Dimensions Volume VI Number 2

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Dimensions Art Journal - Winter 2010 01

ContentsContents

Letter from the Editor

Getting Hold of Objects at Close Range: Postcards and the Experience of Art

by Alexandra Dennett

Artist ProfileRebecca Schultz

A Perfunctory Affair: The Meaning of Process in Sol LeWitt's Work

by Bob Liles

Dimensions Catalog A selection of student artwork

Exit Through the Gift Shop: The Spectacle of the Artist

by Maddie Haddon

Beyond the Old Master Workshop: Portraiture and the Implications of Rembrandt’s Studio Practice

by Emma Sokoloff

Artist ProfileCaroline Chandler

Dimensions Art Journal, Volume 6, Issue ii

We would like to thank the History of Art Department, Yale Center for British Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery for their continued and generous support. Our thanks also go to the student artists whose work appears in this issue.

© Dimensions Art Journal, Yale University, 2010Dimensions is published by students of Yale College. Yale University and other institutions are not responsible for its contents. We welcome all enquiries and comments at [email protected].

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Letter from the EditorLetter from the Editor

As a freshman, I remember having to traipse to the Swartwout Building (encom-passing the now-defunct “Art History Bridge”) to study slides for Professor Vincent Scully’s exams. The ritual involved in accessing and viewing these images in a damp, cavernous, dimly-lit room was my first means of access to art history, as it probably was for many Yalies. Sitting today in the Haas Arts Library with its paprika carpets and luminous tabletops, pulling up ARTstor on my laptop, I con-struct my arguments with the ease and aid of digital images. In recent years, the Internet has come to change the way we see and think about art in fundamental ways. Questions of replication and authorship in art are as timely so long as technologies continue to update themselves. REPLICATE The preciousness of a work of art may be hindered or augmented by its “repro-ducibility.” Reading the phenomenon of the art postcard through Walter Benja-min’s famous essay, Alexandra Dennett examines the role that these objects have to play in mediating our experiences and memories of viewing art in museums. Another problematic aspect of replication is the hand of the artist, the illusive trace that bears the mark of authorship and identity, which seems to be underval-ued in our technological age. Arguing for the presence of a “hand” in Sol LeWitt’s work, Bob Liles shares a personal side to the creation of a wall drawing, and questions a fundamental assumption in Conceptual practice. Stepping back into the Dutch Golden Age, Emma Sokoloff considers the implications of Rembrandt’s idiosyncratic studio practice through her analysis of his emulative model of apprenticeship. Lastly, Maddie Haddon reviews the street art film of the year, Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop. The shifting and uncertain identities of artist and mimic in the work circumscribe issues of originality in art. REPRODUCE As always, we are eager to promote the work of artists at Yale. In this issue, we publish the best art submissions that we have received this semester and profile two artists whose works have been an inspiration to us. We hope you continue reading and supporting Dimensions Art Journal.


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Dimensions Art Journal - Winter 2010Feature 07


by Alexandra Dennett

“Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at close range.”

-Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 1939

AS MUSEUM VISITORSHIP HAS GROWn, particularly during the second half of the 20th century, the gift shop has become an integral part of the visiting experience. The wide range of repro-ductions for sale, from affordable postcards to expensive limited-edition framed prints, offers customers the possibility of owning copies of some of the most iconic works in the history of art. The Metropolitan Museum store’s website advertises their “Wall Art” products as a way for customers to “bring home the splendor of the Muse-um’s most cherished masterpieces.” nowadays, the offerings have expanded beyond traditional posters and books to include clothing, notebooks, and other products featuring an eye-catch-ing work from an exhibit or the muse-um’s permanent collection.

A recent New York Times article (Sep-tember 2, 2010) playfully described the merchandise sold during an exhibit on Ghirlandaio and Renaissance paint-

ing at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Each of the products fea-tured the iconic face of the exhibition’s central painting, ensuring that “Gio-vanna’s eternal beauty and allure are not to be confined by museum walls.” Instead, “She can be spotted prome-nading around the city — on the small vinyl bags (4.50€) and bright orange umbrellas (36€).” These reproductions commodify works of art and turn them into fashion accessories and crockery. Their popularity reveals a high demand for reproduced works of art as decora-tion for material possessions, inserted onto functional objects instead of remaining mere images.

In 1996, a show at the national Gal-lery in London, “At Home with Consta-ble’s Cornfield,” brought the gift shop onto the walls of the museum by exhib-iting reproductions of Constable’s painting in media other than book illus-trations or postcards, namely, ashtrays, biscuit tins, tea trays, ceramic bells, cushion covers, a ceramic locket and even a cigarette card. Its aim was to show how the people who owned these reproductions conceived of their rela-tion to the work. Throughout these eclectic reproductions, the work becomes removed from the context of the museum and its identity becomes multi-

plied, creating a new and “particular combination of inseparable identities.”

