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The Baltimore House Gallery Phenomenon

by Max Guy, 2013

I want to start out by considering networking. The web has provided a creative and discursive outlet through which communities can form. Generally, low overhead costs and collective free time are incentives for production and creative output. NYU Professor Clay Shirky describes this abundance in the book, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Turns Consumers into Collaborators. The amorphous, customizable nature of blogs, message boards, and social networks seems utopian. The creation and distribution of art is no longer limited to a small privileged group. Shirky outlines the utopian potential in societies driven not by capitalism or socialism, but by an economy of amateurism. Increasingly networked, people form communities to do the things that they love, eventually striving for competence and innovation.

I live in a gallery space in Baltimore with my friends where the overhead is essentially paying rent and fundraising means throwing a New Year’s Eve banger. I have the privilege of walking through an art exhibition on the way to and from work.

I’ve been familiar with a young artist community here in Baltimore for about six years. That community works and exhibits almost entirely out of house galleries. Open Space Gallery (where I live), Nudashank, the Penthouse, Guest Spot, Gallery Four–these are all spaces that small groups of individuals have voluntarily carved out of their homes. The walls are white and dedicated to the presentation of art. Most of the galleries are run part-time (open on the weekends and by appointment), and the people running them have other jobs.

Open Living, Max Guy, 2013

As a young creative-type, reading articles on the decline of the capital-driven art world and quotes from Patti Smith saying I’m not welcome in New York (where I grew up), Baltimore’s art scene seems positively utopic. Or at least heterotopic.

Philosopher Michel Foucault describes the term heterotopic in his essay Of Other Spaces. As opposed to utopia–a perfect world in its entirety–heterotopia is a constructed space that embodies an ideal. Heterotopias are private constructs, isolated from but reacting to the real world. These are spaces that seem to do the impossible in their multi-functionality, spaces like an online social network or an artist gallery commune within an auto body shop. When building these structures it is necessary to be aware of surrounding social, philosophical, economic, and political constructs.

The establishment of a heterotopic space is often the product of collective interests and collective decision-making. The domestic dynamic of communal living becomes a major factor in the creation of a house gallery. Open Space, for example, is collectively run not only by the tenants of the house, but also by the previous generations of tenants. Influence within the space is not only based on a collective member’s dedication, but to an extent on their seniority as well. This system of governance functions somewhat like a nonprofit’s board of trustees or a curatorial committee. All curators have biases. In house galleries, camaraderie is the main interest that informs curating. An all-of-my-friends approach to curating can make bland exhibitions.

So can the minimal aesthetic of so-called white cube galleries. The construction of a multi-use “neutral” gallery-style space not only confuses the function of the home, but everything else that happens there. For example, in house galleries, gallery openings become house parties. It is easy to confuse and conflate commercial art openings and house parties at house galleries. While the commercial opening reception is easily adapted into a more subdued house party, it is best not to forget that these events are evidence of different ecosystems with different customs and different purposes.

As a writer, it is difficult for me to determine when a critical voice is appropriate in the house gallery scene. Critical discourse can flounder in this context, and the work can become temporary ornament to the event of the exhibition. I am uncomfortable judging my peers’ work based on commercial and institutional standards not representative of our community. Instead, when asked what I think of an art show, my response is often a description of what is displayed. Perhaps I create a metaphor, a reiteration of the thesis of a group exhibition.

In the spring of 2011, artists Matt Papich and Neal Reinalda co-curated Approximate Infinite Daydream, a concert series held at the Baltimore Museum of Art and at the artists’ homes. The series explored the development of domestic ambient music in Baltimore as a unique cultural phenomenon. Concerned with how lifestyle influences creation, Papich and Reinalda recognized the effect of domestic culture on musical production. Comfortable living brings comfortable, relaxed, great music, and vice-versa. Is the same true for visual art in house galleries?

How much is Baltimore a co-determined music scene and art scene? I see music’s influence on visual aesthetics most exemplified in the eclectic interior design of music venues. At Open Space we change the space’s ambiance to complement or react to performances by altering lighting and temporary display.

Image courtesy of Open Space

Perhaps something needs to change in a small city with little to no art market. As a young and perhaps naïve artist, I am eager to find some utopian alternative to the increasingly closed-off commercial art world and the predominant amateurism of the house gallery. I have come to know and love Baltimore’s art community: the prolific output and dedication of the artists is inspiring. An art scene needs more than the production of work and a local audience. I say: Let’s establish a genuine dialogue on our home turf, then open the discussion to cities with similar art scenes, sharing what works for us and pinpointing systemic flaws.

