Ben Davis of ArtNet writes about Tino Sehgal.  Good piece to be read in conjunction with the more general NY Times article from 2009 and the one from 2007.

Photos For Tino – artnet Magazine

Here’s a delicious nugget of  artspeak.  Let’s hope it’s a translation problem.

“The city is the privileged field for the exertion of power. Subjugation procedures are deployed everywhere (on bodies, on language, on places). But nothing is in itself political for the mere fact of hosting the exercise of power relationships, and yet anything, upon the right occasion, can become so.”

via Neighborhood / e-flux.

The decline of art world money as expressed through the thickness of ArtForum.

Diane Carr, Thicket, 2009, 30" x 48"

Diane Carr – a painter I particularly admire – is back with another gallery show. December 9 – 11, 2009 at Gallery SATORI, 164 Stanton St, New York, NY.

I thought she had a website but since I can’t find it you can see more of her work at the White Column’s Artist Registry.

Roberto Coromina, Untitled, 2002, oil on paper, 25.6”x32”. Courtesy Magnan Projects, New York.

“Collectors have achieved a central role in contemporary art, not that the spirit of today’s collectors has less or nothing to do with yesteryear’s philanthropist or maecenas. With the advent of neo-capitalism and neo-con philosophy, new players and distant economies have descended upon the arts with a set of new motivations that loathe the great charm of the cultural benefactor in his relationship with “the men of genius” who formed his circle. The original simplicity, cordiality and sincerity have given way to aggressiveness, benefit-seeking, and vanity. This attitude, that for decades was considered by Europeans typically “American,” is finding its way among European private collectors.”

via ARTPULSE MAGAZINE » Feature » THE NEW SPIRIT OF COLLECTING: FROM MAECENAS TO PRESCRIPTOR TO SPECULATOR.

I don’t mean to beat a dead horse but Vincent Roman has posted an outstanding review of the Whitney’s new website. He covers Javascript breakage, 404 problems, and SEO issues.  Way more technical than my review and therefore quite worthwhile.

I hope the critical coverage the Whitney’s new site has been receiving

a) demonstrates that people care about museum websites and that they are worth holding to a high standard

b) encourages the Whitney to redesign their site

c) provides recommendations to the Whitney’s staff when the dust settles from the relaunch and they contract with a new firm to fix it

For the record – reviews from Edward Tufte and Mediaite and my review. User comments are interesting and useful, too.

Nothing new here but I’m a sucker for nostalgia.

From the press release, “Florian Slotawa has ripped out pieces of his studio’s walls and transferred them to the gallery space. During the duration of the exhibition, the physically displaced architectural pieces are layered against the storefront window, through which the gallery space opens onto the street. The installation changes the usual spatial impression of the gallery and conceptually links both the artist’s workspace and the exhibition space.”

Florian Slotawa at Nordenhake (Contemporary Art Daily).

“How do you acquire or display a work of performance art that exists only in the form of an instruction sheet? What should conservators do about works that are deteriorating because they were made from unstable materials, such as neon, or sharks? If you want to exhibit a huge work of conceptual art that is housed at another museum, does it make sense to pay for shipping when you could probably just get permission to make a copy?”

via Copy That! Wait, Don’t. Whitney Ponders Problem of Replication in Modern Art | The New York Observer.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has needed a new website for years.  Information was increasingly hard to find, navigation was inconsistent, and the site’s design was of variable quality.  Some sections were outstanding but many more areas were confusing and poorly laid out.  Overall, the site struggled to clearly present the museum’s wide range of programs.  It also wasn’t suited to showcasing multimedia and integrating with social media services like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter which are increasingly driving museum visits.

Fixing all this required a redesign and after a long incubation the Whitney has relaunched their new site.

They enter a highly innovative field.  The past three years have seen growing recognition among museum management that mission is enhanced by a robust online program.  The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Walker, MoMA, and SFMOMA have upgraded their sites to enterprise-level content management systems delivering gigabytes of audio, video, and text to millions of viewers annually.  As museums have increased their digital output and come to recognize that “audience” includes a vast online public, directors are coming to realize that an intuitive, attractive website is a worthwhile, mission-critical investment.

2008 saw many museums of the Whitney’s caliber relaunch their websites including the Hammer Museum, Guggenheim, MoMA, SFMOMA, and Museum of Art and Design.  These organizations produced polished, professional sites to serve as content delivery platforms for a swiftly expanding online audience hungry for museum content.  It’s against this backdrop that the museum community has been eagerly awaiting the Whitney’s entry into the field.

