cubic Construction #25″, twenty-five hand-painted wood cubes in velvet case with brushed aluminum frame, 25 in. sq., 4 in. d. (2010). Another example of interactive, customizable module art: both images are of the same piece. The cubes are removed by hand from their case and rotated to display one of six variously painted faces. We previously discussed Elimelech’s work here.
ABOVE: Donald Rattner, Studio for A.R.T. and Architecture, “Tapestry NO-2-1 in Red and Black”, wool felt modules, 48 1/2 x 58 1/2 in. (2010). This modular tapestry is assembled by connecting individual felt modules together by means of interlocking slots and tabs. Hanger pieces permit the piece to be hung on a wall-mounted rod.
ABOVE: Trevor Elliott, “Untitled Number 29″, reclaimed wood and magnets, 12 x 34 x 3/4 in. (2011). Magnets are particularly amenable to interactive modular art because of their connective (and dis-connective) qualities. Elliott has used them for innovative product design as well, such as his GrowFrame modular picture frames.
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See you there!
November 2nd, 2010
ABOVE: Filmmaker Gerry Schum looks around for the rest of his crew.
Postscript
This is the third of a 3-part series on Rethinking the Artist’s Model. Click here and here to view parts 1 and 2, or scroll below if you are viewing multiple posts.
This past summer the Artists Space in New York held an exhibition on the sculptor Charlotte Posenenske, an event which introduced us to this interesting figure and inspired us to write a post about her. Our good fortune in learning about Posenenske was doubled when we attended a film series one evening during the show in which several documentaries relating to the exhibition theme were aired. To our shock and awe, one of the films, Gerry Schum’s “Consumer Art / Art Consumption” absolutely bowled us over because we felt like we were experiencing a twenty-nine minute long déjà vu. For nearly every single theme that underlies what we’re trying do at A.R.T. was in some way represented by the people and art featured in the film.
Now, we thought we were pretty contemporary in our efforts to link state-of-the-art digital fabrication technology with artistic production and distribution. But the funny thing is this: Schum’s film – which we might just as well have made ourselves if we owned a camcorder and could do voiceovers – was done in 1968.
The film surveys a brief moment in modern art history when a group of art dealers, thinker types and artists came together in the late 1950s and 60s in an effort to democratize the art market. The movement – business venture might be a better term – was spearheaded by the Swiss artist and writer Daniel Spoerri, and later joined by Karl Gerstner, who dubbed their enterprise édition MAT. The acronym stands for Multiplication d’Art Transformable, or Transformable Art Multiples, a phrase which sends shivers of sheer delight up our collective spine – hey, that’s what we’re doing with modular art! Transformable insofar as the modules can be arranged and re-arranged at will; multiples insofar as the modules and their assemblies are infinitely replicable; and art insofar as…well, insofar as it’s art.
While not strictly modular, nearly all of the art issued for sale by édition MAT involved some degree of interactivity between observer and the art. It was co-creativity before there was any such term. Moreover, like our modular art, it was intended to be fabricated by industrial means so that the art would be affordable and continuously produced in sufficient supply without overloading the artist who conceived the work. (Among the artists participating in the venture were Agam, Soto, Tinguely, Vasarely and Duchamp.) Finally, just as we have advocated in the preceding parts of this essay, Spoerri and Gerstner envisioned the art being sold on a retail basis rather than on a speculative one as it would normally have been in a gallery context.
One is tempted to remark that there is truly nothing new under the artistic sun, but of course, there are a few significant differences between édition MAT and A.R.T. Most obvious is the manufacturing technology available in the two periods. In its purest sense the term ‘industrialism’ in the 1960s still referred to the Henry Ford variety, meaning that things were made according to the principles of mass production and with power-driven analog mechanics. Yet in the film there is something of a disconnect between what édition MAT theorized for its means of production and what actually took place in scenes showing its art being made. Instead of large factories with soaring smokestacks rolling out dozens of works of art every few minutes, one mostly caught glimpses of a couple of workers in smocks putting together one or two pieces at a time inside a loft-like setting. If this was industrialism, it was on a very small and artisanal scale, making it more akin to pre-industrial handcraft than to the output of the modern factory.
