Christmas show link!

You can access my Christmas show here.

Also, Neb and Arahan’s shows make fantastic family listening as well, while you’re gathering around your pheasant or roasting marshmallows or whatever the hell normal people do on Christmas. You can access their shows here.

Kitsch and SL, a first try

(This is an essay I started some while ago, assumed that I published on this site when I didn’t – doh! – and have updated a bit to reflect the current conversation. I will keep on working on it and adding to it… consider this Part One of at least three parts.)

I think that in many ways, the various voices that seek to critique and historicize SL art have (for the most part) ignored or misunderstood the role that kitsch plays not only the constructing of those works, but the entire architecture of SL as a medium.

Tomas Kulka, in his phenomenal book Kitsch and Art, does something that I haven’t seen any other author do: He sets out to give an actual definition of kitsch, rather than assume that he and his audience are all thinking of the same thing. I hope you’ll excuse my rather lengthy quoting from his book, but I think that the examples he gives will help ground this discussion. In offering advice to a painter seeking to create a kitsch painting, he writes:

“Let us take for example, the theme of the crying child that figures so prominently in kitsch depictions. Our painter should be advised to choose a nice and cute little child rather than a wicked or ugly-looking one. The cry shouldn’t be irritating or hysterical, but rather a sob of the soft and quiet variety; the child should elicit a sympathetic response. The painter should avoid all unpleasant or disturbing features of reality, leaving us only with those we can easily cope with and identify with. Kitsch comes to support our basic sentiments and beliefs, not to disturb or question them. It works best when our attitude toward its object is patronizing. Puppies work better than dogs, kittens better than cats. The success of kitsch also depends upon the universality of the emotions it elicits. Typical consumers of kitsch are pleased not only because they respond spontaneously, but also because they know they are responding in the right kind of way. This psychological aspect of kitsch was also stressed by Milan Kundera: “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch (Unbearable Lightness 251).” The aim of kitsch is not to create new needs or expectations, but to satisfy existing ones. Kitsch does not work on individual idiosyncrasies. It breeds on universal images, the emotional charge of which appeals to everyone.” (Kulka 26-7; emphasis mine)

To take this apart a bit and relate it to the subject of Second Life:

“The painter should avoid all unpleasant or disturbing features of reality…”
Ok, well – this one is almost too easy. SL, as a corporate environment, is set up so that any kind of truly transgressive activity is grounds for banning – whether it’s choosing a child avatar, doing anything that could be construed as attacking another avatar, or just generally behaving in such a way that is against the rather arbitrary “community standard.” But even if this weren’t the case, the environment of SL inherently denies everything unpleasant or disturbing about being alive. Your avatar never dies, gets sick, or even has to take a shit; one of the most hilarious things I think I’ve seen in SL is the the specter of SL “birth” – in which a “pregnant” avatar “gives birth” to an object resembling a baby, and the whole thing is handled without any trace of pain, blood, or fear.

This leads me to my first contention about SL and kitsch, which is that: Second Life is inherently a kitsch environment.

“Kitsch comes to support our basic sentiments and beliefs, not to disturb or question them.”
SL is primarily an environment policed by the community with occupies it. If I created an unbelievably offensive avatar and interacted with absolutely no one willing to turn me in, chances are Linden Lab would never find out and I could go about my business with my avatar intact. However, all it would take for me to be banned for some length of time is for someone to make an official complaint to LL, which undoubtably would happen sooner or later. LL would most likely err on the side of banning me rather than risk offending the person filing the report.

“Typical consumers of kitsch are pleased not only because they respond spontaneously, but also because they know they are responding in the right kind of way.”

This sort of knee-jerk reaction to banning “offensive” avatars (or actions, speech or artwork) reinforces the idea that there is some sort of consensus of ethics within SL, which has been arbitrarily chosen by LL but pretty much adopted in a wholescale way by the SL community.

So, contention #2: SL is inherently a kitsch environment because the majority of its community members accept and reinforce this.

