Author: Joshua Kochis

There’s a difference between making art because you’re asked to, and making art because you have to.

As I approach the end of this year, for the duration of which I’ve been given a cubicle in the Art and Design building to call my workspace, this distinction has become increasingly apparent. After developing a habit of spending every night in the studio, regardless of how productive I am in that time, I’m nervous for the day when I no longer have access to a place set aside for creative activities. Whether I spend the night making and writing or talking and drinking with my classmates and closest friends, it feels necessary to separate these aspects of my life, and never feels like a waste of time. What happens when I no longer have a place to go when I feel the need to surround myself with creativity?

In the art school, we make work because it’s been assigned to us – until the senior thesis project, there’s always some kind of prompt or inquiry to get the creative juices flowing. The interesting part of critique is seeing how each artist responds to the challenge in their own distinct way. We have unlimited access to the space, materials, tools and machines, as well as logistical elements like ventilation and waste management we could ever need. Each assignment is necessarily derived from this access, a response not only to the prompt but to the opportunities at our disposal. Once we graduate, however, both of these keystones from which our creative processes have been primarily built upon will be pulled out from right beneath our feet. What happens when the work is no longer a response to assignments and access, but the other way around? When we’ll have to work with what material and space we can squeeze out from the cracks of freetime in the everyday life of a poor art school graduate with an addiction to making?

It seems to me that this is when the real Art happens – when the process of making work is a creative response to the obstacles of self sufficiency in itself. What will I make when I don’t have access to a printing press, drying racks for paintings, ventilation for mixing plaster and pigment, welding equipment, a wood shop, the list goes on. Not to mention the ability to tack on expenses to my parents’ financial account and call it a “course fee”. Creativity is responding to the obstructions you’re given, and there are about to be more of them than I’ve ever known before.

As much anxiety as I’ve developed over the course of this last undergraduate semester, it’s not without a significant dose of excitement to dilute this paralyzing effect on my creative practice. It feels as though I’ve gotten to a point where I no longer need the prompts and inquiries to come up with ideas for a print or painting or sculpture I’d like to make. No longer will I have to work with skeptical professors breathing down my neck, asking “why” for each and every decision. No longer will I have to conform to a class schedule that doesn’t match up with the ebb and flow of my motivation. No longer will I have to make work I don’t care about to please people who are paid to be critical, whether it’s productive or not.

In the end, there will be definite positive and negative changes that I’ll have to deal with – the only alternative is to stop making work, and that’s not an alternative I’m willing to accept. Will somebody just give me a bunch of money and space so I can quit rambling already?

As a senior working on his thesis project in the Stamps School of Art & Design, I’ve been (obsessively) thinking about different ways to display artwork. Outside of the traditional gallery setting, the general public has more access to art than ever before – most artists have portfolio websites, or galleries documenting exhibitions in their spaces, in addition to physical forms of “takeaway” objects meant to summarize the work through postcards and artist books.

This past weekend marked the opening of Stamps MFA exhibitions – the third year students’ shows taking place in the Stamps gallery spaces (Slusser here on north campus, and Work down on central), as well as a warehouse in Hamtramck and a smaller gallery further inside Detroit; while the first year graduate students showed their initial ideation processes and studies in the faculty studios on Green Rd. here in Ann Arbor. On Thursday, the school provided a bus for us undergrads to travel out to Detroit to see the two separate venues, spending about 45 minutes at each location before concluding the adventure where it began outside of the Michigan Theatre.

The first stop was the giant Hamtramck warehouse space, where the work of artists Joshua Nierodzinski, Natasa Prljevic, and Cosmo Whyte will be up for the coming weeks. The art itself was well done, consisting of paintings, an installation of images, sound, and video, as well as a multimedia collection of prints and sculpture. However, I couldn’t help but feel more overwhelmed by the building itself, only three rooms of which were occupied out of what must have been thousands of square feet and at least ten floors of space. I don’t think it made the work look bad by any means, but perhaps it would have had a bit more of that “wow” factor had the warehouse not dwarfed the focus of the show itself. For me, the saving grace of the exhibition was an artist booklet that was put together by a local publisher in collaboration with the artists, which included more detailed explanations, process photos, and high quality documentation of the work. In contrast to the warehouse-turned-gallery space, it seemed obvious that the format and size of the book was created to fit the art inside it, not the other way around. And for a small fee ($20), anyone could essentially take the show with them and revisit its contents whenever they wanted.

