The Death of an Artist
Welcome to the 81st edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
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Recently, I started listening to the David Zwirner podcasts, which, like art itself, are hit or miss. I thought that the conversation between Helen Molesworth, the current main host, and Benjamin Buchloh was completely unsufferable, given that the art-world pretense was dripping much too thickly (mostly because of the German art historian). But I enjoyed other episodes very much, in particular the discussion between Timothy Snyder, the historian, and Luc Thuymans, the painter.
After listening to about 20 minutes of that pretentious Buchloh disaster, I angrily switched it off, looking for something else to listen to. I remembered that there had been a podcast series made about Ana Mendieta's death, also hosted by Helen Molesworth. I looked it up and started listening.
I should probably note that I'm not much of a podcast person. I mostly listen to podcasts to distract myself from how much I hate walking. However, I mostly stick with fringe topics, meaning that the podcasts I listen to are mostly produced to sound just fine (which, btw, I'm perfectly happy with).
In contrast to those, Death of an Artist sounds like the podcast equivalent of a Netflix documentary. It's possible that people who listen to the radio know the model for this podcast from shows like This American Life (which to me were always much too self-conscious with their incessant winking at their in-crowd audience).
Given my mostly utilitarian instincts -- give me the information, please, and don't try to entertain me -- listening to this particular podcast is off putting for me. The show, and let's call it what it actually is, is incredibly well produced, with all the bells and whistles that what I assume must be a hefty production budget, education, and technical skills can yield. It's not that I prefer something more lo-fi. It's just that I feel manipulated when listening. Everything is done for an effect that is completely apparent.
That aside, the show is strange in other ways. Maybe the best analogy I can come up with is a piece of tie-dye fabric. Here, instead of different colours, a bunch of very different material is being thrown together, to end up as what comes across as a spectacle. There is art history (in particular minimalist art with a focus on sculpture). There are cultural and societal aspects (mid to late-1980s New York City). There's the history of the Cuban revolution and its aftermath. There is the death of Ana Mendieate, an incredible artist who at the time was married to Carl Andre, a very established and successful artist with deep connections in the art world. Andre claimed that it had been a suicide. Many people did not believe that, especially in light of a number of details (including the fact that Andre initially told the police two very different stories). There was a police investigation (in part shoddily done, as is often the case in the US), and there was a trial in which Andre was acquitted (after a lot of testimony was not allowed in court). There's the art world itself. And there is quite a bit of old-fashioned gossip.
My guess is that for a podcast producer, this might feel like incredible source material for a compelling true-crime podcast. The problem with the sheer plethora of the material, though, is that to cover all aspects you have to take a lot of shortcuts.
The most crucial outcome of all of this is that the life and work of Ana Mendieta, which deserves to be seen and discussed a lot more widely, ends up being just one of those things you hear about. After all, there's the late Peter Schjeldahl, for example, talking about how at Max's Kansas City the minimalist-art crowd was mostly a bunch of jerks so he hung out with the Warhol posse in the back.
I get that life is complicated and typically filled with any number of complications. And I also get that even under ordinary circumstances, it's very difficult to narrate a person's life and career. But I am not sure that presenting the life and death of Ana Mendieta as this salacious mix of juicy material, produced in the most manipulative fashion and, at least for those poor saps who don't buy a subscription, interrupted by neoliberal-capitalist ads for vitamins, women's sneakers, or, and these are the worst, business services and what might or might not be some crypt-currency scam, is the best way to go about it.
I am very much interested in some of the aspects of this podcast. Your mileage might vary which ones you'd like to hear more about. But I do think that we might agree on thinking that too much ends up being glossed over because there always is something else also to be considered.
So Death of an Artist somehow ends up being less than the sum of its individual parts, not to mention that regardless of whether you believe that she was murdered or not, the life work of Ana Mendieta itself is so interesting that it just feels wrong that it becomes just one small aspect in this spectacle.
"I’ve been wrestling with this notion of the male genius for years," Maya Gurantz wrote in 2017, "I can’t get away from it. Around the time I had my first child, I made a series of videos and performances exploring the ways in which my own yearning for success has been defined by this construct into which I will never belong."
Gurantz's article appeared around the time Carl Andre's retrospective had arrived in Los Angeles. Apparently, the opening had been a sparsely attended: "A friend who did attend told me it felt awkward, what with protestors on the outside and angry women walking beside embarrassed boyfriends on the inside."
I remembered the article while thinking about what to write in this email, in particular how to express my thoughts on the podcast. After all, when I first read it -- around the time it was published -- I was struck by how compelling it was. It spoke of many of the aspects of the case that up until then I hadn't known much, if anything about. But it also did so in this incredible way that was far from how I wrote back then.