“The aim of kitsch is not to create new needs or expectations, but to satisfy existing ones.”
One of the most stunning things about SL to a new user is how much a world in which “anything” (more or less) can be created looks so much like the world that we currently occupy. Add to that the numerous avatars you can buy which replicate RL celebrities, not to mention “bling” in countless iterations, cars/houses/clothes that are duplicates of RL cars, and so on, and it becomes clear that SL functions for a majority of its community members as a kind of wish fulfiller, satisfying the desire of its players to consume more things than they have the ability to in RL.

Contention #3: SL is an inherently a kitsch environment because the majority of its users accept and reinforce this, because it’s what they believe they really want.

So… SL is kitsch, before the artist even sits down to do anything in its environment. A good comparison would be if you could imagine an artist creating a serious work of art in the midst of Disneyland – how on earth would one do such a thing and not have the surrounding environment/context inform their work?

Bear with my example for the moment, because it raises some interesting issues I think are relevant to this discussion:

If the artist in question uses imagery within the work they’re creating that is kitschy, or heavily loaded with symbolism, or cute, or pretty, how does the environment it’s in (aka Disneyland, which is saturated by kitschy, pretty, cute, “meaningful” things) inform those images?

How would an artist, creating work in the midst of Disneyland, come up with something that makes his/her audience forget their surroundings and view the work as if it were in a gallery? (Is such a thing even possible, reasonable, and desirable?)

Given that the majority of the artist’s audience will be in Disneyland because they want to be surrounded by kitsch, what are kinds of expectations should the artist build into the piece to assure that it is interpreted as the artist wants it to be?

How does the artist’s complicity of working in such an environment fuel the interpretation of the piece? If they’ve agreed to be there and to play by the rules, how does the artist create something that isn’t kitsch?

More soon.

Christmaspectacular!

YAY! The Amy Freelunch Hour Christmaspectacular is airing Wednesday night and will eventually be linked here (once it’s archived) is linked HERE. It contains a disturbingly heartfelt begging for my favorite charities (Depilex smileagain and maps.org), an interview with Nebulosus Severine, singing cats, Bibbe Hansen bashing, and a dedication to Neb that probably isn’t nearly cool enough.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYBODY!!!! woot and all that. yay.

The raw and the cooked.

Based on some conversations I’ve had recently, I’ve been thinking about this idea of how being an “outsider” figures into SL art.

A little background: The term “outsider” sort of assumes there are two distinct groups of people who make art – those with formal training in the subject and those without. On the surface, this seems fair enough. But it gets a little tricky when you start to consider who has been dumped into that second category, which then breaks down into categories of its own. You have, among the leading lights of Outsider Art:

• Martin Ramirez, who lived much of his life in a mental institution.
• Ray Materson, a former inmate, who began creating obsessive works made from unraveled socks while incarcerated.
• Rev. Howard Finster, who claimed to create his work with the intercession of God.

…and on and on and on. What they have in common is that the creator of the work – beyond just this very simple definition of being “untrained” – has some sort of, shall we say, slippery relationship to the traditional notion of mental health. As a result, while it certainly has its admirers (I’m one of them), “Outsider Art” is a rather dubious category to get dumped in. Even efforts to save it, which seem to inevitably involve the argument that the work of “Outsiders” is somehow “more pure” than those of us who went to school for art and take our medication, because (as the argument goes) the Outsider is creating art which ignores the marketplace and influence of art history and instead privileges that which expresses an inner, emotional, private world.

I’m an eternal optimist, so I generally think that the invention of the category of “Outsider” was well-intentioned; it sought to bring to the fore the work of people who might otherwise be dismissed because of their lack of training. Unfortunately – and this is just the way things go, I suppose – the term is now almost fetishized by collectors and dealers who rally to the cause of this “pure” art and use the term as a marketing tool. And as someone who has an MFA, I find it sort of disheartening to think that my work is considered somehow “less pure” because I chose to take that route.