It’s a shock, then, that the new Whitney website not only fails to improve upon its old website but actually ends up being worse.  Visual confusion, counterintuitive navigation, and illogical organization put it on par with its predecessor but setting it a step backwards is an absence of a compelling design that knits the site together into a coherent whole.  The lack of color, proper division of page elements, and clear information hierarchy leaves the viewer with pages where content floats without clear order or priority.  Perhaps more dispiriting is how generic the site feels.  It’s lifeless.  More a wireframe suitable for preliminary development than a digital platform to project Whitney mission and programs.

If this was a lesser organization such a website would be a shame.  But for the Whitney it’s a liability.  In a highly competitive culture industry, the Whitney needs to continue to assert itself as the dynamic, relevant, and high-quality organization it is.  When its website declares the opposite – that it’s pedestrian, unsophisticated, and banal – the brand takes a beating and its reputation is called into question.

Breaking It Down

12 RSS feeds are available for fine-grained subscription to specific site content and 9 iCal feeds allow for users to keep tabs on the museum’s date-based programs.  A “Your Collection” feature allows users to select and save images, video, and web pages from the site.  Internet art projects will be integrated into the site which – while at first blush appearing little more than gimmickry – will likely be worthwhile given the Whitney’s strong track record of supporting digital art through its ARTPORT.

The site features a completely new design and re-ordered information architecture.  And this is where the site’s problems begin to appear.  7 main categories on the old site have ballooned to 17 main categories on the new site.  Redesigns usually reduce and simplify than expand and complicate.  The new site obfuscates a clear visual flow of hierarchical information.  Little is grounded by bordering, shading, or sectioning (the common methods in web design).  Instead, content blocks float in white space without adhering to a consistent grid.  And within that white space, text leading is used to differentiate sections but that type is of inconsistent style and positioning across the site.

I counted over 12 different link styles:  blue underline, bold black, bold grey, bold blue, bordered black, green background, light blue background, yellow background, grey background, white text on black background, white text on red background, bold black with grey underline, and orange.  It’s such an overwhelming array, it suggests that anything could be a link – a paralyzing position to put a user in.

Since the site is designed exclusively with text and that text is styled in no consistent way, the site’s color palette is hard to define but if pressed I’d say it’s black, white, and forest green.  When I think of the Whitney I think of slate grey – the color of the building.  A proper design should build off of this color and incorporate complementary hues that draw connections between the website and the museum location.

Navigation Problems

The main vertical navigation bar breaks basic user interface design rules over and over again.  First, its 17 top-level options need to be reduced.  Even the old Whitney nav bar was better than the new one.

The priority of information within the bar is also questionable.  Is “Support” and “Membership” – the first two links – more important to a visitor than “Visitor Information” or “Exhibitions?”  Certainly not.  Is “Support” and “Membership” of greater importance to the museum than its exhibitions and events?  I hope not.  The “About” section features fascinating information about the organization’s past and promising future but isn’t even a link on the nav bar.  It’s sunk to the bottom of every page, relegated to what is effectively a website’s graveyard.  Is the museum’s history that irrelevant?  I doubt it, but it’s sending a disconcerting message.  Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that increasingly drive word-of-mouth traffic are hidden in the “Feeds and Email Notifications” section.  They’re doing great things on these sites and should elevate them to the top-level or at least group them in a logical category.

The navigation bar violates the most fundamental rule of user interface design: persistence.  Instead of remaining in the same place when you click a top-level link, that link is pulled out and elevated to the top of the list.

Before clicking:

After clicking “Exhibitions”:

When you click into certain sections – “Education,” for example – links that were once in the nav bar disappear (“For Kids / For Teens”).

Sections two-levels deep make the higher-level parents disappear.

Inconsistency like this is considered unsound by professional web designers because it breaks the convention of a persistent navigation bar where high-level content sections stay put no matter what.  A nav bar with sections that move or even disappear makes a site feel unpredictable, leading to visitor exasperation.

Other oddities include subsection links that because of their green color appear visually to be of higher priority than their desaturated parent and horizontal navigation links within a vertical link structure.  “Film / Performance” are actually two separate sections masquerading as one.  When you click “Film” it’s pulled to the top leaving “Performance” behind even though it’s on the same line.

Visual Design

Visually, the site’s elements are adrift as if they’ve been casually dropped onto the page.  The lack of a uniform grid and an absence of grounding makes viewing page content difficult because everything appears of nearly equal importance.

Let’s look at the “Exhibitions” page:

The top “Your Collection” strip should be sectioned off from the rest of the site content because it’s part of the website and does not specifically refer to the page.  The Whitney logo should be flush with the vertical nav bar’s left margin.  The nav bar should be drawn up to match the horizontal alignment of the page title.  Images should be equally sized and in horizontal alignment with one another.  The border around “more info” should be removed to indicate its lesser importance in the order of title and date.

Problems like these abound on nearly every page but a redesigned template could pretty easily fix them.

A harder fix is the “Education” section where a collection of ambiguous phrases in orange lettering appear on the top of that section’s landing page.

