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In Defense of Formalism

So Andreas Wantanabe (SP? — come post a comment here please) created this HUGE double diamond tube around the top of the tower and around Nebulosus’ work above. I returned it because it completely blocked out the ground from the point of view of the tower which is the default view that people see when Monet auto-returns there. However it looked really damn cool and because of its geometric nature. This is connected in my head to some other thoughts about why there is a future for formalism (hyperformalism) in SL and why DC Spensely and the others in the Kiss the Sky Exhibition (which i quite liked) are on to an interesting path. I’ll write more of my thoughts on this tonight- but in the meantime– Andreas Wantanabe- if you’re out there- can you recreate this piece somewhere else where it doesn’t block the view from the tower? (i know it really wouldn’t be the same but… it still could be cool to see.

Posted by jvanb on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 9:29 pm.

10 Responses to “In Defense of Formalism”

Jay.
Well, “trapping” the tower was obviously the concept for that piece but I understand you have some rules :-) I placed a different piece of the same family up around 300m. Part sculpture and part architecture. I don’t know how I feel about the latest dialog in podcast 11. It seems content is what is being cried out for. Someone’s preference for a natural connection to the world and culture and politics. I have to say that my time in art school was full of just such debate. What’s the point and so what were the demands from some who wished to fill all art with a message. It certainly makes it easier to talk about art if you can debate whether an artist’s message has merit. But what if the art doesn’t have a literal representation? Also could it be that the reason the so called “formalist” work appears to lack substance to our talk show hosts has a lot to do with the kind of art Jack the Pelican Presents chooses to represent, the NYC location and the crowd that gathers there? If this were a gallery in Berlin or Tokyo would we be having the same conversation right now? I don’t have those answers but I’d be interested in hearing what Jay mentioned he wanted to say about this work.
Andres

Left by Andres Watanabe on May 25th, 2008

Hey Andres! Thanks so much for writing back. That preference for connection to culture, etc. is Don’s Preference, and if you visited his gallery you’d see mostly figurative and conceptual work. That’s just Don’s taste, as he said in the podcast. Its not necessarily mine or Amy’s or Boris’s. If you went next door to Black and White gallery or around the corner to Perogi 2000 you might see more abstraction, and i’d say that the audience for BIW in general is very well aware of the history of abstraction, and generally open to its possibilities.

Formalism as a theory of art is still very far out of fashion in RL NYC generally speaking but DC and Juria’s abstractions have been real crowd-pleaders and get some of the most “ooohs” and “aaaaahhhhs” from people in the gallery. Also Selavy Oh’s elegant abstractions have been praised by several people in podcasts, and Amy’s gone on record saying that Angry beth Shortbread is her favorite artist… i think… didn’t you say that once Amy? Now that she’s writing creepy love-letters to AM radio, maybe he’s her favorite now.

One of the things that I wanted to say was to disagree with something don said in the podcast, when he said that the idea of the space of Second Life as a real space (land, sea, sky, people-shaped avatars) was its “central conceit” and that artists like DC spensley were sort of refusing to “play along” with what was natural to the space. I would say that the “central conceit” or the “operative metaphor” or the groundrules” of SL is entirely up for grabs, and further that there will one day be whole neighborhoods and cultures that have opposing takes on this. I’ve been trying to write in my head something about the contrast between the Kiss the Sky exhibition and the Garden of Not Possible in Real Life Delights one of them seeks to create an illusion of a fantasy world, and one continuously makes you aware that you are in a virtual environment. I see tremendous potential for both.

Andres’s work really made an impression on all of us at the gallery saturday. Don and some of the other people in the gallery thought that the computer was broken- I took one look at the screen and said “wow, cool!” — I said this because i really could not tell what the hell i was seeing- Monet was in the tower and his view out the screen was entirely taken up with these lines stretching out to the horizon like the world had disappeared and been replaced by a game of Tempest the confusion that it cause would not have been possible if you had created, say… a photo-realistic rendering of a giant cave swallowing the tower — it was the abstract nature of the work that made it confusable (to some) with a graphics card malfunction - and that gave it some extra emotional power. This is related to part of DC’s point (i think) about “hyperformalism” that what is “natural” to the digital virtual environment IS geometry. A cave is not native to SL, but a series of rectangular prisms is.

But aside from the original confusion, I think this piece was interesting because of the way it related to both the tower and Nebulosus’ floating work above and enclosed both in a private space. It also simulaneously looked like rays of light coming out of the tower when you stood back from it on the big screen — it kinda flattened out in a cool way. There are more pictures of it here

Left by jvanb on May 25th, 2008

Here are a couple issues that could have made thw work much stronger.

The enveloping is good, but perhaps semi-transparent phantom prims would have lessened the feeling of exclusion from the other work.

And, in convo with my publishing partner Christiane Paul at the Whitney, we both wonder if this hyperformalism is really something that Napier did in the late 90’s and the structures are recapitulations of Marcos Novak’s work of the EARLY 90’s, who DC was not aware of. Juria’s work is slightly in this direction, but seems to make no claims beyond the work itself.