I was immediately struck by the possibility of a book acting as an almost custom, portable gallery space. Of course, art is always better when experienced in person, but especially for someone who was able to make it to the actual exhibition, a book serves as a trigger for the memory of the tangible objects and images it represents. Working in tandem, it seems to be the perfect combination. So much so that I’ve since decided that in addition to the thesis paper I’m required to write about my “project”, I’ll be putting together a sort of thesis zine to act similarly as a takeaway of the work, including process images and writing that the viewer wouldn’t get otherwise.

Sometimes I have nightmares that all the gallery spaces will be filled up, torn down, or taken over by the wrong kind of crowd and that my work will have no place to go. It’s comforting to be reminded that art can live in between the public and private realms of culture, and that if nobody wants to show it, I can at least clear out my room for a photoshoot and pass out booklets to my friends and family. That is, until I’m able to open up a gallery myself 😉

 

http://www.nierodzinski.com/

http://www.natasaprljevic.com/

http://www.cosmowhyte.com/

When you’re sick, easy things become hard. Simple things develop the complexity of string theory, and feel oh so very trivial at the same time.

Such is the case with this sick student and his homework. Here’s an old pome that describes how I feel about it and also doesn’t at all:

 

Homework Song

After Mark Levine

 

Henri. Look. It’s morning.

You watch me scramble: clock from my ear, sand

from my pocket. I am a mirror, a two-way

lazy susan. I spin on my nose and walk

in circles. I am a lens, I am convex. I magnify, concentrate

light rays like old friends, I pull their hairs

through the head of a pin, one at a time. You left,

 

Henri, how could you, my nose full of tobacco

and lint. I live just south of you. My voice is all funny.

I am the Way and the Truth: I lick your shoes and you

don’t know I’m here.

I also sing and dance, very slowly. When I see

a stop sign, I tie my limbs together. It’s easy for Henri,

 

the rabbit taught him, out of the box. But me? I

ain’t Jack. I scratch my feet with a hammer, my soles

are too thick. I talk to plants about the weather.

I smell like television. They don’t trust me,

I seem to have it all together. I am ceramic

that hasn’t been fired yet. I’m this close to finding out.

We find out when we break. I run around telling folks

to have a seat. I bisect myself, whistle, cough

up tortilla chips at the crowd’s feet. Give ‘em just

what they want: salsa

all over the place. But now I know

I prefer chervil to cilantro, I am Jacque I say

 

bonjour, I am not a pen. I am dry. I can’t stand still. Itch

my head til it burns. I shed my fur in the summer. I am the 8-ball

on the lip of the corn hole. I am black and white. I am an easy win.

The light approaches and I become the earth. I spin

on my axis, elongate into an oval, careen.

 

Henri says I am a gutter.

I think I’m just the distal toe.

He crawls into the fridge, and I

Take the low rack of the oven.

This semester, RC Professor Ana Fernandez is teaching a course in East Quad about alternative exhibition spaces for art shows of all kinds. The assignments are planned and executed as collaborative projects, with each student carrying out their own role in the course of its completion: there are places to reserve, deadlines to schedule, theme and scope decide on, not to mention the art to find and install!

But what if the art came to the show?

This group of exhibitionists decided that they didn’t wanna put on the same kind of juried competition in which the art that’s being shown is decided on by a group of people all with different opinions and ideas of what a painting should be or how sculpture is done – they decided to have a show that’s UNjuried by its nature, driven by the energy of the movers and makers themselves, participatory, in flux, alive ! If an artist wants to hang a painting they can hang a painting! Hang stuff from the ceiling! Sculpture on the floor! No found object, designed object, sound, photograph, poem, performance or any other gem of creative thought or action turned away until the Duderstadt gallery’s full to the brim!

In addition to the open space with NO rules (except maybe no things that explode or cause other quieter forms of bodily harm), word on the street is that there’s also gonna be a place to make stuff over the course of the show itself – an invitation to come and help create a big sprawling field of anything at all on the paper-covered walls and blank space of glinty lights! Like the imagination itself!

And I think this is an important to be happening, how sometimes the gem of the art is the making itself, makin with a friend or with strangers, expressing thyself to a neighbor, to a tree, the snow, the sky ! Open up the world of dreams! This Friday at 6pm and beyond!

 

(themostopenopenshow@umich.edu for info n stuff)

As an avid reader of words, I constantly find myself marking up and dog-earing pages of whatever six or seven books I happen to be perusing at any given time. I justify the destruction unleashed upon the unsuspecting tome by saying I’ll come back to it later and want to know where the “good parts” are, as if I’m creating an outline or my own version of Sparknotes to save the painfully immense (a gross exaggeration) amount of time and effort it takes to flip through the pages one by one. When it does come time to revisit a particular volume of Ginsberg’s poetry or Kerouac’s rolling narrative prose, however, I tend to use these underlinings and annotations as starting points rather than gravity fragments that would stand in for the general skeleton of the book as a whole. Glazing over the in-betweens separating each nugget I deemed worthy of noting on my first time around leaves me with the feeling of talking on the phone with someone through a poor connection, with whole sentences and pages of the conversation lost to static and empty space on the receiver. I rob myself of the reinterpretation that happens when you read through an idea in its entirety, which often changes drastically from the particular way I synthesized it the first time. As a result, I end up reading the whole thing over again.