Walter Benjamin commented on the huge transformations brought by modern technology to art reproduction in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibil-ity,” stating that “the work of art has always been reproducible...But the technological reproduction of artworks is something new.” Indeed, the way that we relate to works of art is altered by the widespread availability of repro-ductions. When the national Gallery in London first opened, only fifty stu-dents were allowed in each day to copy the works for study at greater length. now that computers allow us to have any image at our fingertips, it is easy to forget that reproductions in books or on slides, as well as post-cards, were once the only resources for the study of works of art not located nearby. This can have tremendous impact on the scholarship produced. Historically, for instance, most Ameri-can scholars had no choice but to study medieval architecture and sculpture from slides, causing their work to focus more on iconography than on physical and material properties, as European scholarship did. The inability of repro-ductions to give a sense of the physical-

ity of works of art thus affects the way those works are understood, even though they can also serve as invalu-able tools for study.

However, the utility of postcards and the decorative potential of posters offer alternative incentives for owning images of artworks that differ from those offered by books. Particularly in the case of posters, retailers must select which artworks will prove to be good sellers. This commodification makes works by artists such as Van Gogh and Monet into consistent bestsellers, with Gauguin and Matisse often found among their ranks. Yet the immediacy, and thus enduring strength of these art-ists’ works (and arguably, of all paint-ing), is inextricably linked with the physical surface and appearance of the paint on the canvas, something that can never be recreated in another medium. This authenticity is described by Benjamin:

"In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and the now of the work of art – its unique exis-tence in a particular place. It is this unique existence – and nothing else – that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject. This history includes changes to the physi-cal structure of the work over time, together with any changes in ownership."

The history contained within the physi-cal art object is yet another element that cannot be recreated in the reproduction.

Benjamin notes that reproductions allow copies of the original to enter into “situations which the original itself cannot attain,” that is, “it enables the original to meet the recipient halfway…The cathedral leaves its site to be

received in the studio of an art lover.” The private setting sets these experi-ences apart from that in the museum. In addition to taking them off the museum wall or out of a textbook which, as places of authority, predeter-mine the relationship between the piece and the viewer — postcards flatten and miniaturize the original. not always sent through the mail, they often func-tion as souvenirs and decoration instead. The reduction required of post-card reproductions could be construed in many ways as being subversive to the original work of art, suggesting a diminished sense of importance to mirror the diminished scale.

Reproductions cannot possibly include the atmosphere or sensations emanat-ing from a work, which are so depen-dent on the combination of its physical appearance — such as size or surface — with the conditions of its exhibition: framing, lighting and its position in rela-tion to other works. To this effect, Ben-jamin alludes to the impossibility of recreating the “aura” of a work of art. A reproduction isolates the frontal appearance of a work, removing any-thing else that might contribute to the experience. Reproductions significantly diminish the work’s presence, inevita-bly making this auratic power wither. Yet they also allude to the work’s aura as it was experienced in the museum. Thus, reproductions (especially post-cards) are emblematic of memory, since they allow the museum visitor to collect physical records of intangible aesthetic experiences.

Benjamin also admits the complexity of the problem by underlining how repro-ductions also bring works of art to life: “By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient

in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced.” While the experience may be inevitably altered by reproduction, widespread dissemi-nation can also enrich the work’s very existence by making it more immedi-ately accessible to viewers. The notion of a mass existence suggests that the original work’s presence is alive to some extent within each reproduction.

Reproductions thus simultaneously reduce and expand the experience of the works they feature. The popularity of reproductions and merchandise featur-ing reproductions is emblematic of the democratization of culture. The demand for postcards and other reproductions demonstrates a desire on consumers’ behalf to create the impression of owning or collecting works of art, but reproductions also function as remind-ers of the aesthetic experience. Though they free the experience of art from the ritual of the museum, they also deny the centrality of the physical presence of works to our experience of them. nonetheless, when compared to the point-and-shoot approach of collecting digital shots of works in museums, buying reproductions can be a better way of collecting memories of works seen and enjoyed.


Rebecca Schultz (YC ’12) possesses an unwavering commitment to paint and its abil-ity to declare itself on a surface. For Schultz, the value of painting is never up for question. It is a given. Her work is about how the universe can arrange itself out of chaos. Brushstrokes inside of a rectangle.

And from this commitment comes a body of work which is trend-averse. Of her paint-ings, she says “I don't think there's anything particularly 2010 about them — I've been looking at much older artists and at spaces that have looked the same for years.”

This word “space” is the key to understanding her work. Schultz says: “I've been thinking about imaginary spaces and floating spaces. These spaces are grounded in a particular place by a particular, recognizable thing — I've been looking at pool tiles and roof beams — but they also retreat and disappear into one another, and become ambiguous or abstract.” The artist’s process is an endless game of building and destroying the logic of space with the simplest marks possible. Sometimes a space is defined by the three planes which declare a corner. Sometimes it is nothing more than shifts in light.

