Known for her uncanny ability to be concise and catty while still maintaining a level of depth (if not, at least, substantiated criticism), Art Fag City's Paddy Johnson has become an oft-looked to voice in the blogosphere, for news, gossip and criticism of contemporary art, digital and net.art, pop culture, and the general gallery scene in Chelsea, NY. If you don't know it or her, check out her blog and/or this great interview with her on artlist.biz.
As the resident blogger/arts critic at the upcoming iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, Paddy's been interviewing the six invited artists and posting on the iCommons site regularly. I thought it might be a good idea to reciprocate and see what she's thinking, simultaneously giving insight to Commoners as to why we thought she'd be the ideal candidate to invite along. -- nathaniel stern
NS: First off, I'd like to know more about the power you attribute to blogging and writing online; and I guess more importantly, can you contextualize that importance to the Commons?
PJ: Well certainly, blogging gives you an amount of visibility that I think is pretty important. But I would say that first and foremost, one of the reasons I blog is that I'm not necessarily that great on my feet [Nathaniel laughs]; so you know, one of the great things about blogging is that I've got, like, 5 hours where I can sit and think about a good one-liner [laughs].
NS: I'm so with you.
PJ: It's so much easier than getting on the phone with somebody and talking to them about your work... With blogging you can just create this distance, and give yourself enough time to formulate exactly... what I think and the way I want it to read.
NS: And yet it seems off the cuff.
PJ: Yeah, exactly. It's a particular skill, for sure and I'm lucky enough to have it... But one of the things I've been thinking a lot about recently in regards to the power that actively participating in a community gives you,comes from this lecture I went to, I guess about two weeks ago, at the Cue Foundation, a non profit arts organization for emerging artists in Chelsea. They hosted a Q&A with Monya Rowe and Michael Gillespie of Foxy Gallery on the topic of what you, as an artist, can do to get into a gallery...
NS: Is this the one where you caught the back of Ed Winkleman's head?
PJ: Uh, no. [Both laugh.] That was the Momenta Benefit at White Columns [Breaks up into both talking and laughing at each other.]
NS: Sorry - go on.
PJ: Um, so, anyway, when he was talking about what you would do, Michael Gillespie said, and I'm paraphrasing, "Anything you can do as an artist to empower yourself is what I'm in favor of." And I've always felt like blogging really does that because what you do as an artist to empower yourself is that you find people who are in the community, who are like-minded, and you hang around them. [NS: right.] Blogging, almost by its very nature, requires artists and writers to build and participate in these communities. You know, what we're looking at now is a much larger community than what we've seen in previous years; and those communities are really developing - I think artists are developing - a unique identity on the web.... We don't know what these things are gonna look like yet and we're still in the process of figuring out what all this means for us, but I think the development over the past year has been very significant.
And that's the thing that I think is really important about blogging: it gives you a voice, it gives you a community... And although blogging is changing, and there is a much greater distinction now between commercial and more amateur endeavors, it remains for artists a means to really figure out what your concerns are, what you want to be doing with your work, and has a built-in commenting system that has the potential to provide invaluable feedback to artists (though it frequently doesn't). And so, in that sense, I think that blogging is really empowering for artists.
NS: So if I may pick up on that a bit... You mention, both, giving voice to artists, and also the community and dialogue between blog sites: writing on a blog, you can help promote yourself and situate yourself. [PJ: yeh.] But, you've also said in the past that you don't conflate your role as an artist with your role as a writer - it's not about promoting yourself necessarily, or just giving voice to yourself. [PJ: right.] So what is it that you're putting up and out there... how are you situating yourself and what does that say?
PJ: I see AFC as an extension of what I do anyway. Right now my [own] web site is not active though...
NS: Yeh, I tried to find it.
PJ: I know; it's being revamped, particularly because all the best work - mostly audio and video - has to be prepared for the web. To be quite honest, my blogging practice is so consuming that I have only been able to make time in the summer to work on my own stuff.
NS: That's funny, I thought of you as a painter....
PJ: Well, I mean, that's my background. But I found that - for myself anyway - that I was far more interested in narrative than painting ever allowed me to do. To be honest, I've really only ever considered myself to be a B+ painter anyway, so like, that's not, [laughs]... necessarily where I wanna be. [NS: sure.] I want to be very happy with what I'm making and I just don't want to feel average. So, I'm really interested in developing narrative and developing writing and developing characters and so Art Fag City for me... that particular voice is one voice of many that I've developed.
NS: So, there's this character of Paddy Johnson, and then the parallel narrative of the art world and the gallery world [represented and written about on your blog]; is your artwork about that discourse as well?
PJ: Typically no, though I have done some largely unsuccessful experimentation in that direction. Mostly, I see Art Fag City as - you know, part of the larger 'Paddy Johnson' project.
NS: I can see that. I think certainly there's a discussion with the art world, but also - hearing you talk your relationship to words being detrimental in person, but so much better behind a computer... I'd love to see [hear, rather] some of this other / newer work. And maybe I can review it separately somewhere in the future.
OK, Easy Questions, you ready?
PJ: yeh.
NS: What's your favorite show you didn't see in the last year.
PJ: That I didn't see? Ooooh. Geez.
NS: This is lightning round - GO!