The problem of being able to manufacture things industrially in comparatively small runs has been solved with the recent rise of digital fabrication techniques, which allows for as few as a single unit to be produced without severe economic cost to the seller. It has also done away with the need to stockpile large amounts of inventory, another substantial barrier to entry and cost control that constrained what édition MAT could do. And unlike the global marketplace in which we can distribute our work, édition MAT had to rely largely on the existing bricks-and-mortar gallery system to adapt itself to a retail business model.
Fascinating film, a remarkable period, and the promise of a democratized art market that we will continue to pursue.
October 20th, 2010
Part 2
If you haven’t read the first installment of this post you’ll want to do so now by either clicking here or scrolling down when viewing all posts.
In the first part of this two-part essay we cogitated on the basic economics of artistic production, in particular, how the laws of supply and demand relate to price. In doing so we concluded that there are several built-in dilemmas in the current marketplace. First, the more successful an artist becomes, the fewer people or institutions can afford his/her work; and second, the less an artist can sell his/her artwork, the more difficult it is for either artist or gallerist to remain in business (no great revelation there). Both of these conditions relate directly to the fact that the art in question is largely executed by the artist’s own hand one piece at a time. Moreover, we pointed out that today’s marketplace seems more and more bifurcated in its extremes: super-high price points at the upper end (galleries), super-low prices at the other end (internet). The middle segment of the market is only scarcely populated in terms of the artwork or venues to sell it.
We think this situation is unfortunate because the middle of the market is a place of great promise for artists. As first Daniel Bell and later Richard Florida have pointed out, there has arisen over the past several decades a demographic variously known as the professional, creative, managerial and/or technological class. These terms pretty well describe the profile of this population segment in terms of their occupations. They are on the whole trained professionals adept at creative problem-solving, managing complex business relationships and utilizing technology. Many have sophisticated tastes, are design savvy and have an interest in the arts not only as spectators but as participants. (Hence the recent popularity of interactive art in which non-artists physically engage with the artwork rather than merely watch or hear it passively.) And, while not uniformly wealthy, many have discretionary income to spend on things like art.
 
Of course, there is certainly no shortage of mid-career and reasonably established artists who would be happy to sell these people their work. But now another problem of the market comes into play. Galleries are almost entirely mom-and-pop affairs, meaning they are generally run by their proprietors as a single shop. There are good reasons for this, beginning with the fact that the artist-gallerist relationship is an intensely personal and individualistic one. In addition, the ‘stock’ in which the gallerist deals is by its nature unique and its supply not always controllable, thus greatly reducing the feasibility of trying to franchise or replicate the business across multiple locations. On top of all this the economics of the traditional gallery are such that they require a pretty high population density to reach a threshold of viability, which is why they are overwhelmingly situated in only the largest urban centers.
So, not only do all the people in this middle market who don’t live in this handful of cities have a large hurdle to clear in trying to gain access to them geographically, even if they do transport themselves to where the galleries are they may very well be priced out of range anyway. Not to mention that visiting the many galleries in places like New York City is largely a hit-and-miss game for anyone who doesn’t spend hours culling through the galaxy of art spaces to discern the ones worth exploring. Sure, part of the fun for folks like us is the process of discovery, but that level of investment may not be possible or appropriate for others.
It should be increasingly evident (if it wasn’t already) that the current gallery system and the predominant means of artistic production are inter-connected. Change one and you’ll need to change or augment the other. Which is precisely what we at A.R.T. propose to do (if that wasn’t obvious already). The goal of this initiative is straightforward: to make compelling contemporary art more accessible to more people. And, we believe, to make contemporary art more closely aligned with the fluid, collaborative nature of 21st century culture than traditionally conceived art.
We start by addressing the means of production. In place of traditional hand-crafted art we propose instead that artists utilize the techniques of the New Industrialism to fabricate their work. As introduced in part 1, the term New Industrialism summarizes the novel ways that we can now manufacture things when we marry the computer to the machine. It also references the new ways we create and distribute objects of design. In the former category we can include digital fabrication, mass customization and on-demand production; in the latter are crowdsourcing, open innovation and ecommerce.