Some of the most striking aspects of her work are those moments which conjure the uncanny. The Yale viewer can pick out moments of her own life, almost (but not quite) recognizable through a painterly filter. “There's definitely something of Yale's basements in my paintings,” Schultz says “especially the Branford basement, which is a very bizarre kind of industrial labyrinth in pastel colors.”

Schultz picks her color palette very carefully. A glistening pink, meant to evoke a fleshy inside, also brings to mind feelings of bubble gum and Polly Pocket interiors. She is currently in a very distinct blue period. The use of blue in the work is inspired by Giotto’s Arena Chapel, and the way in which this sort of blue can connote an infinite expanse. By using an endless blue to create an interior space, she sets up a collision between what is inside with what is out. One can almost say that Rebecca Schultz paints the spatial alienation that we face when going to college. “On a college campus,” she notes, “you end up spending time in public buildings — in buildings that are only partly yours, and of which you can only see parts. This is the kind of relationship that I would like a viewer to have with the spaces I'm painting.”

She succeeds in this goal: to stand before one of her paintings is to catch a glimpse of a mysterious space we cannot ever fully enter or possess.

-Ilana Harris-Babouya l e c e n t e r f o r b r i t i s h a r t

On view through January 2, 2011

The Independent Eye contemporary brit ish art from the collection of samuel and gabrielle lurie

Supported in part by the British Council

Notes from the Archive james frazer stirl ing, architect and teacher

This exhibition has been co-organized with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal and generously supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT 06520 | Tuesday–Saturday 10–5, Sunday 12–5

Admission is free | 877 brit art | yale.edu/ycba

James Stirling, Michael Wilford, and Associates, Bibliothèque de France, Paris, France: presentation model, 1989, paint, wood, molded plastic and metal, James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal

Rebecca Schultzartist profile

A Perfunctory Affair: Negotiating the Meaning of "Process" in Sol LeWitt’s Work

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A Perfunctory Affair: Negotiating the Meaning of "Process" in Sol LeWitt's Work

by Bob Liles

On THE OPEnInG DAY OF Sol lEWITT: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, museum staff at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) wore shirts bearing the slogan “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” This sentence is taken from LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), where he describes the enterprise of conceptual art as follows:

“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the plan-ning and decisions are made before-hand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

While the 105 wall drawings on view at MASS MoCA have such a strong visual presence that they seem justified on their aesthetic value alone, the staff T-shirts worn on the day of their unveil-ing suggested there was something more at stake in these works. These drawings are not just drawings, the shirts proclaim; they are works of con-ceptual art. And one only needs to consider their installation process to see why.

Like most of LeWitt’s drawings, those on display at MASS MoCA were not installed by LeWitt himself (who passed away shortly before installation began) but by a team draftsmen working under his instructions. During the summer of 2008, I was part of this team, spending most of my time on the third floor of the exhibition space painting a few of LeWitt’s late-career acrylic wall draw-ings with other students, artists, and long-time members of LeWitt’s studio. The drawings that our team completed are not the actual works of art; most of the wall drawings in the exhibition, in fact, had been executed previously in other locations. The “actual” work of art — at least, for the purposes of museum collections — is not the exe-cuted wall drawing but a set of instruc-tions and a certificate of ownership. The instructions may be as simple as “vertical lines, not straight, not touch-ing, covering the wall evenly,” but in the end these words are where the work of art and its authorship resides. Around 2033, when the retrospective is scheduled to end, the wall drawings at MASS MoCA will likely be painted over; the wall drawings are intention-ally temporary. But this does not termi-nate the work of art: the concept still remains, attached to the instructions for execution that can be carried out by

a completely different set of hands at a completely different time.

In “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” LeWitt presents a dogma for concep-tual art and casts himself as a figure-head of the movement. In particular, it is in the labeling of process as “per-functory” that he sets up a hierarchy of abstract concept over material execu-tion, a hierarchy that has been familiar to the history of Western philosophy since Plato. However, it is faced with this labeling of process as “perfunc-tory” that I find myself in somewhat of an awkward position. While it is obvi-ous to approach LeWitt’s art from the angle of the concept, most of my expe-rience with LeWitt has been on what he has termed the “perfunctory” side of his work. And knowing how difficult the installation of LeWitt’s wall drawings can be, and considering how much time and energy our teams of drafts-men put into these wall drawings, how are we to understand the labeling of our work as “perfunctory”? Is the exe-cution process to be disregarded, or is there something to be gained from viewing LeWitt’s work from the angle of its execution?

A dismissive treatment of process is implicit in the comparisons critics and

curators have made in placing LeWitt’s work alongside the work of his contem-poraries. It is not difficult to find other artists who seem to have understood a process as something “perfunctory” to a concept, and three artists whose names have often shown up in reviews as comparative reference points for LeWitt are Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Carl Andres. Donald Judd, famous for minimalist sculptures that resist com-positional hierarchy, outsourced the elements for his compositions to small factories. Dan Flavin used commer-cially available fluorescent light tubes as the main elements of his sculptures, and Carl Andres similarly worked with mass-produced units such as bricks and blocks of wood. Comparisons between LeWitt and these three artists don’t just show up in reviews but make for logi-cal curatorial decisions: the works of these artists are exactly those along-side which LeWitt’s work is often dis-played, in permanent installations like those at Dia: Beacon and even in some of the earliest exhibitions of Minimalist art (though “Minimalist” was a title LeWitt strongly resisted), such as the landmark exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966.

