REPORTING FROM THE CULTURAL FRONT

I'm low on blogtributions as I'm amongst my putative colleagues at the 4 day College Art Association Conference, held this year in Seattle - the world's largest gathering of contemporary artists, maybe 3000 people. For a certain kind of fun, check out the conference catalog

The conference has been remarkably free of bogusness- these are the pros, and my respect for the difficulty of the profession taken seriously only grows. The highlight of chief interest to this blog would probably the fierce argument that erupted in the Art, Science and Technology seminar on whether a collaborative development of a highly complex information display form with a set of architects, graphic designers, programmers, and weapons systems intergrating specialists at DARPA, yes, that DARPA, was art, or targeting.

This was the only situation at such a conference where you could ask 'what is art' and not have eyes roll so far back people's heads turn upside down. It was about to get ugly. The argument centered partly on the comments by a well-known astrophysicist urging, almost begging, artists to get into collaborative projects with the sciences and break down the assumption, which he considered false and perhaps violently dangerous, of value-neutrality on the part of scientists and worse, on the part of certain technological culture, who don't share basic science values. (This is all associated with the publication Leonardo.) Unfortunately he went out of his way to dis landscapes, and the most moral person I heard in the last two days was a gifted German landscape painter all too aware of how difficult it is to even find a landscape, and was despairing of the increasing difficulty of just being in a place, unmessaged, without agenda, looking with human eyes and standing on ground that had never been torn. The weakest response I heard in the last two days was the very same, and quite brilliant architect, trying to defend working with DARPA - "this was just after 9/11."

But I don't want to dump on this guy too much - I was reminded of a painter working for the NAVY in WWII, who developed a rather amazing portable SOLID 3-d chart of the ocean that could be unfolded and checked. This is at the same Undersea Warfare Museum across the Sound with a must-see item: the century old brass and glass clockwork torpedo.

A zillion directions, but let me finish with my favorite thought of the day, from surprisingly, a UW art historian. Beware of art historians or artists who fit this description: Big Words, Few Slides.