Max Guy is an artist and curator living in Baltimore. He has exhibited locally at Guest Spot, Penthouse Gallery, Current Space, Open Space Gallery, and Nudashank. Max often collaborates on film screenings and publications with Spiral Cinema and with Peggy Chiang on the curatorial project, Szechuan Best. What Weekly’s Art Criticism Column is made possible by the generous support of the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, creator of the Baker Artist Awards, www.BakerArtistAwards.org. Art Criticism in What Weekly is edited by Marcus Civin. For more information about this column, please contact marcus@whatweekly.com.

via What Weekly Magazine

http://bit.ly/WcDLTh

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My all-time favorite critique back and forth:

CB: What’s up with the table?

CK: Oh, you know, everybody loves a table!

CB: You’ll probably have to do better than that.

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The format of Hito Steyerl’s Lovely Andrea (29’43”, 2007), a short film commissioned for Documenta 12, ostensibly falls under the umbrella of the essay documentary genre. In that space, the work indeed documents an interview-based research process from the perspective of a tangible and bodied subjectivity, but it is perhaps better playfully described by one of its interview subjects, the editor of Sanwa Erotica, Matsumoto Yutaka, upon hearing the basic premise: “That’s a nice mystery novel. It’s mysterious, it sounds good.” In the film, Steyerl introduces her search for a published photo series of herself as a Shibari bondage S/M model taken in 1987 while studying as a film student in Tokyo. This central goal drives her research forward, but despite that apparent clarity and objective-based approach, the film both begins and ends with her as interview subject being asked “What is your film about?” The audience is repeatedly prodded to answer this question, arriving at a place that considers the broader paradigms of global power (reference appendix images A, B), through which bondage pornography might merely reveal some libidinal echoes of an underlying ideological infrastructure that bleeds out into global deployments of Imperialist Capitalism.

Steyerl’s archived images are the subject of the search, but the film’s central figure is Asagi Ageha, Steyerl’s translator as the search moves from Germany to Japan and also a bondage performer with her performance partner, Osada Steve. Steyerl and Asagi follow a trail from fetish studio to fetish studio, connecting the dots between a seemingly small community of male ropemasters that were active in S/M publishing in the 80s, they slowly narrow down the possibilities of the photographer and magazine in which it might have appeared. In a twist on the typical role of “translator as invisible intermediary,” their search is repeatedly put on hold as Asagi is directly addressed by members of the studio. A studio assistant at their first destination, Sanwa Erotica, asks, “Aren’t you a model, Ageha?” The ropemaster offers, “If you want a bondage picture of yourself, I will tie you up.” Asagi replies, “It’s maybe a good idea!” as the whole studio laughs. The film breaks into a montage of Asagi taking her shirt off and being bound by the ropemaster.

In the midst of the search, various editors describe the psychological space of S/M as it functions for both performer and studio. From one editor, Japanese S/M is described as being based on submissiveness, on offering the performer an opportunity to experience shame. Another German editor explains that some of his performers would tell you that they like to see rope marks on their skin, while others would say they enjoy the feeling of floating as they are suspended above the ground, “Only when being roped I feel free.” This sentiment seems to be a motif in BDSM, and parallels a line from Pauline Reage’s 1954 Story of O, “The chains and the silence, which should have bound her deep within herself, which should have smothered her, strangled her, on the contrary freed her from herself.“

Within these descriptions, Ropemaster Nureki Chimuo explains the relationship of these studios to the Japanese legislature while voicing over a photoshoot of a woman with her arms tied behind her back in chic business woman garb, “Back then there were lots of restrictions… It was best when [the police] were extremely bothersome.” Nureki explains that they ought to operate as if they always have these same restrictions but never quite clarifies if this is because those conditions forced the studios to be more creative in their operations, or if it was the illicit nature of the media that increased their audience’s desire for the media. Something to note here: through the description of the studio’s relationship with the state, the audience finds the studio manager describing a power dynamic that becomes a direct projection of the internal dynamic that is roleplayed in front of the camera lens. In this echoed restriction, the studios enjoy being dominated by the police. Through that description, a fractal structure of power is constructed, submission echos from the micro to the macro with an implication of recursiveness ad infinitum. Within that structure, as Nureki says, “The more restrictions the better.” (Reference appendix image C).