For each of these artists, the execution of the work is somehow reduced or simplified in favor of the concept gov-erning the piece. The use of prefabri-cated units by Judd, Flavin, and Andres, in particular, makes the act of creation less an exercise in technical skill than an intellectual exercise in arrangement. Placing these artists and LeWitt side by side, then, suggests an understand-ing of the execution-concept relation-ship in which the concept governing the piece is distanced from the piece’s direct execution. This distancing can

occur through outsourcing, the use of pre-made elements of construction, or hiring a team of draftsmen to execute your work.

But it is troubling to see draftsmanship among this list of ways to set process at a distance from concept. In the work of Judd, Flavin, and Andres, the distance between process and concept can be interpreted as derisive against the

value of technical skill. However, Lewitt’s wall drawings do not fit this model of conceptual art. While they are not made by the artist’s hands, they are necessarily made by human hands. Even the most geometrically complex wall drawings are executed using nothing more technologically advanced than a straight-edge. Read-ing LeWitt’s work as analogous to that of Judd, Flavin, or Andres disregards the complexity and difficulty of the wall drawings’ manual installation process. Moreover, such a reading has little to say about the culture of education and nurturing that LeWitt’s studio embod-ies. Maybe a more informative com-

parison — one that the New York Times review of the MASS MoCA retrospec-tive makes very well — is not a comparison between LeWitt and his contemporaries but between LeWitt and Fra Angelico. The studio of Sol LeWitt is a sort of re-interpretation of the Renaissance workshop: a master conceives the work, which is executed by the many hands of a group of people working towards a governing concept.

Still, LeWitt is not at all ambiguous in his wording in “Paragraphs on Concep-tual Art.” no matter how much his installation process resembles Renais-sance workshop practices, he still terms the process perfunctory. But my experi-ence working on the installation of LeWitt’s wall drawings has led me to the conclusion that LeWitt is saying something much more interesting about process. As much as LeWitt is an artist of concepts, he has just as much to say about the act of human articulation — in particular, about how human articu-lation and concept are related.

An account of the relationship between human articulation and concept can be traced through any number of LeWitt’s wall drawings, but I’ll discuss those with which I’m most familiar: the brightly colored acrylic wall drawings of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. These particular drawings may seem like a strange place to evaluate human articulation in the work of Sol LeWitt. Some of LeWitt’s other drawings incor-porate the uniqueness of human ges-ture into their final design: one wall drawing, for example, invites a drafts-man to make an “irregular horizontal line” at the top of a wall that deter-mines the form of the final drawing.

The studio of Sol LeWitt is a sort of

re-interpretation of the Renaissance workshop: a master conceives the

work, which is executed by the many hands of a group of people working

towards a governing concept.


However, LeWitt’s later acrylic wall drawings seem to leave little room for human gesture. Instead, the instructions for many of these drawings consist of a predetermined geometric design with detailed size and color specifications. The draftsmen, then, are given the goal of replicating this figure with perfect accuracy in perfectly gesture-less planes of fully saturated color. Human articulation is to make itself as unnotice-able as possible.

This is not easy when you are working with nothing more technologically advanced than a straight-edge. Through-out the installation process, imperfec-tion comes at you from every side: walls are not perfectly flat and, you soon realize, straight-edges are not perfectly straight. The five lines that were supposed to intersect at a point did not do so. One batch of purple paint is not as purple as the previous batch of purple paint, and the wall is bubbling somehow and no one knows why. And when you’re working with several different people with several different tools, it’s impossible to isolate the source of these imperfections in any one place: it’s simply the fact that no strategy of human articulation can per-fectly realize the predetermined plan.

Especially by this point late in his career, LeWitt would have had avail-able to him the means to have his wall drawings produced mechanically and with much more precision than human hands were capable of. And if process is indeed a perfunctory thing, why not do so? LeWitt’s studio, however, was insistent on keeping with LeWitt’s origi-nal intentions, and in the MASS MoCA installations, nothing so advanced as a laser straight edge was allowed. By

requiring human, even if imperfect, execution, what could LeWitt have been trying to say about human articulation?

While LeWitt’s writings don’t have as much to say about human articulation as they do about concept, his wall drawings take a particular interest in exploring the relationship between human gesture and predetermined form. It is exactly the draftsman’s job

to negotiate this relationship, and for me, it was a job that made me re-evalu-ate how I understood gesture and form. Somewhere around the tenth coat of traffic-cone orange on Wall Drawing #1005, I began to realize something obvious: when you’re making art by hand, gesture is inevitable. And so maybe the most meaningful gestures can be seen not in art that takes on as its goal the appearance of gesturality (think of your favorite abstract expres-sionist), but in art that aims toward the opposite goal of the predetermined form. This is an idea that invites an analysis that can be carried out only if LeWitt’s art is viewed from the angle of

its execution — not from the angle of its concept.

