I say *mostly* online, as many of these delicious art sites have occasional offline volumes, events and activities that are definitely worth perusing. This article focuses on giving an overview of some of the web-based arts sites, magazines, blogs and journals (not run by super massive companies) that I frequent. I hope that new readers from my recent UK Handmade features (Hi!!) will also find something of interest here…

photo credit: Always Bë Cool

Keri Smith

Artist Keri Smith is creator of the Artist’s Survival Kit – a dry-humoured, realistic and nicely designed guide for ‘the really bad days, for the days when you want to quit, when you feel like everything you do is shit, when you feel your self-esteem plummet, when you decide that you would rather wait tables for a living…’ Her blog is full of interesting projects, things to get involved with, cool links, drawings by Keri and the archives of her ‘create a thing a day for a month’ set of exercises. Perfect for those down days.

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Art Vehicle

The magnificent Art Vehicle is run mainly by Slade School of Art London graduates and, as you would expect from such high calibre staff, is smart, funny and descriptive. I particularly enjoy their clean, unpretentious layout, simple navigation and decision to showcase audio and video contributions as well as traditional texts. Content is London-focused, covering contemporary artist interviews, reviews and artist pages, but ‘postcards’ from other places provide another dimension.

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Dandelion Journal

Dandelion is more than a journal – it’s a student-led initiative funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council: a community, social network, free webspace and noticeboard for art historical researchers. However, the postgraduate journal itself is worth a good look. It’s in a stylish PDF format, but cleverly, has an online contents page, with academic abstracts and direct links to each document, saving you precious searching time. Topics covered range from 15th Century Roman guidebooks to the Christian apocalyptic thriller and each issue also comes with a lecture-style podcast.

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Whitehot Magazine

J’adore Whitehot Mag. Not only because I’ve recently joined their truly international team as Assistant Editor, but because their bang-up-to-date mix of articles on major and emerging art and artists, art book reviews and occasional op-eds is spot on. Known particularly for their hand-picked interviews -  interviewees include Mariko Mori & Bette Gordon – and support of new artists and galleries, the editorial group’s commitment to fresh views and quality signify the rise and rise of this original magazine.

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Artists Talking

A collection of journals of a different kind, a-n’s Artists Talking space is an unedited, ever-expanding library of living, contemporary artist’s personal and professional musings, projects, exhibition reviews, images and a healthy comments section. Lightly overseen by Andrew Bryant, a practicing artist and curator who also writes the Artist’s Talking newsletter and gives blogging advice, the site’s design, searchability and ‘choice blogs’ section bring a gentle order to what could be merely a chaotic mish-mash of art-related stuff. The result is a great directory of witty, well-informed and talented artists, with the bonus of really getting to know an artist’s practice through their sustained written and visual diaries.

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Dialogue

Axis Web is a more traditional arts directory with a superb commissioned magazine – Dialogue – taglined, ‘the latest news, opinions, interviews, reviews and debates.’. You might have seen my opinionated Rants grace its virtual pages, but Axis is also brilliant for expert written and audio coverage on arts events and conferences; political and funding issues affecting artists and curators; articles on digital media; prominent competition info; and timely responses to news items.

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ArtHistoryRag

ArtHistoryRag, run by art writer Stacey Laird, is a punchy, glossy news-based blog/magazine with great images and pink headlines! Named one of the ‘top art history blogs 2010′ by bestbloggers.org, turn to ArtHistoryRag for the scoop on arts prize nominees and winners; exhibition openings; really engaging exhitbition and arts documentary reviews; and a varied geographical viewpoint. A sample of Stacey’s tags should convince you of her catholic tastes: ‘christies, constructivism, creolisation, damian hirst, hans holbein the younger, jaum plenser, john cale’. Phew!

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Becoming Part of Something

Artist Rosalind Davis’ blog – Becoming Part of Something – is an insightful, reflective diary that deals with the personal aspects of being a working artist and running an artist-led gallery (she described the gallery as ‘like an informal MA for me’), as well as documenting exhibitions and thinking carefully about the pros and cons of the type of work she does. Rosalind seems to be unafraid of writing about contentious topics and is, equally, happy to share her knowledge and experiences with the artistic community. Brilliant.