PJ: Well, I had this - a top ten list that included the answer to this question earlier this year...
NS: Of shows you didn't see? Oh geez. OK, just give me a link to it, and I'll call myself an idiot who didn't check your blog before formulating these questions.
PJ: [Laughs.] OK.
[Paddy's list of the best exhibitions of 06, with an apology of why she did not include 3 shows - the reason given that she had not seen them! These are the Goya's Last Works at the Frick, Amy Sillman at Sikemma Jenkins and Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran, Tourism and the American Landscape, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.]
NS: OK. If you could interview anyone, who would it be?
PJ: God, anybody? Jeff Koons comes to mind...
NS: That's cool, I can work with that; I'll get right on that.
PJ: I need to bother him about why he doesn't have a blog! [Both laugh.] And what's going on with his web site? Have you been to his site? [NS: No, I haven't.] All it is, is a splash page with Jeff Koons' name and, unless something different has happened to it, there's nothing else there. But of all the people who should have a giant web site, Jeff Koons is number one. He's a master of pop culture, self promotion, and the market - all the things the web is great for.
[Editor's Note: nothing else has happened - though I did get an error message, which seems to be new... ]
NS: OK, five words or less [make it two sentences or less] - it can be a list of names of artists, specific or non-specific, theoretical, whatever: curate a show for me. GO!
PJ: [Silence.] [Then,] Hmmm. [Then, more silence.] Let's see. I'd really like to curate a show pairing the reductive art practices of net artists with those of modern masters. The De Kooning eraser drawing that I cite as comparable to Jaka's work for example. Also modernist work like that of Sol LeWitt as compared to John F. Simon's Every Icon (first noted by Tom Moody in 8-bit).
NS: Very nice. I think besides that being a great concept that geeks like us would appreciate, it would also have the potential to invite newer audiences that are less comfortable with digital art into its space - like, from the access point of slightly more traditional work.
OK, What do you hope to - as a blogger or mediator or as an artist - what do you hope to bring to the iCommons table, besides just covering it? Because that's one of the reasons we invited you is that, you know, you're really smart and all, and have interesting opinions... So do you know what you want to bring to iCommons? Or are you kind of open right now? And want to see what happens?
PJ: Well, I'm definitely open. I don't know what to expect; I haven't been to Croatia before, I haven't been to the conference before; so I have a lot of questions about what it's going to be like. Primarily, my hope is that when I go there I don't turn into a giant tourism blogger and start talking about the sandwiches I've eaten [NS laughs and professes occasional guilt].
[Laughs.] So in a lot of ways... I'm worrying less about what I'm going to bring to the table and more about what I don't want to bring to the table...which apparently is my sandwich! [both laugh]...
NS: What are you working on right now?
PJ: Well... the big thing that's taking up a lot of my time right now is this YouTube competition that I'm curating with John Seroff at Joe's Pub. We're putting together a competition that is going to be hosted by Slovin and Allen - this comedy duo who have written for Saturday Night Live - and this guy Reggie Watts - who is this Hip Hop improvisational rapper, so he's gonna respond to all the videos that are being shown.
My job in all of this is basically to come up with people who I think will make good competitors. The objective that I have for this particular project is coming up with a mix of people, some of whom are more mainstream Internet celebrities but with a real eye for cultural ephemera, and those who actually make the stuff I think deserves larger attention, and some combination of the two. So, we have competitors like Marisa Olson, and John Michael Boling and Javier Morales; and we also have competitors like Peggy Wang - the editor of Buzzfeed - and blogger Jason Kottke. All of them are web, internet-surfing mavericks, each with a very unique styles. I actually think the competition is a really important cultural event... It's an interesting thing to think about web surfing and art making as a competitive sport, There is real value in the skill of "curating" the web so I think a competition which encourages professionals to cultivate that skill may actually, at this point, be needed. (I'm open to the idea that this may be over-estimating the value of surfing, but that's fine).
Also, raising the level of awareness of net.artists and what they do is really important to the field, and so I hope that this competition in part serves to do that.
NS: Your first point, I think is a really good one. I mean, certainly, it's one of those Catch-22s, where it's very easy for people to get online and make a voice for themselves, which is wonderful, but at the same time, because there is so much out there, it's nice to go with someone you trust to find interesting content, and who can mediate some of it for you. And on your second point, well, there are actually so few successful net.curation projects.
PJ: And I also think it's very important for artists to continue thinking about ways they can have work migrate on and off the web. Making the transition back and forth can be very difficult, but I think the more permeability there is between the web and stuff that happens in real time... the greater significance it'll play in our lives. Or at least in the development of web culture.
NS: Anything you want to say about the Commons or CC or just to tie the two in together here?
PJ: I guess I would just say that I think both Creative Commons and iCommons can play a really important role in the development of web culture: Creative Commons for its role in creating licenses that people can easily use and understand, and iCommons for bringing artists, scholars, and activists together to discuss securing the freedoms we want and need in order for that development to happen. Active users understand better than anyone else the creative vitality that comes out of mash ups, remix culture, and even straight-up appropriation, so it's up to us to make sure that as the web evolves we maintain our ability to define appropriate use of that material.
tags: new-york united states culture art interview artists-in-residence art-intercom summit07
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