My experience of the dynamic between gesture and form may seem incidental, but this dynamic can be seen through-out the history of LeWitt’s wall draw-ings. Some of the last drawings of LeWitt’s career — the “scribble draw-ings” of the early 2000s — bring exactly this issue to the forefront and make clear that LeWitt is very deliber-ate in how he sets human gesture against predetermined form. In these scribble drawings, a team of draftsmen scribbles in graphite with varying den-sity to create gradients of light and dark that, from a distance, resemble rounded metallic forms. Here, an undis-guised gesture itself, the scribble, becomes the basic material for creat-ing a predetermined form. The contrast here between, for example, LeWitt and Andres could not be clearer: while Andres uses commercially available products as the basic material for his forms, LeWitt uses the unique human mark. I am not trying to lay out a strict dichotomy between human and non-human art; commercial products too are ultimately human-created products. However, the commercially available products Andres uses are not so obvi-ously connected to the gestures of human hands; a viewer in front of one of Andres’ wooden block compositions would have a difficult time connecting the wooden blocks to human articula-tion. A viewer in front of LeWitt’s wall drawings, however, has a much easier time connecting the work of art in front of her with the hands that created it. The human hand is visible enough in LeWitt’s wall drawings that a viewer with no knowledge of the drawings’ installation process can begin to make

The five lines that were supposed to intersect at a point did not do so. One batch of purple

paint is not as purple as the previous batch of purple paint, and the wall is bubbling some-

how and no one knows why.

the connection between the wall draw-ings and their origins. And the curators of the LeWitt retrospective, by includ-ing extensive footage of the installation process throughout the exhibition, have made efforts to bring LeWitt’s installa-tion process closer to the viewer. In this retrospective, any viewer can easily arrive at these questions of human articulation.

It is not LeWitt’s written instructions that raise these questions about human articulation; they are raised by our closeness to the process of his wall drawing’s execution. And finding our-selves faced with such questions, it is clear now where LeWitt seems to differ from some other artists who treat pro-cess as “perfunctory.” Whereas many of LeWitt’s contemporaries seem to dis-tance process from concept by execut-ing their art in a way immune to the imperfections of human hands, the imperfect process of human creation is what LeWitt seems to be deliberately engaging in his wall drawings. And it is specifically by directing human articu-lation toward the concept that LeWitt manages to explore its workings and limitations. This is where LeWitt is saying something different than Judd, Flavin, or Andres; and it is this aspect of LeWitt’s work that his canonization among such a list of superficially simi-lar artists threatens to flatten.

The view that I’ve been developing here shouldn’t be seen as a challenge to the understanding of Sol LeWitt as a conceptual artist. But these two angles of viewing LeWitt — one as an artist concerned with the limits of human articulation and one as an artist of con-cepts — don’t seem to fit together well, especially when LeWitt is seen along-

side the artists whose work I’ve abused throughout this article. How can a work of art be “about” human creation and simultaneously distance itself from the process of its creation? One way to explain this is by saying that Sol LeWitt’s art simply does not best repre-sent the statements in his own writings, but such an explanation fails to actu-ally address everything that is at stake in LeWitt’s wall drawings. A much richer way of understanding of these works can be reached by trying to see that their humanity and conceptuality are not incompatible in the first place. While it is clear that the work of art is primarily a concept, it is also clear that for LeWitt, striving to materialize the conceptual is necessarily a human pro-cess, and moreover it is the collective experience of a group of people guided by a common goal.

This brings us back to the basis for the earlier comparison between LeWitt and Fra Angelico. While this compari-son may just seem like a convenient way to explain the structure of LeWitt’s studio in few words, it touches on the deeper issue of how the human and the conceptual figure into spiritual art. A full investigation of this issue is beyond the scope of this article, but if we just accept a rudimentary definition of spiri-tuality — something like “a communal connection to a larger reality” — describing LeWitt’s work as spiritual is only appropriate. Though such a defi-nition of spirituality is full of religious overtones that seem incongruous with the modern art studio, taken at face value these words describe exactly what happens in the studio of Sol LeWitt. And more importantly, this is an understanding of LeWitt’s wall drawings that manages to bring

together the seemingly disparate ideas of the human and the conceptual. In spiritual art, it is easy to see how pro-cess is a perfunctory thing: it is not so much the creation of the work that is of interest, but rather the higher concept toward which the work strives. But it is also important for this strive towards concept to be a process of human artic-ulation, and one that shows how the human and the abstract relate to one another. With this understanding in mind, I have no problem at all hearing that our team’s months of struggle were perfunctory.