This theoretical fractal structure is reinforced with a series of playful associative video transitions that imply a much broader presence of explicit and implicit domination in a global setting. Inclusions of Depeche Mode’s 1984 single Master and Servant (one of many ‘70s and ‘80s punk and pop singles that populate Lovely Andrea’s soundtrack) leads to a chorus with corresponding title cards that exclaim, Let’s play master and servant; it’s a lot like life! This simple libidinal request becomes a central theme that is rearticulated throughout the film. In conversation, Asagi asks Ropemaster Osada to clarify a point about S/M, “You mean in a normal society, everything is bondage?” Osada responds by describing the web that he imagines connecting and binding everyone in “society” before the audience returns to transitions between footage from the 1960s animated Spiderman and the 2002 live-action Spiderman with scenes which depict broad webs stretching between buildings and collecting various vehicles and people. With repeated insertions of pop media as soundtrack and transition, there is an implication that pop media of this sort may also be a function of domination in a global setting.

There are multiple threads that emerge at this point in the theoretical structure that Steyerl develops. With the inclusion of imagery from the 2002 Spiderman (reference appendix image E), she briefly sketches out a connection across forms of censorship, jumping between the censorship of bondage imagery in 1987 Japan and the censorship of Spiderman promotional images in 2001 that depicted a web capturing a helicopter between the Twin Towers in Manhattan. Between these images, is it just the visible knotting and harnessing that becomes illicit here? That visible knotting might remind the public of the quotidian power dynamics in which they play a part? With tongue planted firmly in cheek, it becomes unclear if censorship is caused by the visible inclusion of the web in both of these images, or, more likely, a distinctly moralist protection from pornography and a separate statist repression of imagery that reminds a public of a global political landscape.

When Steyerl and Asagi ultimately locate the images of Steyerl in the Fuzoku Shiryokan Sex Archive and are able to arrange a meeting with the photographer, Tanaka Kinichi, a description of the industry in the ‘80s complicates the research up that point. Tanaka notes the number of women that were lied to about the kind of shoot that would be happening and how in some cases, they wound up being paid in freedom rather than in the agreed upon sum of money. In this moment in which roleplay and real power blurs, a collapse occurs in the theoretical space that has been developed when a variety of scenes depicting Abu Ghraib bound victims, Guantanamo Bay prisoners, Terror Advisory Charts, and Spiderman are inserted into a monitor in the scene (reference appendix images A, F, G). At this point, Asagi clarifies to an interview subject that the name in “Lovely Andrea” that Steyerl used in 1987 was borrowed from her friend Andrea Wolf, who would later join the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and, labeled a terrorist, be murdered by the Turkish State. (Reference appendix image D).

In adopting Andrea’s name, the photoset in the 1987 issue of S/M Sniper travels and disseminates in a manner not so different from the way Andrea Wolf’s actual image was reproduced and consecrated by fellow PKK insurgents after her death. Some differences: the 1987 image of “Andrea” shows a bound, stripped woman, wrists tied together, bent over, with large, male hands directing her posture, printed in glossy color on cheap paper, bound between covers, while the image of Andrea in Turkey after her death features a soft, kind face looking away from the camera’s gaze contentedly, and is printed in cheap black and white and is surrounded by a green laurel. The ambiguous relationship between these two image-based “Andreas” raises a question: What exactly is the relationship between the images of the martyr Andrea and the images of the sex object “Andrea?” Thinking through the lives of images, do they coexist primarily through their distinction from the real lives of the two subjects that are imaged? Where the life of the martyr Andrea becomes completely isolated from her experience as an insurgent, and similarly for “Andrea,” the “sex slave”? Alternatively, does 1987 “Andrea” function more purely as an icon for life in a neoliberal global landscape derived from the effects of colonialism? Perhaps the term “roleplay” becomes key for thinking through the power dynamics inherent in that global landscape.

In one of the final scenes, Asagi explains that she no longer performs as a typical bondage model, but rather as a “self-suspension performer” (reference appendix image H). This shift in terminology places Osada Steve in the assistant role as she binds her body and suspends herself through the use of a rope and pulley system. The distinction does not eliminate the role of being bound nor does it eliminate the imagery of bound bodies, but rather locates agency within that role. A montage of her performance plays as title cards alternate --- “WORK IS BONDAGE”/”BONDAGE IS WORK” --- and music plays as found footage of women working in a restaurant cuts in and out.