For the artist it means that there are two end products rather the one: the digital file from which the physical piece will be produced, and the final assembled artwork. The beauty of this approach is that once the file has been created it can be used to generate an unlimited number of physical pieces – none of which requires the personal intervention of the artist, who is then free to utilize the time to create more art. Since the supply of a given work of art is theoretically unlimited, the speculative pricing method utilized in the traditional gallery system is no longer applicable. Instead, the work can be priced as a function of the cost to manufacture plus overhead and profit, which will invariably lower the cost of art in general. That is actually a potential boon to the vast majority of artists. Rather than receive a one-time commission, the artist instead derives income based on a licensing agreement in which he/she earns a percentage of total sales. If the artist does good work that’s accepted by collectors, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Put it another way, the Scarcity Principle has given way to the Abundance Principle.
It should be remarked that all the work in our ModulA.R.T. portfolio is designed, constructed and distributed using the methodologies of the New Industrialism.
Now, some may argue that art that isn’t made by the hand of the artist is intrinsically invalid. To which we would respond that we must then invalidate almost all of Sol LeWitt’s portfolio, since he ‘outsourced’ to others much of his physical production, as have other prominent artists all along the historical spectrum. We would also point out that for the last 150 years neither architects nor composers have fabricated or performed their own work either. Seen in this light, having visual artists shift to the same production paradigm as these other creatives does not seem out of line.
Another objection that can be made is that reproducing art in unlimited supply reduces it to a commodity. We’re not entirely sure that is an issue, for reasons too lengthy to go into here. But one of the ways we at A.R.T. try to address this potential problem is by creating a portfolio that is modular. The creative dimension necessary to art is therefore satisfied by the imaginative arrangement of the modules rather than the uniqueness of the individual, static object. Being modular also dovetails with what we asserted above about contemporary audiences wanting to be more interactive in their experience of art, in contrast to the top-down and passive approach associated with traditional gallery pieces.
Speaking of the gallery, with all these proposed changes in the way the artist works it’s inevitable that an alternative economic model will have to be adopted for the distribution of the art of the New Industrialism. That model is no more or less than the conventional retail operation, in which objects are sold for a price over and above that of the wholesale cost. Not only does this make sense in terms of how the art is made, but it also means that the venue for selling this type of art can be either a one-off boutique or a multi-store operation. Nor are large cities the only environment in which such a venue could survive; now mid-sized cities, university towns and other concentrations of the professional and creative classes become viable contexts as well.
Let’s conclude by stating unequivocally that we make no value judgments about art that is traditionally conceived and created, nor are we advocating or predicting the disappearance of the gallery system. Both serve a purpose and a market that values the hand-crafted item, and will no doubt be with us for a long time. Instead, we are proposing to add a third option to the current constellation of distribution points as well as to change our perceptions of what contemporary art can be, how it can be made and how it’s valued. After all, if contemporary art is to be contemporary, then shouldn’t it be open to to the ideas that make contemporary culture contemporary?
References
Michael Whitelaw, “Networked Production: On Making with Bits and Atoms”
October 4th, 2010
Part 1
Full disclosure: this is not an essay about the people who pose for artists, as intriguing and largely neglected a subject as that might be. Rather what we want to write about is the economic model by which contemporary visual artists operate. Wait! Get your hand off that mouse or trackpad – you’re not clicking out of here so easily. This really is an important discussion which is absolutely intertwined with fundamental questions surrounding contemporary art…you know, like, what makes it contemporary? So stick around, it might just be illuminating.
Let’s start by looking at the contemporary artist in terms of his/her production model, since economics are closely related to production. How do visual artists generally make their work? Surveying the kind of art generally exhibited in galleries, which is the preferred venue for artists producing quality work, we can safely say that the vast majority of pieces are made largely by hand. Of course, we find an extensive use of various types of machines as well, be they mechanical printing devices, chemical processes such as are used for engraving and etching, and power tools for the production of sculptural objects. Despite the intercession of these non-manual techniques, however, we can still characterize the overall production process used for such work as being essentially manual, because they all require the human hand to operate.
  
That, in turn, means there must be a degree of variability in the execution of each piece. For example, if a sculptor uses hand-held power tools to carve one block of stone into a figure, and then tries to repeat exactly the same design in a second, the two will be different in small or large degrees, depending on how well the artist can match the ‘choreography’ of the first version. But they will never be exactly the same.
Beyond its purely aesthetic qualities, it is the quality of uniqueness that endows the work of hand-made art with much of its perceived monetary value. That is simply a function of supply and demand economics, and in particular, of the Scarcity Principle. This principle states that the the rarer an object is, the greater its value if there is demand for it. That value will then increase further as demand grows and especially if it exceeds supply.