Dimensions Art Journal - Winter 2010Catalog 17

DIMEnSIOnSCATALOG featuring a selection of Yale student artwork


Scott ShintonWhatcom County, WAFilm negative/ C-Print

Andrew nelsonFlatlandDigital Photograph


Sebastian ProkuskiSelf Portrait #4

70” x 46”Digital Photograph

Sebastian ProkuskiUntitled10” x 6”Digital Photograph


Anna MoserDouble Paraphrase: Stone and Snow

8.5” x 15” (x2)Latex house paint, spraypaint, casein paint,

pumice gel, molding paste, on broken wood panel

Anna MoserFour Degrees of Submersion30” x 42” (x4)Liquid acrylic and graphite on paper


Leeron Tur-kaspaUntitled

Mixed media

Leeron Tur-KaspaUntitledMarshmallows, wire


Soi ParkAnchorage, Alaska ( 2010 )

30” x 40”Film negative / Pigmented Inkjet Print

Soi ParkBethlehem, Pennsylvania (2010)40” x 50”Film negative/Pigmented Inkjet Print

Exit Through the Gift Shop: The Spectacle of the Artist

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ExIT THRoUGH THE GIFT SHoP IS A FILM by the infamous London street artist, Banksy, whose counterculture esca-pades have served to make him one of the few household names among street artists. His film takes as its subject the attempt of LA native Thierry Guetta to make a documentary of Banksy; but Banksy, by turning his own camera on Guetta, manages to document Guetta’s obsession with street art and the emer-gence of his own street artist identity, Mr. Brainwash. In his documentation of the emergence of Guetta’s new graffiti artist personality, Banksy touches on issues facing street art today, ranging from the popular perception of the artist to the place of street art in the art world. How this plays out is something I wish everyone had a chance to see by watching the film. Since the movie is difficult to find in theaters and will not be released on DVD in the US until December, I will be forced to spoil the surprise.

Banksy’s first presentation of Guetta is as an eccentric and exaggeratedly French man with a family of four who owns a vintage clothing store in LA. However, Guetta’s true passion is cap-turing the lives of those around him on his video camera. On a visit to his family in France, Guetta follows his

cousin, the street artist Space Invader, on his nighttime adventures tagging the streets of Paris. After this event, Guetta becomes obsessed with filming street artists in their act of creation. The film shows him as he follows icons of the graffiti world such as Shepard, Fairey, neckface, and Swoon just when street art is beginning to emerge as a recog-nized art form. He is able to film every major street artist who passes through LA, except for the great Banksy. Finally, through the contacts Guetta has col-lected during his travels, Banksy grants the new artist the honor of filming him as he creates his work, something that no one has ever been given the privi-lege of doing before.

Banksy, seeing the hours of tape lying around Guetta’s house, asks him to produce a documentary on the evolu-tion of street art. Guetta fails at his first attempt, which is a compilation of foot-age that resembles a series of horror movie trailers strung together. Banksy takes matters into his own hands and uses Guetta’s footage to create the first half of Exit Through the Gift Shop, which serves as a documentary on the growth of street art into a recognized and commercialized art form. This por-tion of the film raises an issue that faces street artists today: while street artists

like Banksy wanted to be acknowl-edged for their skill and artistry, it becomes increasingly clear throughout the documentary that they did not wish for street art to become commodified. Part of the essence of street art, of course, is its existence on the periphery of the mainstream. The second half of the film elaborates on this issue by doc-umenting the emergence of Mr. Brain-wash, Guetta’s street artist persona, whose highly commercialized practices raise this concern about the direction of graffiti art.

After the failure of Guetta’s movie, Banksy encourages him to create his own street art without realizing the extent of the former’s idolization of himself. Guetta appears to have the ambition to become a celebrity graffiti artist: he takes off tagging all over LA and referring to himself as “Mr. Brain-wash” in reference to his ability to “brainwash people’s minds” with his art. His works primarily consist of photos of pop icons like Albert Einstein and Michael Jackson, which he distorts in ways similar to Warhol’s style of using colored silk screen images. How-ever, he does not create any of his images or introduce new concepts, but merely seems to recycle the material of those who have been successful before

Exit Through the Gift Shop:The Spectacle of the Artist

by Maddie Haddon

him. Despite this, Mr. Brainwash’s first show in LA is a commercial success, owing primarily to the popularity of Banksy and street art as a new trend. His show displays colorful images of great figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although without the thought-provoking messages that Banksy and other street artists include in their work. Despite the fact that Mr. Brainwash’s works are in these ways superficial, he is still able to sell his pieces for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Mr. Brainwash’s overnight success has been very useful to Banksy, giving him a clear example of the over-commer-cialization of street art. This has in fact caused some people to ask the ques-tion: is Mr. Brainwash a real person? After seeing the film, some have specu-lated that he is really a ploy used by Bansky to provoke exactly these ques-tions about the direction of graffiti art, given its acceptance into the main-stream art world. Curious about this, I ventured down to Mr. Brainwash’s New York exhibition in the trendy Meatpack-ing District.