On top of that, there's incredible insight (that is actually missing from the podcast). Gurantz:
it is interesting to consider that these white male conceptual sculptors were killing the Author, making “identity” unimportant, at the exact cultural moment when women and people of color were asserting their own identities in their art-making.
I don't know whether you want to listen to the podcast or not. But I do believe that you want to read Maya Gurantz's piece because it tackles a number of very important topics -- much like the podcast -- in a fashion that leaves space for you, the reader, to come to your own conclusions. Furthermore, it will make you see some things differently, even if what I saw differently might not be the same as what you see different.
Maybe some topics are better left to writers to explore. I know, we live in a world where it's flashy Netflix shows and podcasts that garner all the attention. I don't want to come to a conclusion based on just one case. Still... Complexity isn't served by flashiness. And flashiness results in spectacle, which results in a shutting out of one's critical facilities.
Under a rather unflattering "portrait" of herself, created by some AI machinery, Hito Steyerl writes that it is "an approximation of how society, through a filter of average internet garbage, sees me".
Even as I think that Steyerl relies a little bit too much on the fact that in the English language, the word "mean" can stand for very different ideas, her essay about the problems of images created by "artificial intelligence" is a very worthwhile read.
By now, I have shared a number of pieces about these images. I suspect that there might come a lot more. As far as I can tell, in the world of photography, a lot of discussions miss the actual points we should consider, and they all pop up in Steyerl's piece.
The other day, I received a very quaint looking email from some German photographers association. They had issued a statement. In true German fashion, they had emailed it out as a pdf attachment (the email text itself look like a letter and it read like one of those awkward form texts you get from German bureaucrats). AI images, I was being informed, are not photographs. That was the most important aspect of the statement. This made me laugh. I'm sure they mean well. But for an association of professionals to be so much behind the curve of the actual issues...
Hito Steyerl:
Hidden labour is also crucial for the datasets used to train prompt generators. The 5.8 billion images and captions scraped from the internet and collected on laion-5b, the open-source dataset on which Stable Diffusion was trained, are all products of unpaid human labour, ‘from people coding and designing websites to users uploading and posting images on them.’footnote15 It goes without saying that none of these people were offered remuneration, or a stake in the data pool or the products and models built from it. Private property rights, within digital capitalism and beyond, are relevant only when it comes to rich proprietors. Anyone else can be routinely stolen from.
I realize that I might be bumming you out. Death (a possible murder in fact), death of an artist as a spectacle, now AI images that rely on exploitation... It's all a bit much.
So here's a picture of the sky that I took yesterday in the late afternoon.
"What I like most about photography," Heinrich Holtgreve says, "is leaving my studio to meet people or visit places and taking pictures there." He then expresses beautifully one of my main misgivings with using AI to make photographs.
Brief aside: yes, for me they are photographs. I couldn't care less about supposed indexicality or the presence of a lens. For me, the most important aspect of photographs is that they are made to be shared. Photography acquires most of its meaning in that process. It simply doesn't matter to me whether there was a camera when a photograph was made. What matters is how we see and treat it, given the context.
Anyway, here's Heinrich:
I like the English expression "to take a picture", which means that through the catalyst of one's own perception and with the camera as a tool, one takes something from a place. There's a beautiful word for that: serendipity. It means finding something without searching for it. Being able to stroll, having a plan to experience something or a reason why you go to that place too. But then, within this framework that you have created, to take the freedom to let the images come to you. I think this is something that the AI tools in their current form do not favor. Because the user interface of Dall-E, Midjourney or of Stable Diffusion is a text mask. After all, we are talking about the "prompt-to-image" genre of AI tools. With these tools, you must be upfront: You must know exactly what you want and then put it into words.
Heinrich offers an interesting conclusion how this AI stuff might play out:
I believe AI can benefit documentary photography economically. The oversupply of AI-generated content will increase so much in the coming months and years that there will be a return to the Real, a new hunger for photography as a document of something that has happened.
In March 2015, I was invited to Budapest to give a workshop at MOME (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design). This was almost two years before I picked up a camera again. I wouldn't have had enough time to make "serious" pictures anyway, so I mostly used an app on my old iPhone 4s to produce fake Polaroids.
On Friday (5 May), I will be going back. This time, the workshop will be longer, and I will stay for a total of three weeks (there will also be two talks). I'm going to bring my work camera.
This probably means that there either will be a break in these emails until the beginning of June, or I will produce something a little different from the road. We'll see.
I'm excited to be traveling again, it's my first trip back to Europe since the pandemic.
With that I'll conclude. Thank you for finding the time to read what I write. I hope you're well!
-- Jörg