Excerpt from “Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom”, Dushko Petrovich and Roger White, The Highlights, 2013.
It’s a beautiful sunny day here in Chicago and I imagine any number of you are day dreaming about playing hooky from work, or million dollar ideas that might give you license to live the rest of your days on a beach in paradise. I can’t give you that, alas, but I did come across The Highlights: an online arts journal who’s latest issue presents blog works/art/articles that touch on labor, Marx and Foundation biographies while presenting images of honey glazed turkey, black rectangles and to do lists. The following excerpt and accompanying image come from Colleen Asper’s piece, “Labor with Rectangle.”
Colleen Asper, Bathroom Mirror with Rectangle, 2012.
I am an impatient audience to the conversations of strangers in museums. Like many artists, I have a terrible sense of entitlement in such spaces and move through them with the conviction that the work is there for me, not for those offering reports on their audio guides or reading wall labels to each other. Yet, attention is not something one can always aim. The works I have come to pay close attention to often become inseparable from their commentators, however impatiently I may wish them away. I have no memory of seeing Julie Mehretu’s show at the Guggenheim that is not also a memory of listening to a couple on their first date.
It is easy to overhear the conversations of people on first dates. The pitch of their voices is often of a public rather than private sort, as if they are speaking to each other over separate microphones at a radio station. This couple was young, probably in their early twenties; the man wore khaki pants and the woman a tight t-shirt. I wondered who had tried to impress whom with the suggestion of going to see art, as neither gave the impression of ever having sought it out before. They quickly got down to business.
“How much do you think these cost?â€
“I don’t know. Does it mean someone bought them if they’re in a museum?â€
“Probably, the paintings aren’t old, so that’s not why they’re here.â€
“But how do you think they sell them? It must be hard to be an artist. How do you know what paintings people will buy?â€
They were both quiet for a moment. The man examined the sides of a painting. The silence crackled between them and I grew worried, then the man looked reassured.
“You know where I bet the real money is? Making the frames. As long as people are making paintings, they need those. Think how many they needed just for this show! The guys that makes those will never run out of people to sell them to.†(continued)
- Corresponding Between Found and Made: An Interview with Jessica Stockholder - October 5, 2016
- Plant Humans of the Future: An Interview with Saya Woolfalk - August 30, 2016
- Reading with My Whole Body: An Interview with Essi Kausalainen - August 29, 2016