The perfect storm for artists and gallerists – in the positive sense of the term – is for an artist’s reputation to grow, as that will increase demand for what is inevitably a limited supply of product (sorry, that’s what it is). Because as we all know, a human being can only work so many hours in a day and will only live so long; by its nature supply is going to be limited and finite as long as the artist is expected to be personally involved in the physical production of his/her work.
 Some artists have managed this ‘problem’ by operating as proto-industrialists, setting up workshops populated by trained assistants who then carry out much of the labor required to produce their work. Koons, Murakami and, until his recent market collapse at least, Hirst have each employed dozens and even hundreds of such surrogates as a way to boost production to feed excess demand. All have ample historical precedent: Warhol worked under the same arrangement in his aptly named Factory in the 1960s and after, as did the Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens in 17th century Antwerp. Nor was Rubens the first to do this; workshops centered on individual artists working for personal gain can be traced back as far as antiquity.
Whether the artist is highly successful or barely known does not ultimately affect the economic model under which they operate; it’s still very much a question of supply and demand as to how their work is valued. This poses several problems from a market standpoint. Generally speaking, the more successful an artist is, the higher the price for their work, which means fewer and fewer people can afford it. The less successful an artist is, the lower the price, which is positive in terms of affordability but means that the emerging artist is increasingly unlikely to be able to earn a living from it (not to mention the challenges to the gallerist trying to sell it).
Several responses to this problem have been devised over the years. Mechanical processes such as photography and printmaking offered an opportunity to produce artwork in unlimited qualities. In the 1960s the concept of the art multiple was taken up by a number of artists and dealers as a way to make art more democratic and affordable. Keith Haring opened his first Pop Shop in 1986, where he sold gear like t-shirts, bags and posters embellished with his signature line drawings. Even the exalted Gagosian Gallery has entered ‘democratic space’ in opening up a retail store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
But the fact is that none of these developments has truly solved the problem of the market. In fact, the polarities of the market seem to have never been greater. At the upper tier the prices for the most coveted artists continues into the stratosphere (only partly halted by the recent global slowdown), while the ‘bottom’ of the market is more and more served by websites that sell open edition work by the yard, ranging from the not so good to the pretty okay. For quality artists caught in the middle, the financial challenges of sustaining their calling remain significant, while the buying public with real interest in acquiring compelling contemporary art that is not restricted to the usual suspects of photography and prints is left with relatively few choices. That most art galleries are mom-and-pop businesses and therefore limited to certain geographic areas only exacerbates their difficulty in accessing art other than through the internet outlets.
Naturally, we think there is a potential solution, or why would we be going on like this?
Over the past few years there has arisen a wholly new mechanism for the physical production of objects. We have nicknamed this novel set of production capabilities the New Industrialism. It can be considered new because for the first time in history industrial manufacturing equipment has been married to the computer. Laser and water cutting, CNC milling machines, rotational molding and many other techniques have been developed out of this synthesis of the digital and the analog.
The New Industrialism also encompasses what we might call new design and production strategies; these would include mass customization, crowdsourcing, open innovation, on demand and short run production, and various other ways of working that were not viable in the pre-Digital Age.
In Part 2 of this thinkpiece, we will expound on the ways that artists can utilize the tremendous creative possibilities born out of the New Industrialism and in doing so rethink the economic and production models that have guided them for centuries.
References
A Primer on the New Industrialism
Murakami’s Hiropon Factory
Keith Haring’s Pop Shop
Gagosian Goes Retail
July 29th, 2010
Oy vey, does she really want a painting to go with her sofa?!
A documentary film about the abbreviated life of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat was reviewed recently in The Paper (you know, the Paper). Towards the end of the article the writer references a “tantalizing anecdote” where either one of the invited talking heads appearing in the film or Basquiat himself “tells of his [Basquiat’s] disgust at a patron who asked him to color-coordinate a painting to her living room”. This is a real-life version of a frequently repeated mise-en-scène in which the artist becomes aghast at the notion that his or her work could possibly be considered as somehow related to the surrounding décor. A fictionalized dramatization of the same scenario occurs in Woody Allen’s 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters when Dusty Frye (Daniel Stern) visits the studio of the artist Frederick (of Hollywood?) played by Max Von Sydow, who flies into a rage when the moneyed but obviously boorish Dusty explains his desire to find some art of sufficient scale for a place in Southhampton he’s renovating with the help of an interior decorator.