All of this – the popularity of the term “Outsider,” the reconsideration of “Outsider Art,” and the underlying current of distrust towards “Insider Art” – feeds into these conversations I’ve been having with SL artists about their work. And while SL artists (and their supporters) may feel a well-intentioned affinity to the work of Outsiders, that connection is extremely limited at best.

SL seems to draw to it its own two, distinct categories of artists – those who are artists/academics/MFAs in real life and those who are not. For a couple of years now, the two groups have more or less peacefully coexisted but more and more I see them bumping up against each other. In private conversations, the MFAs are branded (by those who don’t have that background) as condescending, patronizing, and arrogant, whereas the un-MFAs are considered anti-intellectual and a detriment to the wide-scale acceptance of SL art by the RL artworld.

Neither of these charges is really all that untrue, but they’re unfortunate. And I see what’s being proposed as a kind of middle ground (and I’ve done this in conversations as well as I’ve heard others do it) is to recast the unMFAs as Outsiders – totally outside of some sort of mainstream conversation about art, immune to the marketplace, and somehow therefore more pure. While I see this sort of compromise as being well-meaning, it also conjures up some of the worst stereotypes of people who spend a lot of time in SL (mainly, that we’re all a bunch of weird and mentally unstable types) and despite its best intentions, it comes across as both demeaning to the artists it attempts to describe as well as to those that it excludes (the idea that AM Radio’s work is “less pure” because he went to art school is silly, at best).

So maybe the best comparison to draw is not to compare SL artists to Outsider Artists, but to think instead of an example of (for instance) the Quilters of Gee’s Bend. The story of the quilters is legendary to anyone who likes to root for an underdog: A group of women in the deep South, without any knowledge or exposure to Modernist art, created a vast collection of beautifully designed quilts which – and this is the fun part – engage color, shape and abstraction in exactly the same way those Modernist artists would… only they did it with cloth and thread and either did it before their contemporaries in the artworld did it in oil paint on canvas, or concurrent to that work. You’d have to be pretty heartless to look at their work and consider it to be anything but a legitimate work of art, even if it’s taken a little while for the canon to catch up with them.

I think that coming up with this entirely separate category – like “craft” or “design” just as examples – could really be the answer to all of this. I doubt anyone thinks of an Eames chair as being more or less “pure” than the work of Damien Hirst – the two are simply in completely different categories. And while you might go to the American Museum of Art and Design and see an embroidery that specifically refers to a work of contemporary art (this is not rare: more and more MFA/classically trained artists are embracing these sorts of techniques while also not abandoning their training), it may easily be hanging next to a similar piece that has no such connection to “high art” but instead references the history of craft (or something else entirely). Each piece has to be taken individually; in interpreting it, bringing in and referencing outside trends in fine art, design, popular culture, and the like is not frowned upon. Which is to say that the conversation about this kind of work generally isn’t only about other works of art, but the culture in which it exists as a whole – which frankly seems to me to be a better, more reasonable way of discussing just about any kind of art.

Taking this strategy will be most threatening to the SL MFAs, as it suddenly makes them not the prevailing experts on the topic. I’m personally ok with that; others won’t be. But I like it as an acknowledgment that in this field, none of the rules are set and it’s impossible to be an expert on the topic. It’s what makes SL art criticism tough, but also what makes it fun.

Holiday specials

I’ll be recording a few holiday special shows this week – one with Jay Newt of Brooklyn is Watching, which will appear (in some form) on the BiW podcast. We’ll be discussing, among other things, a controversial new piece by Arahan and Ichibot that seems to have confused the regular BiW panel, but I’m sure there will be other topics as well.

A detail of the piece in question:

Meanwhile, I’m off in a few minutes to record a conversation with Nebulosus that will feature into my Arthole show this week. It’s going to be a pretty open-ended conversation, I think, but I do have some suitably wonderful/horrible Christmas carols to offset whatever we talk about, along with an extended rant on… oh, Bibbe Hansen. I dunno. We’ll just see how it goes.