It’s unclear what one is supposed to do here or how one should choose where to click.  “Curiosity” may be an option they provide but “Confusion” is really what I’m thinking.  I don’t know where I’m going to go or what I’m going to get when I click one of these links (I assume they are links – but perhaps I shouldn’t since they aren’t underlined – another convention disregarded).  When I do finally decide that I’m “playful” I am presented with a page but no indication through a bread crumb or a nav bar entry where I am.  The navigation system here completely breaks down and a user is adrift in a sea of links without reference or bearing.

“Your Collection” vs. “The Collection”

The “Your Collection” feature allows users to collect pages, images, and video from across the site and store it in a personal user account for future access.  This would have been innovative had MoMA not already introduced an identical feature more elegantly implemented on its own site months ago.  I’m skeptical of the utility of such a tool.  I think a more effective approach is to design a site that enables visitors to easily export site content to whatever content aggregation service they’ve adopted (Delicious, Evernote, Facebook, Tumblr, bookmarking, etc.).  I suppose these “collections” features are supposed to increase site stickiness but I think they probably just go unused.

“Your Collection” is not to be confused with “The Collection” which is a growing online database of the museum’s permanent holdings and is the new website’s highlight.  Images are impressively sized, and navigation – though rudimentary – is at least functional.  This section holds great promise.

In Conclusion

I’m not sure what went wrong here.  How could a museum as first-rate as the Whitney have produced a site so inferior?  Linked by Air – the development company the museum hired – should shoulder much of the responsibility.  Apparently the backend is robust and well designed for the staff but this must not come at an expense to the end user.  The failure to successfully integrate a strong back end and an elegant front end throws the firm’s credibility into serious doubt.  I would also venture to guess that the museum had no dedicated project manager familiar with the web to help guide the museum through the thicket of options.  There may also not have been the will to redirect a project going down the wrong path.

I have great confidence in the Whitney.  The staff is enthusiastic and recent hires indicate an institutional understanding of the importance of the web.  Although this particular site is stillborn, I’m certain that with a new developer and a strong project manager the Whitney will retool their site into something they – and the museum community – can be proud of.

–

Update 11/13/09: In the interest of full disclosure, I’m the Digital Projects Manager at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

The gall.

From the press release of an upcoming show at the Brooklynite Gallery titled “Go Get Your Shinebox”:

With the global economic downturn and the hardship it has caused blue-collar workers throughout, we find it fitting to explore the world’s simplest way to make a living- SHINING SHOES. We are planning an exhibition around just that— SHOESHINE BOXES.

And how will they “explore” it?  By taking replicas of shoeshine boxes, decorating them, and plopping them in a gallery.

It gets worse.

However a “SHOESHINE BOX” should not be taken in the most literal sense of the words. These objects, our inspiration, have all been created out of necessity – a need to earn money, or further, to survive. We push “the need to survive” beyond its literal context, commissioning our favorite established and emerging artists to design their own, “SURVIVAL BOXES”.

This is a classic example of political art done wrong.  Here’s the pattern:

1. Take an object associated with a subjugated group of people

2. Reproduce and decorate it

3. Assert a political critique

What’s so frustrating about work like this is that it simply aestheticizes a political symbol without getting to the bottom of the core issues that political symbol represents.  A pure visual product alone is silent and – because it’s a work of art – open to multiple interpretations.  This is the opposite of assertion.  It’s suggestion.  And suggestion and open-endedness is what makes art great. But when an artist traffics in political subjects that have real-world affect on subordinated peoples’ lives, simple open-ended “visual inquiry” by  priveleged artists producing for a priveleged audience is an offense.  It exploits serious social problems for cultural capital gains.

This Shinebox project is even worse because it ignores the issues behind shoeshiners and focuses on the damn box.  And then, in an extraordinarily outrageous move, leaves the box behind and sets up a show of “survival boxes” drawing attention to the individual ARTISTS leaving behind the source subjects.

If you want to, you can visit their atrociously designed website and then navigate to the exhibition page.  Only to find it broken. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Brooklynite Gallery

The Museum of Modern Art’s blog blasted onto the scene a couple of weeks ago and has been pumping out smart, solid content since.  Case in point: this “behind-the-scenes” dissection of a Claes Oldenburg sculpture.  Keep track of the MoMA blog; there are good things afoot.