Paint-splattered images of Andy Warhol, Duchamp, and Daft Punk were col-laged on the walls. Some of his larger pieces, such as a life-sized Matchbox car in its box and a kangaroo made out of tires, were being sold for $300,000. This exhibit shows Mr. Brainwash capitalizing upon the spec-tacle of street art, but at the same time possibly creates a new form of art alto-gether. His creative process raises fur-ther issues: the film shows him making his art by directing a group of contrac-tors and freelance artists to photoshop and build his visions, bringing into

question the definition of the artist and his relationship to his work. Is it enough only to conceive the idea of a work of art? Or does it have to be the hands of the artist that form the piece? Many celebrated artists of the past, like Andy Warhol and Sol LeWitt, are recognized for separating their ideas from the physical execution of their work. But unlike these great artists, I wonder if Mr. Brainwash’s ideas are even worth being created into physical forms.

Another question that the movie pro-vokes is the importance of the popular perception of the artist. Throughout his career, Banksy has tried to destroy the myth of the artist and encourage the viewer to assess his work and its mes-sages for themselves, not through the lens of the social hype. The success of Mr. Brainwash, on the other hand, relies on his status as a celebrity artist who ironically was further popularized by the film. But, is it his fault that this myth of the artist is perpetuated? His popularity could not exist without the tens of thousands who celebrate and want to purchase his art. In a way, Mr. Brainwash is only guilty of putting his idea forth into the world. If audiences

want commercialized street art, then let them have it. If they want to codify the imagery of what is trendy art and bas-tardize the legacy of pop art left by Andy Warhol, who is to deny them this? On one hand, street art is an immediately public art form trying to gain legitimacy as art that exists out-side of the museum, gallery, or auction house. Yet in the example of Mr. Brain-wash, we see an incidence of street art becoming almost too public. His street art, rather than making the political statement of Banksy’s art, caters to public taste and resembles little more than what Clement Greenberg classi-cally termed “kitsch.”

Though I may have spoiled the sur-prises of Exit Through the Giftshop, viewing the film will still invoke many more permutations on the questions that I have already raised and cannot resolve. Despite the film’s focus on graffiti, the questions it raises can be applied to the entire discipline of art. “I used to encourage everyone that I knew to make art. I don’t really do that anymore,” Banksy says towards the end of the movie. In the context of the film, this comes off as a somewhat com-ical statement. But in fact, Banksy puts forth what can be read as the central issue of the film: is art really something that can be created by everyone?

His street art, rather than making the politi-cal statement of Banksy’s

art, caters to public taste and resembles little more than what Clem-ent Greenberg classically

termed “kitsch.”

Beyond the Old Master Workshop: Some Implications of Rembrandt's Studio Practice

33


Beyond the Old Master Workshop: Portraiture and the Implications of Rembrandt's Studio Practice

by Emma Sokoloff

Short Feature

REMBRANDT’S WoRkSHoP HAD A vERY distinctive culture, atypical of other sev-enteenth century masters. His drawing, Studio Scene, shows him intently study-ing and sketching a model, surrounded by a crowd of curious students. Educa-tion was an integral aspect of Rem-brandt’s workshop; his teaching methods, however, were unique to his own doctrine of art-making. Unlike other masters from the period, such as Rubens, Rembrandt instructed his stu-dents to make their own pieces in emu-lation of his style instead of having them collaborate with him on large works. While Rubens entrusted his pupils with the task of replacing his own hand in the final stages of his larger paintings, for example by filling in a landscape background, Rembrandt rarely worked with his students on the same canvas.1 Rather, he oversaw drawing exercises, erasing and subse-quently correcting his students’ sketches, and was equally as overbear-ing in his supervision of the production of finalized, marketable painting.2 For their works, Rembrandt’s students often chose subjects already painted by the master himself, or he assigned his pupils a specific theme to then interpret and explore.3 Rembrandt’s overarch-ing demand from his students when designing and executing their own pieces was to maintain devout loyalty to his own style.

In the early years of his workshop prac-tice (1630s-40s), Rembrandt’s instruc-tive ideology made it nearly impossible for the Dutch public, even esteemed patrons, to distinguish between the hand of Rembrandt, the master, and the hand of a follower, the student. By the 1650s, this differentiation began to fade entirely. Arnold Haubraken, a Dutch biographer and painter, reported that one of Rembrandt’s pupils, Gov-aert Flinck, “became accustomed to [Rembrandt’s] handling of paint and manner of painting, which… he learned to imitate to the extent that several of his works were seen and sold as works by Rembrandt [echte penceelweken van Rembrandt].”4 That Rembrandt taught his students how to exactly imi-tate his own manner of painting allowed him to present a massive body of work to the seventeenth century Dutch art market. In this sense, Rem-

brandt opened his studio as a fast and mass-producing outlet, as a highway of outgoing traffic. He “mechanized” his assistants, ensuring the proliferation and pervasiveness of his artwork, both geographically and temporally.