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One Night Stanzas

Claire Askew’s One Night Stanzas is not a ‘fine art’ blog per se, but I thought I’d include it as my final selection, as her ideas, links, images and writing have been a great source of inspiration and encouragement as I’ve begun my, erm, ‘journey’ as a blogger, freelancer and artist. A talented, award winning poet, on the University of Edinburgh staff, and editor of Read This Magazine, Claire is one of those super productive people whose blog I turn to for tips on how to keep it all together! She features excellent poets (poets are artists too, right?), procrastination-crunching posts and notes on being a writer – on topics from dealing with rejection to staying on top of your game (top tips: sleep and eat breakfast, d’oh). Love. Her.

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ps – This post was kind of inspired by Seymour’s recent writing on his current favourite bloggers (ah, he picked me! *blush*)

Agnes Martin, Mountain #1, Museum of Modern Art, New York (detail shot taken by me)

A sense of disappointment and defeat is the essential state of mind for creative work

That is why art work is so very hard. It is a working through disappointments to greater disappointment and a growing recognition of failure to the point of defeat

‘Defeated’ is the position from which to have something to say, to rise up

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I noted down these thoughts on disappointment and failure while reading Martin’s handwritten notebooks and letters at the University of Pennsylvania rare book and manuscript library.

I read similar passages in the book Agnes Martin: Writings, as a young artist-in-training at Chelsea College of Art & Design. Martin’s words sustained me back then and continue to do so.

Writing this review was a huge challenge for me in my particular position as an art history graduate student and aspiring artist. I enjoy the challenge of writing about visual and/or conceptual things, but have come to prefer the physical process of making my own drawings and tactile objects…

Record 1974/75. Mabou Coal Mines by June Leaf published by Steidl / www.steidlville.com

Dealing with the mountains of delicious desire, drawing inspiration and eye excitement while attempting to be an objective, critical observer was tough. I think that difficulty comes across in the review, although I’m also fairly satisfied with the way it turned out. June Leaf’s drawings are stunning, narrative, personal and process oriented. When Leaf’s beautiful book arrived in the post back in April, I started flipping through it, looking at the variety of marks and Leaf’s confidence with the accidental, my imagination ran wild and my frustration and desire to work as a fine artist rather than primarily as a writer finally became codified in my mind. Leaf’s book was the catalyst and the prompt for 30 Days of Drawing and all of the developments that are going to come out of it…

Book Review: June Leaf, Record 1974/1975 and Critical Communities, RITE

RITE
April 2010, Critical Communities

In a 1997 interview with Chuck Smith, the abstract painter Agnes Martin comments on the proliferation, and redundancy, of critical writing on art. She observes, ‘we have five big magazines coming out a month, people talking about art, and there’s just nothing you can say’.

Over a decade later, crises within art criticism are still a significant topic in aesthetic debate. In a recent Huffington Post article White Hot Editor-in-Chief, Noah Becker, reminds us that it is of utmost importance in aesthetic discourse to ‘write about or talk about the actual contemporary art in question’, rather than concentrate only on the ego-driven, discursive framework of verbal battles between celebrated art writers. Martin got it partially right: the art she refers to is often deliberately ineffable, non-verbal, formalist; made in defiance of language or narrative. This type of work may quite naturally attract projections from individual critical personalities or theoretical positions, due to its screen-like blankness. However (and you will understand this if you have ever tried), producing a coherent piece of writing about any kind of art – whether formal sculpture, live performance or neon text installation – with integrity, focus and clarity, is incredibly challenging.

Perhaps this is one reason behind a new sway of critical interest towards artists’ own writings, speech and notebooks. Two recently published books, June Leaf’s Record 1974/75 and Critical Communities’ RITE, both 2010, take substantially different approaches, but their appearance in this moment seems connected by the contemporary desire to discard tired critical methods and to explore new ways of communicating about (and through) art and writing.

