Why Parallel Communities?
Hyperallergic, one of the more prolific arts sites going (do they ever sleep?), had a thoughtful piece last week by Kyle Chayka titled Art-World Cliques that builds on a piece by gallerist/blogger Edward Winkleman called What Do We Mean by “The Dialogue?” Winkleman’s essay discusses the practical realities of art world relationships wherein artists, galleries, and fairs are self-grouped based on various dialogues. These dialogues, or what Chayka accurately renames cliques or scenes, revolve around different axes. To quote from Chayka:
The consequences of this reality are that as the art world grows larger, with ever more artists and ever more galleries joining an already-huge number of exhibitions, fairs, and biennales, the community as a whole is becoming increasingly segregated into a collection of different dialogues, or niches. We might as well call them “cliques” or “scenes” — circles around certain types of art, certain levels of industry, or certain social tribes. Winkleman dances around the social organization of the art world, preferring to assign the “dialogues” aesthetic boundaries. But there’s an insider-outsider power structure to all of our dealings in the art world that we can all perceive. What we now have, however, are more circles to be inside.
These cliques occur simultaneously, sometimes intersecting, sometimes not. There’s the painting clique, the internet art clique, and the new media clique (one that has historically had a very difficult time reaching the mainstream art-world dialogue, and continues to set itself apart, for better or worse). There’s a blue-chip clique, a lo-fi hipster clique, a Lower-East-Side clique, in fact, there are dozens. Like planets in the explosion following the Big Bang, as the art world grows the cliques both grow in size and grow farther apart.
By the media-specific logic, Printeresting’s readership can be broken down almost exponentially within printmaking: academic printmaking, printers, curators interested in print, designers who print, lithographers, letterpressers, and the list goes on. On the surface Printeresting is a media partisan espousing a love for all things print, but our audience is actually quite diverse. Looking a bit deeper, we’ve always tried to expand the definition of printed art; the idea of dwelling broadly or narrowly on media seems pretty dated. While there are plenty of posts about silkscreens and woodblocks, there are also posts that pull artwork from other disciplines and reframe seemingly disparate work in the context of print (for example).
Whether you call it a dialogue or a clique, printmaking with its shared facilities and idiosyncratic processes and language does exist as a parallel community to the larger art world. Like fans of a sports team or alumni of an institution, print is a niche providing a sense of unity and common bond. Making prints involves learning an elaborate set of terms and processes not easily explained at the Thanksgiving table so as practitioners and enthusiasts, we rely on on an “extended family” of fellow practitioners. The shared interest helps define identity and that’s important. That said, lots of interesting stuff happens when varied interests cross-pollinate. Very few artists seem interested in being identified solely as a printmaker.
I’d like to add a two more readings to the conversation. Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article, Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg makes a strong case for overlapping interests and crossing group boundaries. More recently, Justin Moyer’s Washinton Citypaper piece, Our Band Could Be Your Band: How the Brooklynization of the culture killed regional music scenes, discusses the importance of regional communities in creating new directions in music/art. The key for any individual seems to be finding some balance between multiple group identities.
This post was only meant to share some links to a couple of interesting essays. It’s taken a more sprawling character than I ever intended but maybe Winkleman and Chayka’s posts along with the articles by Gladwell and Moyer combine for some worthwhile food-for-thought… and perhaps even dialogue.
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My take on this as a printer collaborator is a little biased. I have customers in nearly all of the possible circles, scenes or cliques. While they are in our shop they are part of just one scene, the printmaking scene (even if what we are making is later sold as a painting). What is fascinating about the print shop as a filter is that 2 artists from what one could describe as warring tribes can have a positive reaction to each other’s work in the print shop and get ideas from each other.
So if I can sprawl a little as well, I think it’s easier for those who critique and consume art to think of these scenes as little boxes to put each school of thought into. As artists we know this is not the way the world works. A performance artist might have a best friend who does commercial landscape paintings. While their scenes might be different from an outside viewpoint they really aren’t. They go to the same openings, eat at the same restaurants etc.
An artist I work with who has been prominent since to 1960s said this to me. “It was easy in the 60′s because there really weren’t that many of us.”
First off, great group of readings. I still have to read the two you cite father down in the post but the first two and yours were enough to thoroughly get me going.
I think Kyle’s framing of the art worlds/dialogs in a gravitational context is very apt. I would also continue the scientific narrative and say it also has to do with proximity (covered in gravitational metaphor) and perspective. If I’m next to a crayon litho guy, I’m a tusche/splatter guy; If I’m next to a screenprinter, I’m a litho guy; if I’m next to a painter, I’m a printmaker; if I’m next to an art historian, I’m an artist; and if I’m next to my great aunt, I’m an ‘art person’. The closer you look, the more communities/dialogs emerge, the more the ‘one true Dialog’ turns into many. The father you zoom in on the map, the more you realize that that alley behind your house has a name.
I see it all in a Powers of 10 kind of way. A micro-dialog surrounding media-specificity has parallels in the [macro]Dialog about the global art world, like a cell looking like a galaxy. The more specific you get, the more universal. Having your personal foundation, that is, what universe you are a cell within, is paramount. I believe that me being able to champion any of the communities I outlined above is key. Being able to go through the different powers of 10 that are beyond yourself and traveling through the layers of dialog frequently is what makes for strong, intelligent and educated dialog. Being able to go from global conceptual matters to matters of material and technique and back again, forging intellectual trails through the dialog-wilderness, provides structure to our chaotic world.
The problem I see is when we hit a ceiling, when we are unable (or unwilling) to take the next step beyond our current state. With the expanding consciousness (globalized art world/internet/ what-have-you) you will find a critical mass at some level along the way and then stop searching for that next forest for the trees. The same situation makes for a concern at the other end. With more and more layers at the uppermost levels of dialog, groups and dialogs have lost their footings in the most narrow but strongest of dialogs. Me being a tusche splatter litho guy is my cells, where I can then begin to expand upon. Those who have no footing, no strong cellular structure, make for deformed galaxies; any deficiency on the micro level is exacerbated exponentially when you start zooming out. This is where I see the place for dialogs surrounding media-specificity and technique to be so essential, what keeps us rooted in simple concepts such as ‘artist as maker’ and other crucial-yet-trivialized affairs. My concern is that with our ever-expanding universe it’s harder to notice when an insular group/dialog has drifted off, either by shortsightedness or forgetting those giants we’re standing on.