New episode: Interview with Scott Kildall

Arahan and Neb aired my interview with Scott Kildall (aka Great Escape) today, which was recorded in Miami two weeks ago. Due to server issues last week, it didn’t air til now. Click here for a direct link to the show.

Scott speaks in particular about his “No Matter” project, images and text about which can be found here. Scott’s work is well-documented on his site, and there are also many images there from Second Front performances.

(Something I forgot to ask Scott: Is Bibbe Hansen actually an active member of Second Front? I kind of want to take this up with the SF guys. I have issues. But whatever… this is for another day.)

Scott’s interview is good and worth a listen. And now with school being over, hopefully I will finish the half-dozen or so articles I’ve been kicking around for this site. So, more soon. I hope.

latest episode…

Ok, so the episode I recorded while in Miami isn’t airing tonight, due to technical problems having to do with the server or something that Arthole uses. Sucks, but not a lot we can do.

Meanwhile, Cyrus Huffhines was giving me a hard time for not hyping his interview enough, so now’s my chance! Check out last week’s show here.

Episode 10: Don’t get cooked by the pilot light.

Ok, so really quick:

I’m writing this from our slightly scummy but oh-so-cheap (and well-located!) hotel room in Miami Beach. I’m back from the opening of two of the gazillion or so fairs, scouring them for art that rocks my world and also has some sort of relevance to the listeners of Arthole, etc., and so far… nothing. Campari was the liquor sponsor at the Aqua fair (which is pretty fucking rad by me); Pulse served tiramisu on little plastic spoons. And more. But I digress.

In this week’s episode, I am playing a conversation recorded between me and Cyrus Huffhines, discussing a build he’s working on (not open to the public yet), which he finally sent me a picture of to show you:

…and eventually wind up poking through eteam’s SL Dumpster project, once we get over our initial fascination with the idea that it is possible to buy an avatar that looks like 50 Cent. Listen in on Wednesday when all of this will make sense. And more!

I’m hoping to hunt down Scott Kildall (aka Great Escape of Second Front fame) who is supposedly in Miami right now too; between that and my interview with Selavy Oh – currently a work in progress – we have some cool things coming up over the next couple of weeks. So, stay tuned.

How to get copies of the shows that have already been broadcast

We don’t have an RSS feed… yet. Not sure if we’ll be getting one or not. But if you’re looking for past shows, here are a few to start with:

Hello, Nessie! The AM Radio Interview, episode #9.

Euro-trash girl. Amy and Jeff talk about SL art in general and Strawberry Holiday’s work in particular, episode #7.

An SL art primer. Amy and Jeff look at Juria Yoshikawa’s and Selavy Oh’s most recent installations, episode #3.

It’s taken a little bit for the show to hit its stride, but I’m pretty excited for what future episodes will be like.

Of course, archives of Nebulosus’s and Arahan’s shows are also available, and a new set of shows from all of us air every Wednesday (with Neb and Arahan broadcasting LIVE!!)… check the Arthole blog for lots of info.

AM Radio interview

Ok, we’re hyping this to death, but I swear it’s a big deal… tomorrow, Neb and Arahan will be airing my conversation with AM Radio on Arthole radio. AM was incredibly generous with his time and shared a lot of information about his process, his ideas on art in Second Life, and so on. I’m actually sort of amazed that he said all that he did, but wow.

I am shelving the conversation with Cyrus Huffhines til next week – don’t kill me Cyrus! I’m doing it for very good reasons!! I didn’t want the AM Radio interview to totally overshadow my talk with Cyrus, which I think is also really good and should be of great interest to SL artists… but I didn’t like the way it sounded just tacked onto the end of the talk with AM. So I’m shelving you, Cyrus, but I’m doing so in a really nice way(!). And what’s more, next week I will be at Art Basel Miami Beach and will record a short intro from there, so there will be lots to tune in for then.