On 26 November, 1974, June Leaf made her first handwritten, diary-type entry into her new sketchbook (reproduced for publication by Steidl), made during a difficult Winter spent in Mabou Coal Mines, Nova Scotia with her husband Robert Frank: “I don’t usually like to write because I am more satisfied by an action.” Perhaps this indicates a tendency, like that of Martin, to view some types of art writing as useless or static. Despite this disaffection with writing, as in Martin’s case, Leaf continues this practice throughout her workbook sometimes using a close conjunction of exploratory images and scrawled text, sometimes pausing the act of note-making for a few pages while a visual idea is refined through tentative, speculative drawing.

Record 1974/75. Mabou Coal Mines by June Leaf published by Steidl / www.steidlville.com

Drawing is key to Record. Leaf draws and writes with exactly the same materials: dark ink, ball-point pen and pencil, adding judicious splashes of painted, often primary, atmospheric colour with what looks like watercolour or gouache. In some places, the boundaries between drawing and writing begin to blur, offering an insight into a practicing artist’s process-based use of words as independent forms in an overall composition. This is evident in a beach scene (p. 47) in which the curling cursive date, ‘Nov 22’, in the top right corner of the page mimics – or perhaps prefigures – the shapes of penned-in clouds below. On turning the page (p. 49), three bristling drawings of sea creatures are stacked one above the next, with the bottom image being sealed off and captioned, ‘A WHALE’, in mock typewriter text: text produced explicitly through a graphic process rather than through traditional handwriting. In other places (such as p. 59) anxious black ink marks seem to be escaping from a figurative sketch of fingers manipulating a thin rope, slipping downwards until they form, not words, but repetitive curves and diagonals punctuated with sharp dots, which might dually refer to outlines of tiny people and spasmodic stabs at language-formation.

Pertinent to Leaf’s inquisition into the visual and textual is the notion of narrative. While each page, or double page, certainly works as an energetic or delicate composition in its own right, the book as a whole comprises several interwoven narratives. Firstly, fragments of Leaf’s autobiography are caught, almost as if overheard, in her diaristic, infrequently dated, notes that run chronologically throughout the book. Leaf declares, in emphatic capitals, her desire to remove personal history from her art (p. 143); perhaps by using the journal in part as a safe space for storing personal thoughts, she might later abstract images and concepts away from their autobiographical roots into fully realised works. Second and third narratives are those of the development of motif and technique. Record opens with several pages of experimentation, in which the image of a knot is located as the eye of a bird, followed by a meditation on looking (drawings of a man focusing intently as he tries to thread a needle). A kind of free associative narrative continues, which seems to link up acts of looking and touching, with as much emphasis placed on the hands as the eyes; the knotted thread is now unraveled and the connections continue.

Record 1974/75. Mabou Coal Mines by June Leaf published by Steidl / www.steidlville.com

Before moving onto a brief discussion of RITE, it must be mentioned that Steidl showcases via Record the remarkable reproduction techniques used by the publishing company’s ‘digital darkroom’. The book is a delight to handle and to examine up close: every stain, smudge, rubbed out graphite score and pressure mark in the original sketchbook has been captured in the facsimile. This attention to detail naturally allows for Leaf’s linear sensitivity, speed, inventiveness and variety to be appreciated in depth, making this publication a valuable document in researching Leaf’s emotional, skillful work and, equally, for more general studies of artistic process.

RITE, a publication produced by the members of collaborative, London and Yorkshire based artists group Critical Communities, also focuses attention on the use of writing as process, this time in live and cross-disciplinary art. The book comprises brief, varied contributions by selected artists from within the group, utilising text, a variety of fonts, photography, graphic design and montage.

Emma Cocker’s piece, ‘Re: Writing, 1993-2009, 2000 words’ (p. 13-21), is a collection of 296 footnotes, including one image, separated by neat semicolons and displayed in small, professional-looking type at the bottom of each of seven pages. Phrases range from the art-typical, ‘(202) Pause is then a critical gesture’, to the romantic, ‘(269) The pages flutter like butterfly’s wings warmed in the sun’, and the psychological, ‘(255) Keeping certain voices at bay’. A curious attempt might be made to read the notes as a linear, or a dreamlike, narrative, however what is more useful about them is that they appear to refer back to a multitude of unknown/unknowable thoughts, texts, actions or observations collated by the artist. Footnotes become, therefore, a way of figuring those longing-filled gaps in contemporary criticism that initially provoked Critical Communities to begin writing for, and amongst, themselves.