While Rembrandt’s workshop was open as an outlet, it was closed as an in-flowing channel, and was entirely isolated from the surrounding cultural world. Known for his reclusive tenden-cies, Rembrandt rarely emerged from his own studio. He lacked social grace when interacting with patrons, and never conversed with other masters (as was typical in Italian academies.)5

Unlike other prominent artists of the seventeenth century, he never left his native country to travel Europe and study the work of his predecessors. Rembrandt did not have his students imitate the old masters of the Italian Renaissance, and he only had them reproduce his own work or that of his contemporary followers. Rembrandt remained rooted in his workshop, removed from the bustling Dutch market of trade and banking.

Rembrandt, therefore, crafted a her-metic image of himself. However, this withdrawn quality is put into question by his Portrait of Jan Six (1654). Rem-brandt depicts his friend, a patron of the arts, as he puts on gloves and a cloak, preparing to venture out into the public world. Six is in a liminal state; he is on the threshold of re-entering his societal persona.6 Rembrandt exposes Six’s private side, which the magistrate normally suppressed underneath his composed and self-consciously pro-jected public image.

In this portrait, Six occupies an dark, ambiguous interior space. The back-ground’s shadowy quality rhymes with the intimate, mysterious privacy of Rem-brandt’s isolated workshop. Rembrandt does not embellish the scene with any theatrical stage props, but rather paints Six in his actual, present location: the studio. Six, therefore, is on the brink of an exit that Rembrandt himself could never execute. In other words, Six is about to cross through the barrier of Rembrandt’s workshop, which the artist himself never dared to break.Perhaps Rembrandt presented his Por-

trait of Jan Six to the art world in place of presenting himself. To put things more directly: this portrait not only por-trays Jan Six’s private persona, but unveils Rembrandt’s own psyche. Unable to exhibit his physical self to the outside world, Rembrandt offered his studio’s massive collection of con-temporary portraits as an embodiment of his own concepts and beliefs. It is as if by teaching his students how to emu-late his mark, Rembrandt simultane-ously taught them how to convey his own ideas. He employed an emulative method of teaching in order to maxi-mize the volume of this pictorial exposition.

Rembrandt’s paintings of public figures launch his artistic intellect from within the secluded workshop out to the Dutch public world. This mediation has per-sisted through time and can be seen in modern artists, like Andy Warhol, whose silkscreen technique allowed him to reproduce and iconify the faces of public figures of the 1960s. While Warhol presented these portraits in conjunction with his crafted public per-sona, Rembrandt offered his portraits as a substitute for his sequestered self.

1Hubert von Sonnenberg, Rembrandt / Not Rembrandt, (new York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 72; Josua Bruyn, Rembrandt: The Master & his Workshop, (new Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 83.2Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, (Chi-cago : University of Chicago Press, 1988), 71.3Sonnenberg, Rembrandt / Not Rembrandt 74, 19.4Benjamin Binstock, “Rembrandt’s Paint,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics (1999): 145.5Bruyn, Rembrandt: The Master & his Work-shop, 70.6Professor Chrisopher Wood made this obser-vation in his lecture class, Seventeenth Century Pictorial Worlds, on September 28th, 2010.


Caroline Chandlerartist profile

When Caroline Chandler (ART ’11) moved away from making video art several years ago, she turned to crocheting and painting as her central focus. The walls of her studio are now lined with home-made sweaters and satirical needlepoint images of the First Ladies. As a woman coming from a strong Southern heritage — with a mother who urged her in the video, The Message, to “represent Southern femininity, grace, and genuineness” — it is tempting to view Chandler’s art only as a statement on feminism and traditional women’s roles. However, to do this would be to over-look the meaning in her final products, whose starting points lie in the choice of material. For some of her most recent work, she begins by finding raw materials in craft store bargain bins — things such as cotton pom-poms, Christmas wreaths, and flashy stickers — and then arranges them in small holiday-themed vignettes on fabric-covered canvases. The small size lends them a “pathetic or humble quality,” in the words of the artist, but perhaps deceptively so. For despite being small, they carry an arresting sense of holiday warmth that is frozen and displaced. This displacement gives the viewer a chance to analyze coldly the elements that compose such an innocuous image and, perhaps, some of their attendant connotations. By reappro-priating the materials of our traditions, Chandler charges us with finding something new without “completely transforming” them.

In her upcoming work, she is interested in exploring the associations attached to cornucopias: abundance and excess, phallic and breast imagery. “I’m kind of a maximalist,” she admits, but it’s in the plenty that viewers can find something both assuring and threatening at the same time.

-Kelly Cannon

Dimensions Art JournalDimensions Art Journal

Editor-in-ChiefYing Sze Pek

Managing EditorNaina Saligram

Associate EditorsKelly CannonBob Liles

Web EditorIlana Harris-Babou

Art EditorSusanna Koetter

Graphic DesignerMaggie Tsang

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Dimensions Volume VI Number 2

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