Recommended Reading
Information overload, how creativity is not what it seems, and art history's most elusive artist.
Hi Everyone,
Hoping you’re well and having a good week.
Following are a few recent articles I read that I would highly recommend:
First off, I’d like to suggest Claire Bishop’s “Information Overload,” which is in this month’s Artforum.
Bishop’s piece takes on “research-based art” since the 1990s to critique it, which she argues has never been done to the approach as a whole before. Bishop believes that this type of work can’t be separated from contemporaneous developments in digital technology. As a result, she says, at this stage in its maturation, research is actually search (not research), and that mostly what this work does is demonstrate curiosity versus doing what research does (at its best): ask good questions and try to separate the signal from the noise.
Bishop further clarifies the difference she sees between search and research:
“Searching is the preliminary stage of looking for something via a search engine, “Googling.” Research proper involves analysis, evaluation, and a new way of approaching a problem. Search involves the adaptation of one’s ideas to the language of “search terms”—preexisting concepts most likely to throw up results—whereas research (both online and offline) involves asking fresh questions and elaborating new terminologies yet to be recognized by the algorithm.”
Bishop thinks this presentation—of search results as research—is problematic, and yearns for much more substantial research in these artworks. She further characterizes her ideal as “selection and synthesis—a directed series of connections that go beyond the subjective, contingent, and accumulative.” Finally, she says, “If this sounds like a crypto-academic call to apply traditional research criteria to works of art, then it is, to an extent.” Read more here.
I’d also like to recommend Louis Menand’s short piece, “The Origins of Creativity,” which is in The New Yorker this week. The piece is essentially an expanded review of Samuel Franklin’s new book, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023). The review traces Franklin’s history of creativity since the Cold War—before which the term supposedly barely existed. (Hence the book’s title.)
Franklin argues that in the postwar period, creativity’s invention was rooted in the American need to compete with the Russians and capitalistically with the world, and the place where it became most used was advertising, which Franklin says was “the industry that most avidly grabbed on to the term ‘creative’ to glamorize what it did.” So the big—and fascinating—takeaway here is that while we believe the ideology of business-oriented creativity thinking was recently stolen from artists, it was something that was actually never actually stolen but conceived by and rooted in capitalism and industry from the beginning.
At the end of the article, Menand calls out a few things he wished were discussed in the book, and one of them (interestingly) is the role of fine art relative to this way of thinking about creativity. Menand, for example, wonders if Pop Art’s anti-author, appropriative stance was a reaction to industry becoming more interested in creativity. Read more here.
The final piece of writing I want to recommend is Alex Greenberger’s recent coverage of conceptual artist stanley brouwn in Artnews. brouwn could be the most elusive artist in the history of art. While his work has been shown widely, and it’s known he lived and worked in Amsterdam most of his life—and that he died in 2017, brouwn sought throughout his career to have no information available about him and his work at all. He refused to include accompanying information about it when it was shown, he rejected photography of his work, and Google search results are minimal. This might change due to current shows at the Art Institute of Chicago and Dia: Beacon, yet in keeping with brouwn’s wishes, the curators say nothing about the work, the institutions include no wall labels, there’s minimal information on their websites, and no public programming or publications.
What is brouwn’s work like? The Dia show includes a work called walking through cosmic rays (1970–2009), which is “the cosmic radiation in a certain space, indicated by a text label.” The Art Institute show, which is the first comprehensive brouwn exhibition staged in the U.S., includes versions of This Way Brouwn (begun in 1960), which is arguably brouwn’s most famous work. The work consisted of brouwn stopping people on the street in Amsterdam and asking them how to get from one place to another. He’d ask the person to draw it out the directions on a piece of paper, and then afterward he’d sign his name and stamp it with a title. The general idea was to remove himself from being an author, prompting others to create, and then signing the work.
What’s also interesting is that we do know brouwn was an immigrant from Suriname. Greenberger comments, “Born in the capital city of Paramaribo in 1935, brouwn came to Amsterdam 22 years later…[and] having crossed the Atlantic, he may have been processing his own migration.” Read more here.
Thanks, as usual, for your support; I hope you enjoy these readings; and, as always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me here or on Instagram to share other content you think should be recommended.
Wishing you all the best—and see you in two weeks.
Best,
Matthew
Just found your newsletter. Good stuff! As an artist myself, I can’t find much succint and at the same time dense and meaningful food for thought around. Keep up the good work!