It feels unfair to make a selection of ‘other standout pieces’ in this book, as RITE’s ethos is determinedly democratic and collaborative. The potential failings (digression, dullness, self-obsession, obscurity, corny or awkward phrasing) of many of the book’s texts are probably symptoms of the ambiguous expectation of audience on the part of RITE’s artists. Some of the texts appear to be useful, exploratory exercises enabling an individual or group to develop or to document their practice, perhaps through tracing a memory as in Amelia Crouch’s work on experiences of Mona Hatoum’s ‘Measures of Distance’ (p. 54-58). These diaristic pieces generate sympathy, and evoke a spirit of emotional openness, rather than being compelling pieces of writing for general consumption. On the other hand, many of the texts attempt to anticipate their readers’ gripes in less than subtle ways, such as in Emma Bennet’s line, ‘Yes, this grammatical pedantry may seem a little arch’ (p. 91). Positively though, conversational framing, or fragmented montage – as in David Berridge’s simple but engaging non-puzzle ‘Match the Diagram and the Phrase’ (p. 86-90) – refers back to RITE’s roots in live art process, rather than in polished writing-as-product.

Both Record and RITE are broadly titled after their respective functions. However, both books spill quickly outside of their remits, working more as textual-visual performances or displays, rather than as critical, or even truthful, documents. In this way, Record and RITE, though very different publications, feel similarly romantic, desirous, self-conscious. This marks them out as books by artists. These books ask to be read differently, slowly; sometimes critically, at other times emotionally; with caution, with patience; with generosity and with pleasure. They show that paying attention to the ways in which artists use and expand text is particularly appropriate right now, gently to challenge and to refresh what is typically acceptable as art writing, both for artists and for critics.

This piece was originally published at White Hot Magazine

For your drawing inspiration today, this is an hour long lecture by feminist and psychoanalytic scholar of art history Catherine de Zegher on Eva Hesse’s relationship to drawing, and on contemporary art’s expansion of drawing, from the Walker Art Center’s 2009 exhibition of Hesse’s drawings…

Introduction from the Walker Art Center’s site:

The exhibition Eva Hesse Drawing offers an intimate look at the drawings, working notes, and sculptures of one of the most important artists of the 1960s, Eva Hesse, whose extraordinary oeuvre helped redefine the art of her time. Exhibition co-curator Catherine de Zegher speaks about the development of Hesses artistic process, the relevance of her extended vision of contemporary art practice, and the importance of drawing as a primary medium for contemporary artists.

My trip to the University of Pennsylvania’s ICA archive has already proved exciting, pushing forward my MA dissertation and PhD preparation on the abstract painter Agnes Martin. In an (as far as I can tell so far) anonymous, 1973 essay on one of the artist’s grid drawings, entitled ‘The Desert’, I came across this wonderful passage on drawing and had to share it with you…

Duchamp felt that all objects were limited and necessarily imperfect realisations of an idea. A drawing – like the blueprint for an object or the plan of a building – is less elaborated and thus closer to the original idea. Not being a finished object, the drawing seems to leave more room for the viewer to make of it what he wishes. A drawing requires more interaction on the part of the viewer than either a painting or a piece of sculpture precisely because it is incomplete.

…one must get very close to ‘Desert’ in order to really see it. It makes no strong visual impact, retreating instead to the surface of the wall on which it hangs. In this way, the drawing invites dialogue, demands close and intense participation, ultimately making a greater impact through deceptive but insistent meekness.

I love the idea of a powerful meekness, a soft strength, even a deceptively shy form that doesn’t cry out to be looked at, doesn’t have a hook, but that rewards an attentive viewer.