Strangely, it is in moments of such explicit attribution of meaning that make the inclusion of topics with ambiguous or multiple dimensions of relevance so generative in Lovely Andrea. With the ideological origins of the PKK in Marxism-Leninism, a reading of this associative collage through the filter of labor gestures towards Imperialist-Capitalist extraction of capital as ubiquitous bondage, a metaphor that becomes concretized when applied to the police tactics that strip bare the pop-culture surface of such systems.

But in returning to the repeated question pointed at Steyerl, “What is your film about?”, one final moment illuminates Steyerl’s sensibility of a feminist read. Noticing her image on the monitor, Steyerl exclaims, “I should get some Botox, I think.” Immediately, she is asked, “But you consider yourself a feminist?”, to which she responds, “Yes, definitely.” In this brief exchange, Steyerl foregrounds her own libidinal objectives and autonomy over self. In a familiar feminist read, the existence of cosmetic surgery as iconic symptom of feminine bondage to feminine body idealization is a problem, but her exclamation reads as sympathetic towards bondage and clarifies the ways in which that desire is not mutually exclusive with feminism. An adjacent text of Steyerl’s illuminates this thinking beyond the broad understanding of her and Asagi’s own autonomies, “The feminist movement, until quite recently (and for a number of reasons), worked toward claiming autonomy and full subjecthood. But as the struggle to become a subject became mired in its own contradictions, a different possibility emerged. How about siding with the object for a change? Why not affirm it? Why not be a thing? An object without a subject? A thing among other things?” The implications of such a claim towards an objecthood without subjecthood interfaces with Asagi’s notion of self-suspension neatly, but this also remains fairly theoretical in the way that her interest in Botox is not.

Katherine Behar addresses a similar question in her collection of texts, Object-Oriented Feminism, as she navigates the issue of the body-self-object in service of navigating a sound non-anthropocentric philosophy. In this work, implicating the self as object is sought in order to escape the anthropocentrist approach, which she describes as a liability in a variety of arenas, “[from] the ecological to the epistemological to the ethical.” Identifying the problem of animism in some supposedly non-anthropocentric philosophies as vivophilia, she advocates for necrophilia,

“It is a question of perspective. Vivophilia says that most things in the world are, in some significant way, as alive as I am. Necrophilia says that I am, in some significant way, as dead as are most things in the world.”

Behar identifies this (very specific) notion of necrophilia as the generative central tenet of the feminist body-art that has developed since the 1960s. “Denouncing the fetishization of lively integrity in body objects, body art foregrounds the self not only as a deadly object to be killed off but also as the scene of the crime.” In this dialogue, Behar claims administration of Botox as an ideal method for achieving that objective on a more quotidian timeline, through the use of the same toxin found in botulism, OnabotulinumtoxinA, via direct injection.

Within this space, there is better ground for understanding how the more overt elements of this film (the unethical practices of the Japanese black market porn industry in the ‘80s vs. Asagi’s agency in self-suspension) fit with the more opaque elements (the relationship between Andrea and “Andrea” as images, the role of censorship, the question of global power, how to reckon Botox ethics). The repetition of the line “What is your movie about?” remains useful because it gestures towards the simultaneity of mutual dependence that these threads rely upon for support.

In architecture, a “reciprocal frame” is a class of self-supporting structure made of three or more beams which requires no center support to support roofs, bridges or similar structures (reference appendix image I). This model of the reciprocal frame provides a useful illustration for the way in which Steyerl’s threads seem to support each other: leaning on each other in a sort of pinwheel formation, without need for a central column to support the resulting structure. In that model as illustration, Steyerl and her relationship with Andrea becomes the absent center support; instead, the audience encounters Asagi as surrogate for a younger Steyerl, the images of Steyerl that circulated throughout Japan, the images of the real Andrea that circulated throughout Turkey, the censorship that occurs under any state government, the real tactics of domination that state governments impose on their citizens and on other countries, and the roleplay of sexualized objects. If an audience pulls out the threads of Steyerl’s criticality, bondage functions as a useful distillation of much broader power dynamics. Despite this analysis of “bondage as theatre”/”bondage as business”/”work as bondage”, the brief reference to/absence of Andrea Wolf’s relationship to Steyerl and her images reveals that this work is founded in sentiment and a self-reflexive gaze in spite of such an ostensibly goal-oriented, critically-minded approach.