Maybe this is just a refreshing of cultural memory in a space that is not typically historically aware outside of certain areas.

Jay has a chapter I just wrote for MIT Press on formalism in virtual worlds, and I think it’s just different than prims as formal elements - SL is more complex than that.

Left by patlichty on May 25th, 2008

Jay and Patrick/Man.

Thanks for your thoughts. Jay and the gallery folks being confused was very much along the lines of my intention. More than any abstract or formalist exercise, I attempted to cause a perception shift by building a wall to trap the tower and Monet in a “physical” space separate from the increasingly visual space that has recently turned the sim into a veritable sandbox.

I understand Patrick’s point well about making the form transparent and phantom having used this in sl many times. But what happens when the luxury of purely visual becomes so common that no “natural” laws are needed? Surely this is one of the great freedoms of the virtual world to allow movement and interaction (flight, passing through phantom objects, etc.) However, this short lived piece, in its ornery ways was meant to cause disruption of the viewing habits that BiW has fallen into. Like a junky cut off from his supply. Jay, from what you described at first looking like a sl malfunction was better than I had hoped for.

Enveloping the tower and Nebulosus’s artwork was purely about a code of conduct that in my mind became a game of not physically blocking any artwork or exhibition element in the space. The abstract form was actually fairly arbitrary and was mainly dependent on the needs of the space and this experiment. That it failed and was returned to me says that my rules clashed with the set of rules the curator (Jay) functioned under. I have no hard feelings it though since I believe something happened regardless of how long it stayed up.

It’s now time for me to fess up that Andres and Juria are both driven by the same rl person (me: Lance Shields). There are certainly formalist similarities between the two but I chose to create separate bodies of work via these av’s. By my telling you this information, to some people the two bodies of work may now become one in the same but I feel that in a virtual world one rl artist can create separate yet related work through different personas. My telling who is who, it’s also another layer for critique (for better or worse.)

Patrick, your mention of Christiane Paul brought back fond memories since she was my favorite instructor at the School of Visual Arts in the late 90’s. In her net art class I was lucky to gain valuable critique from this remarkable person. Please tell her hello.

Andres, Juria and Lance

Left by Andres Watanabe on May 25th, 2008

Juria (andres, lance…) you may have been at SVA the same time i was at Parsons studying painting.

I found some links to give people for the artists that Patrick mentions. Marcos Novak

Mark Napier

And…
Clearly we need to get Christiane down to Jack the Pelican to see BIW…tell her I will buy her a drink of whatever she likes best to drink at the bar down the street.

Left by jvanb on May 26th, 2008

[...] addition to this great thread that we got going on the topic here at BIW, there’s an interesting article about Kiss the Sky [...]

Left by Brooklyn is Watching » Blog Archive » Still more talk about Hyperformalism on May 26th, 2008

Hey Jay,
Thanks for the links. I was familiar with Napier’s work Digital Landfill back in the 90’s, having studied it at SVA and done a share of net art myself. Novak is new to me and I am very interested to see the work Patrick was talking about.

It would be great to have Christiane by Jack the Pelican. Not sure how well she’d remember me since it seems like ages ago. Why not get us both in one of your podcasts? That would be really cool!

Left by Andres Watanabe on May 26th, 2008

Hey man, if Don can give something ten thumbs up or whatever (and if Jurias, Andres and Lance can all be the same person), I can have two favorite artists! :)

Having said that, I really like this piece specifically because of its aggression. I was thinking, back when it was originally posted, that I thought there was a relationship to Situationism that was quite nice. But with the revelation of this additional information, I’m actually reminded of one of my favorite Peter Saul paintings (which I can’t find online, even after searching!). It has a painter in it with a word balloon that says (to the effect of) “Art critics hurt my feelings, but I fight back.”

I feel like that’s what Jurias/Andres did - he fought back - and that’s what I love about this piece. Suddenly, there’s the content I’ve been aching for, there’s the connection to something real.

Just as “formalism” has a negative connotation, so does “content” in some camps - for something to have “meaning” it doesn’t necessarily have to be “This is a piece made in response to the Iraq war…” Emotional content is totally valid as well. What bothers me about work that we’re lumping in the category of “formalism” is that it can too often seem like feats of prim-constructing greatness which, in my mind, has a much closer connection to design than to art.

I’m going to stop now since I’m babbling and need more caffeine… but I wanted to chime in at least a bit. Also, I should just mention that this is now probably my favorite piece that has been left for us on the island! Seriously, awesome job - ten thumbs up! And some lucky clovers and gold stars thrown in for good measure… :)

Left by Amy Freelunch on May 26th, 2008

p.s. Jay, we should have Lance/Juria/Andres on the next podcast…

Left by Amy Freelunch on May 26th, 2008

Jay and Amy.
I’d be very happy to join. Can you give me the time and info on means of communication.
L/J/A

Left by Andres Watanabe on May 27th, 2008

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