Monthly Archives: December 2013

Michael Amter: Visionary



Michael Amter (Artist); Defined, limited print – 20 x 14 inches; 2011

Fall From Grace (Sample)







東京

I first became acquainted with Michael Amter’s work a few years ago when I had a solo show at Gallery Aferro in Newark, New Jersey. He had a video showing upstairs while my show of paintings was on the ground floor. I get bored in galleries pretty easily, and art videos seem to push my patience past its limit.

But Amter’s work was different. These were not the usual slow-moving, easily dismissed art videos. There was a whole set of cartoony symbols and relationships in his tightly edited work that made a kind of strange, sometimes creepy sense, though I could not precisely decode them. I also could not stop watching.

The first link, Fall from Grace (sample) is a very short clip from his piece Fall from Grace that he showed at Gallery Aferro in his later solo show of the same title in 2011. This exhibition was mesmerizing – it not only included the aforementioned video, but numerous graphics and ink drawings that had a painter’s touch fused with a love of comic and animation art. The show investigated his issues pertaining to his manic depression by couching it in a mythic good vs. evil framework. With its artful repetition of key images that were both cute and threatening, I felt as if I had walked into a world that inspired both paranoia and a childlike delight.

The second link, 東京, is a short video that uses music of Maki Kinoshita. It’s a more stripped down work than the aforementioned “Fall from Grace”. Its spare, melancholic beauty acts as a cathartic meditation on the passage of time and space.

I’ve used words like creepy, paranoid and melancholic to describe Amter’s work and these are all apt. But while these characteristics would seem to point to a very closed down, oppressive experience, the work is instead peculiarly open and mind-expanding. His work should be a bummer. It’s anything but.

For more examples of Michael Amter’s work, please go to: www.michaelamter.com

His video work can also be experienced in various permutations on YouTube

Merry Christmas!

Apexart unsolicited proposal winners announced – loser appalled by soulless proposal writing!

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Apexart, a non-profit gallery in lower Manhattan, annually accepts submissions for curatorial proposals for the following year. The submissions for 2014 were judged by 130 international judges and the top three proposals as determined by vote were then awarded a show. 525 proposals were submitted.

Full disclosure: I submitted a proposal that was not among the winners. Beyond the typical rejection email, the people at Apexart let you know where your proposal was ranked. Kind of nice, though others might see it as an act of cruelty. My proposal was not in the top 20 or even upper half. I was tied with about 30 other people at number 483. Not sure how I feel about that – if I’m going to lose, I would like it to be exceptional in some way.

Given the amount of entries, I am not especially disappointed and I have nothing against Apexart. Quite the opposite – the application was mercifully easy to complete and there was no fee to submit (a rarity). I found the whole endeavor to be commendably administered, in fact.

But I was appalled by the tone of the proposal that came in first place (titled “As Above, So Below”) . Here’s a pithy sample of the last paragraph of the winning entry:

“…However, the exhibition seeks not only to critically reflect on this socio-spatial shift, but also to give prominence to the potential for de-colonizing the aerial space itself, and hence, the aerial point of view. Through a series of workshops and talks, hosted by activists and thinkers, the project will offer practical DIY skills and proposals of how to re-conceptualize the air space as ‘commons’ and to reclaim the sky through social and collaborative practices.”

I feel dirty reading it. It hits all of the hip socio-political grace notes and couches them in a bloviating, academic/bureaucratic-speak that’s just too perfectly slimy (so perfect that it resists parody). I’m perplexed: Who would possibly vote for this? Does this language really excite people? Or did the judges vote for this proposal in spite of the smarmy, soulless writing?

A fellow commiserator wrote to me, “Better hope they get lucky with some worthy artist who turns fashionable diatribe into something sound by exhibition time.”

Excuse me, I must now re-conceptualize my own personal air space as ‘commons’. Through social and collaborative practices, of course.

Why I’m writing this…

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When I first thought of writing this blog, I looked around at other artists’ blogs and found the results a bit wanting. The tone that I encountered was and remains typically uncritical, where a kind of vague cheerleading acts as a substitute for saying something meaningful.

This uncritical tone ensures that the artist blogger does not offend any fellow artists, an arts organization or most important, a gallery. As one artist told me, his blog was really just a networking tool, a way to meet as many artists as he could and thereby ensure that people “knew” him. He would then feature their work on his blog and they would then include him in group shows, introduce him to people they knew, etc., etc.

This strategy makes excellent career sense, but in terms of saying something insightful, it’s essentially just one more empty plastic bottle in the internet landfill.

I am hoping that Art Blah Blog will be something different. Certainly, as an artist I have my own career ambitions, and I am not free of my own conflicts of interest (which I will disclose as they come up). That said, this is a space for my own criticism and advocacy that I offer without apology. I hope to write about work that I believe has great value, but will write about that which does not from time to time. In fact, writing about work that I find meretricious (a fancy word for “prostitute-like”) is a guilty pleasure of mine.

When I broached writing this blog to other artists, I mentioned that I had avoided it due to my unwillingness to alienate my colleagues. One said that she thought it would be refreshing, another said that it might help me meet like-minded people. We’ll see about that.

Join me.