IMAGE CREDIT: Agnes Martin, Happy Holiday, 1999; Acrylic and graphite on canvas; 152.40 x 152.40 cm; © Estate of Agnes Martin/DACS, London 2008; Photo: A Reeve

NB: I had a bit of a train travel problem yesterday involving getting stuck in not one, but two, towns in the middle of nowhere, so didn’t have time to upload my Saturday Sketchbook photos (no wi-fi on Pennsylvania regional rail – boo!). They should be up by the end of the day though. Happy drawing!

Surprise, surprise: I’ve only just realised that my a-n blog (made up of more personal and sporadic reflections on the academic and creative life than my website here) was selected as an Artists Talking ‘choice blog’ a month or so ago. I didn’t even think that anyone read it, so I’m really touched by the comments I’ve copied below. A true motivation to keep writing in a spirit of honesty…

photo credit: Olivander

Choice blogs April/May 2010: Jewellery and Visual Artist Hazel Evans selects Becky Hunter’s Diary of an Art Historian

To sell or not to sell your soul, that is the question…

Someone recently told me that (in their opinion) to be a commercial artist would be to sell your soul, as art should only be for art’s sake. Needless to say this person was in full time employment and was not trying to make a living as a professional artist either! In response to this person’s bold statement, I found that the blog, Diary of an Art Historian, by Becky Hunter, brings to the surface the continuing question of lifestyle choices as an artist. Hunter says “I sometimes feel as if I’m betraying myself in some way by focusing on how to earn a living rather than on creative flow”. An honest declaration that hits the paintbrush on the bristles about how many artists compromise their creativity in order to make a living.

Determined never to be a ‘hobby time’ artist I have learned that earning a living as a creative person also involves getting skilled in business, being a multi-tasking extraordinaire, as well finding time to get in the ‘creative zone’, and this is something that many artists find challenging. Hunter raises questions about finding professional direction and even gives a handy link to making a start on a business plan.

Hunter’s blog blends accounts of her progress in further education studying an MA in History of Art with engaging documentation of her own work and studies from drawings to “Yesterday I took my cardboard grid out for a walk through the nature reserve near my flat”. This appeals to me as I enjoy the journey into my own work through the written word, historical reference and humour mixed with a touch of glamour and magic. Finding time to follow my creative flow is not always easy but I enjoy what I do, and that is the question!

Hazel Evans is a Jewellery and Visual Artist

Taking a break from Freelance Journalling today. Instead, here’s the marvelous Bruce Nauman…

Click through to Ubuweb for more Nauman classics and a brief bio.

I haven’t posted any art history notes for a while so thought it’s time to share a snippet from a recently completed essay on Cornelia Parker’s ruinous and theatrical installation Cold Dark Matter, 1991. Maybe I can make AHN a Wednesday thang? This section of the essay deals with the way in which an art historian might use psychoanalytic theory to interpret a work of art against its historical conditions. Comments and critique totally welcome…

(NB: Not Parker's work, just a cool image)

Hal Foster, in ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, 1994, consciously upholds a common fantasy within art historical writing that presents art history itself as an individual, psychoanalytic subject, with past traumas resulting in the repetition of artistic tropes, such as the grid, the readymade and the monochrome. In this way, Foster avoids a conventional art historical outlining of chronological, organic formal developments and instead focuses on psychoanalytic time, in which an adult individual’s past is repeatedly revisited or received, in order gradually to work through and fully to ‘comprehend’ traumatic events or desires. It is my contention that Melanie Klein’s theory of infantile anxious and depressive states may be used to enrich Foster’s conception of the psychoanalytic subject as an analogy or metaphor for the story of twentieth-century art.

It is worth addressing, in four fairly substantial points, the reasons that this adaption of Foster’s methodology is both necessary and valuable. Firstly, Foster uses a Freudian/Lacanian model of the return of the repressed, a model that holds the Oedipal conflict as a fundamental principle in the development, or stagnation, of subjectivity. By choosing to replace this with a Kleinian model, the helpful notion of the return of the repressed in later life is preserved (in Klein’s analysis of creative drives this is called ‘primary repression’), but the initial trauma is located at a much earlier, ‘pre-Oedipal’ stage of infancy. Klein’s work is therefore applicable equally to male and female subjects and does not assign a fixed gender to the parental unit (viewing the infant’s perception of the male penis as within the female body at this stage).

