There was a lady named Ruth Ettling in my church who was a fairly well-known artist. She made beautiful prints and collages. I got to visit her studio when I was in high school, and I remember wanting to have a studio like hers. She went to Rhode Island School of Design and was thrilled for me when I was accepted to go to college there.

I studied painting because I wanted to master color, but I’ve evolved into a sculptor. Now I make this hybrid between painting and sculpture where I build surfaces of color with weaving, sewing, and beading instead of paint.

LO: Please explain the themes in your work as well as your working process. For instance, some artists are very methodical while others are more instinctive. Please elaborate.
KD: The idea of a garden in paradise influences the organic abstractions I make. I worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for many years in Asian and Islamic art, and that time deeply influenced my work. The symmetry in jewelry from India, the balance between realism and abstraction in Japanese screens, and the beauty and fantasy of the borders in Persian paintings really connected with me.

I work instinctively but in a very orderly and organized manner. I organize my materials so that I have a sense of color, scale, and a goal of what I want to accomplish, and then I dive in.

LO: You are a painter, sculptor and also create public works. Are there any differences with each way of working?
KD: I approach each medium differently.

With painting, I have an idea about a size, palette, and compositional approach, but it’s pretty loose. I usually can’t articulate what I am doing in a piece until after I’ve done it.

With sculptures and installations, I usually gather together materials that I want to work with and start organizing the colors and forms until I develop a compositional plan.

I can usually say what direction I’m going in if not the final destination.

With public work, the site rules all of those elements. I look at the site and try to imagine how I can bring my visual voice to the space, history, and requirements of the place.

Public art requires that you fully articulate what you’re going to do before you find out if you are going to get the opportunity.

LO: Who are your favorite artists and why?
KD: I love Calder’s use of color and play, Lee Bontecou’s articulation of nature and abstraction, the way Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois use materials. Judy Pfaff’s compositions are so dynamic. Having worked at the Met, I developed a long, close relationship with the collection there. The Tiepelos at the top of the main staircase blow me away every time I see them; I’m awed by the color and compositional dynamism of those paintings.

LO: What advice would you give younger artists on how to mark success as an artist? Success seems to be marked by big galleries making big money. Do you think that there are other ways to mark success as an artist?
KD: Not everyone is going to get rich or even get by, and very few artists will always be “hot stuff.”  My advice: commit to a life of making art, with success being measured by your satisfaction with a piece or body of work. Make making art and building a body of work the priority; then, you need to find a balance in which you are creating the work, showing it, and engaging with the art world outside of your studio.

The post Leah Oates in Conversation with Katherine Daniels appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

What lured me in to Móstoles for nearly a week was the presence of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri who were doing a workshop on “After Work.” I miss the great discussions and genial interactions at 16 Beaver Studio, a place that they founded and currently run in NYC. Their work has been a lodestone for me.

The conference was very rich and interesting. It helped me to draw a bead on many recent works in the realm of political art. However, that’s fatuous to say now, about the ideas behind the artistic practices that are engaging the overbearing problems of our day. I did not draw a bead so much as get absolutely soaking wet from the dense theoretical fog the presenters pumped out.

Unlike the formal fumings of decades past, the presenters here were dealing with subjects of immediate importance: the nature and constitution of value and property, remuneration for artists, concepts of political action separate from labor, and curatorial and artistic frames which could contain those economic and political speculations.

As the conference began, on June 17th, Hyperallergic reported that “Over the weekend, a group of 100 or so activists protesting Tadashi Kawamata and Christophe Scheidegger’s ‘Favela Café’ were teargassed at Art Basel.”

Attending the conference in Madrid was Andrea Phillips, the English co-curator of the Istanbul Biennial. Events she arranged had been disrupted by protests there only weeks before. She spoke about this during her presentation. During conversations about the Basel incident during social time, some voiced skepticism. “It looked like an Aernout Mik production.” Could the whole thing have been staged? The coincidence between representation and an intervening reality had been too neat.

I was uncertain as to what they were talking about. After the talks were done, I learned more. This was a harsh event, but totally fascinating, interesting and ambiguous, both politically and, in the emergent terms of what must be called, a new aesthetic discourse.

If the attack on the faux-favela party was a set-up, the police were in on it, because they commented to the press afterwards. And cops don’t do art. A video posted to one blog was shot from behind the Kawamata installation, almost as if this YouTuber was waiting for the event to happen. It’s a slow pan, shot from behind the favela, just before and as the police arrived. When the event does happen it does it isn’t directly visible. The classic frame is at 2:45 or so, as a chair hurled at police appears in the air above the favela roofline. It begs for the Beuys/Nauman/Johns question: “What is under the chair?” (This video is linked on Greg Allen’s blog, “greg.org: the making of: movies, art, &c”; clearly this is “&c.”)