MoMA | Claes Oldenburg: Conservation of Floor Cake (Week 2)

OK, so there’s nothing “new” here with this theme but, still, could be a hoot. From their release:

“The Christopher Henry Gallery invites you to the exhibition The Map as Art , a group show curated by Katharine Harmon and Christopher Henry opening November 5, 6 – 9 PM.. The exhibition presents a diverse group of work in a variety of media, all of which use mapping concepts to explore uncharted territories both formal and intellectual. The show is presented concurrent with the launch of Harmon’s book, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography Princeton Architectural Press. The exhibition features works by: Doug Beube, Matthew Cusick, Joshua Dorman, Jerry Gretzinger, Ingo Gunther, Jane Hammond, Emma Johnson, Karey Kessler, Joyce Kozloff, Hayato Matsushita, Meridith McNeal, Florent Morellet, Vik Muniz, Aga Ousseinov, Matthew Picton, Karin Schaefer, Dannielle Tegeder, Heidi Whitman, and Jeff Woodbury.”

via Opening reception November 5: Christopher Henry Gallery.

“Artist Mai Ueda invites a selection of her friends–musicians, fashion designers, and artists–to perform, dine and play music at the same time. A not-to-missed neo-fluxus event that will recall the Fluxus Dumpling dinner staged by Maciunas in 1971 in SoHo.”

Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway, 2nd Floor
Saturday, November 14 7:00pm
FREE

via Performa

This massive anthology collects scripts in the form of notes, instructions, drawings, graphs, charts, and more from artists of varied backgrounds and styles whose shared interest is in the performative. With contributions from Marina and Ulay Abramovic, George Brecht, John Cage, Peter Frank, Philip Glass, Dan Graham, the Living Theater, Claes Oldenburg, Rachel Rosenthal, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Wilson to name only a few. Over 700 pages.

PrintedMatter.org

“While a computer program may use a complex series of mathematical algorithms, the visual artist generally uses simpler procedures. But the process is similar whether the algorithms are simple or complex. Artists like Larry Poons, Sol LeWitt, and Jackson Pollock sometimes used structured visual procedures—or algorithms—to generate their images.”

Good interview with early computer artist Mark Wilson

More illuminated manuscript maps from the Walters Art Museum on Flickr

Between 1996 and 2005, Maria Eichhorn conducted interviews with artists, gallery owners and others–including Carl Andre, Michael Asher, Paula Cooper, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Adrian Piper, Robert Ryman, John Weber, Lawrence Weiner and Jackie Winsor–about sales of artworks, speculation, the role of collectors and museums and artists’ rights.

via Amazon.com: Maria Eichhorn: The Artist’s Contract (9783865604217): Gerti Fietzek, Maria Eichhorn: Books.

Glad to hear of a new show of photographs by Angela Strassheim. I was captivated by the saccharine melancholy of her 2006 “Left Behind” series.  Radically new direction here in this upcoming show.  Press release follows.

–

Marvelli Gallery is pleased to present “Evidence,” an exhibition of new photographs by Angela Strassheim. This will be Angela’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

Angela Strassheim conceptualized her most recent series of images after learning of a violent crime that involved a student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she was teaching at the time. Strassheim developed the project utilizing a forensic technique commonly reserved for crime scene investigation, which she learned while working on the field for the Miami Forensic Imaging Bureau. In this particular body of work, Strassheim created her pictures through the application of a specific chemical spray called “Blue Star” to the walls of rooms where violent, aggressive acts were committed. Long after the struggles ended in these spaces, despite the cleaning, repainting and subsequent re-habitation of the rooms, the “Blue Star” solution is capable of activating the physical memory of blood through its contact with remaining proteins on the walls. Long exposures- from ten minutes to one hour- with minimal ambient night light pouring in from the crevices of windows and doors, capture the physical presence of blood as a lurid glow: a constellation of stars embedded in the walls.

Through a long and painstaking research process, Angela mapped out the exact locations where violent, often horrific crimes were perpetrated. She convinced new owners and tenants, some unaware of the violent history of their residences, to revisit the unnoticed, unseen past. Angela captures the tracing of a final struggle through the hard evidence of a violent moment, thereby revealing the silent yet omniscient memory of everyday living spaces. The physical result of her work is a series of luscious, large black and white prints, which attract the viewer like stills from a film noir with their eerie seduction and mysterious quality. Ultimately, these images are honest and true to the original space; they make visible, once again, the traces of violence and death that took place in those spaces in a forgotten past.

via ArtCat – Chelsea – Marvelli Gallery – Angela Strassheim, Evidence.

American Landscapes takes the interiors of commercial photography studios across the United States as its ostensible subject. The artists reject the foreground and highlight instead the space in which images are literally “made.” In these occasionally abstract photographs, the surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings junction along straight lines and parabolic curves to create the unspoiled white space known in the photography industry as Cycloramas. Broomberg & Chanarin refer to these spaces as ’scenography for a free market economy’ or simply ‘Landscapes’. For just as the American West came to represent unbound possibility in the minds of early pioneers, so these studio walls act as a blank screen on which any sort of fantasy may be projected.

Via Rhizome | American Landscapes 2009 – Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin.

Mary Frey