Secondly, Klein is renowned for her strong interest in ‘negativity’ and destructive tendencies in male and female infants; her work’s focus on infantile anxiety and ‘weapons of the child’s primary sadism’ provides a suitable theoretical framework for focusing on Cold Dark Matter’s ambivalence and brutality, closer to the installation’s way of handling its bric-a-brac materials and modernist tropes than the notion of reception through repetition alone. Mignon Nixon has greatly opened this area of Kleinian art historical studies with both of the above points in mind, for example in her 2005 study of the melancholic, aggressive mother-son relationship exemplified by Louise Bourgeois’ Portrait of Jean-Louis, c. 1947.

Thirdly, Foster’s psychoanalytic analogy, while convincing, stretches only to provide an initial thesis regarding the reason that modernist tropes resurface throughout the twentieth century. Yet, when Foster looks at specific instances of repetition, such as the blending of the monochrome and the readymade in an outdoor, social setting by Daniel Buren, he turns to the ‘institutional nexus’ (rather than further psychoanalytic notions) in order to suggest how the artist has received and reworked modernist emblems. In contrast, by using Klein to think specifically about Cold Dark Matter’s relation to its historical conditions, the scope of the psychoanalytic analogy is deepened from observation of an art historical pattern across the twentieth century, to an analysis of a specific work mounted against its historical conditions. This makes for a more consistent methodological approach across the investigation.

Finally, by using a psychoanalytic hermeneutic in this investigation, another interpretive problem may be sidestepped, for now. Unlike the overtly, or intentionally, critical work of many artists on Parker’s lateral axis, for whom a Foster-style approach based partly upon the artist’s own theoretical or institutional concerns may be useful, Parker’s critical agenda has proven to be slippier to pinpoint. By using a Kleinian psychoanalytic approach as a metaphor for what Cold Dark Matter does, suggestions can be made about historical, and contemporary, relationships without overstating the case by defining these relationships as the artist’s deliberate strategies.

Also not Parker's work, but cool nonetheless!

IMAGE CREDITS: Lars Lindberg Christensen & Madhollo & here’s a definition of actual cold, dark matter, pretty fun stuff!

ps – I’m doing my best only to use open source images on my blog. So if you’d like to see more of what Cold Dark Matter (the installation, not the cosmic phenomena) looks like, take a look at Tate’s multimedia exploration of the work or click here.

pps – there is also a super cute (and rather surreal) short story on the Tate Tales children’s website inspired by Cold Dark Matter, entitled ‘The Dark Hole of the Mine’. Part of goes like this, ‘As he stepped forward he realised that his body was shrinking! But he didn’t care he wanted to see what’s inside the hole…’ Love it.

IMAGE: Review notes from November 2009, Artist Rooms: Agnes Martin, Edinburgh National Gallery of Modern Art.

I’m going to start recording the investigations into my main research interest – the works of Agnes Martin – on my site. Hopefully it will provide a focus with which to sustain my online writing and perhaps provide space for some interesting debate.

That’s not to say everything I’m writing about will be based specifically on Martin’s paintings and drawings, but I will structure my blog project around research on Martin’s milieu, various previous readings of her work, strategies that I may use and/or critique (feminist, psychoanalytic, socio-historical, philosophical), reviews of related contemporary exhibitions, books and articles, etc.

I’m also expecting that with more a more streamlined focus, I might free up some of my mind to start creating my own visual or tactile work again, beginning by attempting to make the feel of this site a little more intuitive, by reintroducing an element of the handmade.

“We can circumvent, avoid and repress our history, and encourage our culture to be more decorative, distracting and vapid, or we can directly face this part of our national history if artists choose to participate in a struggle for needed understanding as they see fit. As we yearn for peace and beauty, for masterpieces of harmony and resolution, difficult and disturbing subjects must not be avoided. Those willing to tackle them deserve support and encouragement, for there is beauty in such work too.”

Jock Reynolds, Washington Project for the Arts in Washington DC, in A Different War: Vietnam in Art (1990, ed. Lucy Lippard).