The ambiguities of representation are in full play in an event that unfolds in an artwork. It purports to open up global urban poverty in a fair catering to the world’s rich and their artist servitors. In Basel, in very rich, very secure Switzerland, this event has a very different meaning than the disruption of the biennial-sponsored performance in Istanbul.

That same lecture-performance was restaged in Móstoles by the Brussels-based duo Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans. They had the tables in the meeting space arranged like a boardroom, and proceeded to hold a kind of corporate presentation of a fictional art index fund, complete with simulated tele-chat by a financial expert. This character was a fictional composite, performed by an actor, and inspired by Herman Melville’s mid-19th century novel “The Confidence Man.”

Their work, “Art House Index”, concerned the proposition–with distributed prospectus–of a kind of investment vehicle based on art. By now I understand a great deal of this terminology, although the whole notion of an index on which one may “place bets” remains obscure. I suppose Willi Bongard kicked this off with his “Top 100 Artists” list in the mid-1970s. By now this seemingly innocent guide to comparative value among “investment grade” artists, based on their museum and one-man gallery shows in key art cities and auction sales, is a relic of a distant past. I met the short-lived German Bongard, and thought him an odd guy, in some way also an artist with a conceptual project. I was an art fool. He was a business visionary. This shit is now real, or as real as fictional financial instruments can make it. The Art House couple revealed in a Q&A that some experts have offered to help them make their index project a real investment vehicle. Yow.

The activist artists of Turkey broke into the Art House performance with banners and chants. One artist trailed co-curator Fulya Erdemci with his video camera for a long while, which led to an ongoing legal dispute over privacy rights. It is unsurprising that these artists should be inattentive to a parodic project to turn creative production into a speculative financial instrument. Already in 2009, the Istanbul Biennial purported to deal with the concerns of precarious labor. That outing was themed “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” and curated by collective What, How & for Whom. It was protested by anarchists, which the art world ignored. To move in four years later with a theme of presentations around public space on the eve of a revolt around the same issue was too much to bear.

The part of the biennial that was disrupted in Istanbul was the educational section. It is funded by Koç Holding, an enormous Turkish conglomerate deeply involved in the rampant hyper-development tearing Istanbul apart. Gezi Park, one of the last green lungs of the city and the site of recent riots, is slated for a shopping mall and a historical reconstruction of military barracks in fond recollection of the Ottoman imperium.

When I heard “Koç” in the Móstoles table talk, I thought they said “Koch,” the right-wing billionaires who have also thrown money into the NYC culture pot, and whose sponsorship there has been protested by Occupy Museums.

In her talk, Andrea Phillips discoursed learnedly on notions of property around art today. In her view, art fairs like the Istanbul Biennial and Art Basel “protect art from indiscreet speculation” of the kind burlesqued by Art House by asserting other meanings for art. Auratic, profound, transcendental significations are advanced over the mere significations of art as property.

I’ll buy that. Still it’s a rear guard action at best and waged on the plane of ideas where neoliberal capitalism has not bothered to deploy its forces. What was more germane in Phillips’ analysis was her understanding of the role of neoliberal culture in the “post-welfare state” as responsible for a certain constant “fictionalization of concepts of publicness.”

Art is promoted as a social necessity, a “socially ameliorative tool, a healing tool,” which is more important than its commodity status. Still, it “holds up a spectacle of freedom to unfree spectators.” Art fairs, then, are vistas onto what Grant Kester calls the “ontic spaciousness of the bourgeois subject.” That is, they are social, political and philosophical comfort food for an increasingly precarious bourgeois class.

The activists of Occupy are precisely those “unfree spectators.” They are moving to free themselves from the “nightmare of participation” in cultural and discursive arenas by disrupting these toy public spheres which cannot stand in for the absent forums and mechanisms of democratic participation.

At this moment, when artists have taken leading roles in the Taksim Square occupation (said Andrea Phillips, who should know), another spectre of Melville’s fiction has emerged – Bartleby. The clerk of the short story who “prefers not to” – move on, protest, fight the police, resignedly watch TV, take up armed struggle, etc. – has reappeared in Turkey in the form of the “duranadam,” or standing man protest, begun by an artist, which has gone viral.

It’s a great public action, and clearly a work of art: a public sculpture.

By Alan W. Moore

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