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Hello Colin How nice to hear from you.  And, yes, sadly the sabbatical is coming to its end. You are correct.  The three types of form were Megaform or the monolithic, then two types of group form.  First hierarchical or compositional form, and second reciprocal form. Do you need more details than that or does that answer your question?  The types came from an essay on form by Kenzo Tange a Japanese architect.  I came across the essay on my undergraduate course in England 1970's-ish give or take a year.  Does that help? I have images and stuff from the lecture that I gave to you guys. Good luck, nice of you to ask about my year.

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what’s it mean when you start dancing to this song in the mirror and your art practice is a series of well reproductions

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Keith Tyson, Large Field Array, 2007

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Günther Uecker [Germany] (b 1930) ~ “Sting House”, 1967. Nails and plywood, polychromed black and red (48,5 x 30,5 x 33 cm).

Find out more here:  Günther Uecker : Hammering Passion   ©   ART HuNTER .

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Teva Sandal

Blue Scorpion Pattern

Black Jean

White underwear

low rise

sheer blouse

sleeveless

oatmeal

half buttoned

neckline

marula oil

pore refining

exfoliating

cleanser

purple plastic butterfly hairclip

black elastic

no bun

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Thread

Leaf

Note

Lease

One and a quarter inch

Bent Hinge

Fruit fly

House fly

Shit fly

Erection

Ethic

Fruit

Revlon Navy Blue Skinny Eyeliner

Organic Vapor and P100 Respirator Mask

Steel bar, horizontal, brushed, stainless

Rust spot

Nut

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Tennis ball Peace Lily Sunlight Grey blouse North pole Sun hat Fifteen Aluminum Tailgate Wart Away Plastic Bag Stain Collar Beach ball 15W30 Keyboard; flute voice Marble fragment Craigslist Book

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koki tanaka, everything is everything (2006)

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This is where i post when I’m anxious, fb is where i post when I’m curious, ig is where i post when i lov it

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my favorite move in critique is when someone asks “why did you ________?” and I answer by just describing the thing with more words of my own choosing. Probably only feels non-evasive because you can’t help but bring baggage with the words you’re choosing, but also its a great way to just say “I wanted it like that.”

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scrawling some notes. trouble afoot in brain town. very little drive -- i am scrolling through old pictures and being nostalgic for a day to day that, despite beating down on me & feeling like sleepwalking at times, ultimately felt unified and as if there was an immanent glow. Richmond has felt super bad lately. I am feeling like I’ve stopped caring for my body, stopped finding the drive that might support caring for my body, and ultimately am in a practice trench because those chemicals are stalling out. 

very lonely tho, which is connected. I seem to spend a lot of time in the studio not actually getting much done because I am in a depression cycle w/ anxiety that keeps me up late, which make me wake up late, avoiding time spent preparing meals because of the feeling emptiness that they foreground.

Feeling uncomfortable about the kind of questions that are brought up by being in this school setting, as well. I very much so believe in my own work in its most winding ways, both object and non object producing, and wouldn’t be doing this if i didn’t but am not sure that the practice is supported by the path that allows it to be self sustaining -- which maybe means it needs to rely on a slower burn. Which mostly enters the studio in this bubble context in the question of tightness of coherence of practice, which brings anxiety into the equation. I think what I need is the hardheadedness back -- spend too much time studying and then suddenly u r trying to prove the theory rather than the other way around. Amazingly, the best thing I heard last year was the advice that “you are always right if you believe in it.” Or at least I think that’s what he said.

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I want to make a carving of an owl. This is something I’ve wanted since being described a sculpture of very similar properties at the Berlin Biennial. It’s one of those feelings that you lock onto -- I think I remember introducing myself to a person I thought I was very attracted to back in 2010 or so and then realized that I had just seen them around and that in fact they were just familiar. 

This is something that is everyday now. Not some confusion between attraction/recognition, but the identification of base level feelings as reality. Often as simple as a heightened level of attention that feels significant. What is that intuition? I feel completely vacant of that intuition at the moment, something maybe from too much attention to work after navigating 3 full years with only very intimate vis

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Presenting some work to more people today than... i ever have? and realizing my train of thought has no logic, its just vibrating thoughts.

learn how to use space first

memory palace as virtual space, and as the transformation of history, narrative, or data into virtual space

edith as a parallel transmutation of body into salt

(not so interested in sodom and gomorrah, but interested in judeo/christian/islamic trajectory as such a succesful use of narrative to distribute ideology, thinking of snow crash and the virus)

jon von neumann talking about the most powerful aspect of the computer being that the program is made of the same material that is manipulates (data)

thinking of the body 

thinking of architecture

thinking of platonic form