  
The aversion among the cognoscenti to the idea of connecting fine art to its physical environment is a relatively recent phenomenon. For centuries this was not at all the case; quite the contrary – art was very much viewed as part of a larger whole, rather than as self-contained, autonomous objects floating in their own hermetically sealed bubble. We can start by citing the ancient Greeks, who adorned every square inch on the inside of their pagan temples with works of painting and sculpture, all organized to harmonize with the surrounding architecture. The Romans continued the tradition, developed some new media to add to the mix (e.g., mosaics) and extended it into secular buildings and private dwellings. The practice reasserted itself with a vengeance in the art-crazed Renaissance, its apotheosis being the riotous agglomeration of artistry inside the Christian church, especially those in the northern reaches of Europe.
Things visually calm down a bit in the more restrained Neo-classical era, but in truth it’s during this period that the concept of the consummately designed environment – what would later be broadly labeled the gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’ – emerges as a desired objective among design professionals working at a domestic as well as an institutional scale. Perhaps no entity better represents this new empowerment than the architectural and interior design firm headed by Robert and James Adam. As impresarios of a new attitude towards interior design, the Adam Brothers are among the first to regard the modern domestic interior as a weave of the fine and applied arts, and then to choreograph the execution of these spaces in a masterful assemblage of multiple media down to the smallest detail. To coordinate the parts into a coherent whole, their scope of work necessarily included the design of tableware, decorative accessories, furnishings and floor coverings, as well as the development and commissioning of the fine art program.
You might be thinking at the moment that this is all fine and good for the olden days, but hey, we’re in the 21st century now and we just don’t do that kind of stuff anymore. Well, not so fast: the first generation of Modern Masters were very much of the same mind as the Adam boys when it came to the idea of the totality of the arts. The doctrine of the gesamtkunstwerk underpinned the curriculum of the Bauhaus through its entire history, to take just one of many celebrated examples of modernism’s embrace of this philosophy.
Excuse me, Mr. Molina – I mean Rothko – there’s no smoking in the studio, even your own.
So when and why did artists start to think differently? Honestly, we can’t say for sure, but we can surmise that, like so many things, it all changed with the War (you know, the War) and the demise of the Beaux-Arts. To bolster this assertion we again cite a literary dramatization about artists – this time, the award-winning Broadway play Red. The play tells the story of the painter Mark Rothko in the late ‘fifties after he’s received a commission from noted architect Philip Johnson to paint some murals for the upscale Four Seasons restaurant inside New York’s Seagram’s Building. Rothko is both flattered and repulsed by the invitation, and ultimately decides to turn down the work in part because he felt the atmosphere was undignified and his artwork a mere palliative for the unenlightened fat cats who would be dining alongside them. Among the snippets of dialogue there lingers a whiff of familiar disdain for anyone who dares think of art as merely ‘decoration’ tacked onto a wall.
In historical fact, Rothko was among the last of a generation of artists who very much wanted to embed their art in the larger context of a holistic environment. His canvases for an eponymous chapel in Houston and his research in preparing for the project represent the very embodiment of an artist in search of a physical grounding for his work. So again, we ask, when did things go awry? Okay, here’s another stab: when the artist’s studio and the art gallery became White Cubes.
But that’s a story for another day. For now, we would simply like to note that our efforts to promote a modular art stem in part from our desire to see art and its setting re-united in a common vision. For one of the most appealing characteristics of modular art is its customizability, which provides the artist, collector and designer with a powerful tool for re-linking the components that make up a space. After all, isn’t the whole nearly always greater than the sum of its arts?
References
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
Screenplay for Hannah and Her Sisters by Woody Allen
Website for the Broadway Play Red by John Logan
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Mission Henry Ford, move over – the era of mass production has come to a close! Personalization is the name of the game now. People want a role in shaping the physical world around them to suit their individual needs, tastes and resources; to satisfy that goal they're looking for works of art and design that are reconfigurable, interactive and scalable. This blog explores how creatives are responding to the quest for customization, as well as the impact customization is having on the creative disciplines themselves.
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