So why do I keep writing and folding all over the pages of every new crispy book I get? There’s the obvious advantage of thinking about the text in a critical way that wouldn’t be possible without stopping when a particular word or line gets me right there. But I think there’s something else to this habit of documenting thoughts I’m worried I’ll forget without recognizing their importance – the potential of sharing these ideas with other people. One of my favorite things to do is read out loud; popcorn was my favorite game in high school english class, and there’s just something satisfying about discovering the way a particular word rolls off the tongue, how it rolls differently off of my tongue and your tongue, and how a simple change in the inflection of a syllable can have a drastic effect on its meaning and context. Reading out loud to each other brings the act of internalizing somebody else’s thoughts into the public realm, where the words are allowed to hover around the room and do whatever it is they please, rather than simply traversing the distance from page to headspace and calling it a day and (usually) fading into the milk of the mind where it all blurs into wordsoup. Reading out loud transforms a solitary activity into a collective interaction and I think that’s important. Not that we should always read out loud, or that spending a quiet night in bed with a cup of tea and a good book is any less satisfying or useful than sharing the experience, but one without the other seems to me to take away from the beauty of someone’s mind captured in the form of a book. Don’t believe me? Read this post out loud ! To a friend! a stranger! yourself! anyone! everyone!

A lot has happened in the past year: students have come and gone, landmark restaurants and stores snuffed out, butt scandals passed over social media and other such occurrences of utmost importance. But one thing that has remained alive amidst these tumultuous times is the TENET artist collective’s ability to put out a zine (almost) every month since their beginning last January.

I know, I know; another post about this so-called artist group who still doesn’t really exist outside its target audience of art schoolers, English majors, vijjy enthusiasts, and the general hooligan population of Ann Arbor? Especially when this self-appointed spokesperson of sorts hasn’t shown his rambling face around these parts in a hot minute. But I maintain that you few people traversing these particular sidewalks and alleyways of the world wide webtown should know about this kind of stuff, nay - need to know about this stuff, about these people making drawings and words and ZINES and happenings right under your noses, and that its possible for anyone to do with a pen and a copy machine and a lot of time on their hands, or maybe just time to sacrifice (is sleep not for the weak?).

Yes! This is all gravity and bones because for the first time TENET has broken out of the living-room-turned-gallery-space method of past events in favor of entering the “real world” “art scene” by showing work and releasing zines in the North Quad space on State Street, the one with all the windows and tables and TVs and oddly shaped chairs and stools scattered around a huge projection screen. How did they manage to convert a space usually reserved for Powerpoint lectures and Acapella performances, you ask? Well there were zines hanging from a coatrack! all the past issues! mountainous drawings on tables! raw paintings leaned against walls! reflective sculpture on the floor! tasteful shower videos in the corner! there were readings by never-before-heard Teneteers, speaking words straight from the zine! there was almost a release of this music vijjy by the Tusks Band (technical difficulties being inevitable)! It was a new way to see the work of these obsessive image makers and word crafters, outside the comfort of their own friends’ homes!

The gallery show was followed up by a long and arduous march back to where the legend all began, at the Mundungus cave on South campus before returning to the new stomping ground of Kerrytown, onward to Sparkman’s Palace where Tusks and Wych Elm killed it (as usual) in the basement of low pipelined ceilings and brick walls, cement floors and columns that ring when you knock them – and here it was that the essence of these events reared its beautiful sweating head, the gallery show and zine release just a means to an end, important to those who’ve lived and grown within this vortex of creative expression over the past year but really the gem of experience being the potential for connection between people, the connection of TENET with the public, in TENET, through TENET but not solely about it and them, about all us hooligans roaming these Arboreal streets in dazes, all about the US, everyone, the innocent bystander becomes angsty ruckus maker, the introverted poet becomes proclaimer of words and feeling, and TENET ceases to be this small group of subterraneans meeting in basements and poring over mags talkin bullshit to each other at a mile minute – here everyone becomes TENET and TENET becomes everyone. I know, you know, we all know and feel what it is to connect other like-minded hooligans, for shenanigans, and it just keeps getting better.