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As relayed to me by a colleague, there was a guest essay in the Opinion section of the New York Times , March 8, 2023, by Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull. (As noted by the Times "Dr. Chomsky and Dr. Roberts are professors of linguistics. Dr. Watumull is a director of artificial intelligence at a science and technology company.") Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT (The link is to a "gift" copy of the article which should be accessible to those who do not subscribe to the NYT.) Many of its readers wrote back to the Times. I think I'll add to the general feedback that the title "False Promise" bordered on clickbait, given that AI builders generally do not promise what the irrationally exuberant populace can't seem to wait for. AI marketers do. The exuberance leads to hype-fueled disappointment, which leads to hostility towards AI. So, it's an ironic title, yes, but ironic because it is a lightweight but pervasive example of disinformation propagated by the media and ersatz intellectuals without AI being the culprit. I'm going to agree with some other observers, too, by saying that Chomsky's idea of the biggest concern is nowhere near the biggest concern. The biggest concern is that unscrupulous people with power and money will use AI to either indifferently or intentionally harm those who stand in their way, frequently by manipulating people who are not-so-intelligent. Other than that, it's weird that he spends so much time on such a good explanation of what learning machines are built to do, but leaves such a complete void of explanation of how the "human operating system" is built to do what he says it does. The effect is of making the claims of absolute difference between them a bit hollow. He doesn't establish that AI *can't* do what human intelligence can do, because he doesn't show us the mechanism behind the human intelligence. No apples to apples comparison is actually made. We expect more from Chomsky. Even so, my favorite line in his whole piece is this: "Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism." I love that. But then, he says humans are "limited IN THE KINDS OF explanations we can rationally conjecture". Superficially, if not obviously, that makes it unclear as to whether he is saying that creative conjecture IS or IS NOT limited by "reason". His end statement is really the reason for the piece: "we can only laugh or cry at the popularity of AI systems". In other words, the popularity is the thing that is actually pretty faulty. I think he should have written, then, about why people want AI to do what it isn't built to do and then get freaked when it doesn't do what they want. The point here is that ChatGPT does not promise false things. People try to make it do things it isn't built to do. My view is that I don't attribute any of the following to automation (a machine thought of as an actor): inspired, instinctive, imaginative. And I think most people believe that those three things are essential ingredients of what they would call "creative". AND that when they say "artificial" intelligence they believe that those three things are omitted, which is the same as saying that they don't think artificial intelligence is "creative" regardless of how "generative" it is. In my words, "the spontaneous adoption of an experience as being meaningful" is a pretty consistent way to start identifying both inspiration and instinct. Imagination, differently, is when we take a "WHAT if" and treat it "AS if" it was already real. Imaginary experiences can have the same impact as actual experiences, which means that they may provoke a spontaneous adoption of the experience as being meaningful. That adoption probably depends on what we want, what we fear, i.e., what we have feelings about. Machines don't have feelings, so this particular feedback loop -- of the imaginary inspiring instincts that fuel the further creation of the imaginary -- doesn't happen for machines. Chomsky claims that "explanation" is the true sign of human intelligence but I think he's wrong. Improvisation is the true sign of human intelligence.

Wired up with Diane Komater Feb-Mar 2023 By Malcolm Ryder Are we over-exposed? Not in the highly sex-positive Bay Area of California, where erotica is not even taboo anymore. But the notion of erotica can still have a special influence, either if it presumes to identify something even more exclusive than before, or because some audiences still haven’t really bought into x-rated material being “business as usual”. Either way, the more erotica that is easily available, the more variety it has, and the more likely that each person brings their own luggage to each encounter and unpacks it right on the spot. Erotica’s high availability is a certainty. The internet has completed what pulp fiction and cable TV did earlier to blow the covers off its market and suppliers. That seller's market includes lots of ways of legitimizing erotica's consumption, and in turn, that brings attention to whether producing it gets tailored specifically to the rationale permitting its use. Spiritual leaders, professors, and new age healers all supply. And of course let’s not forget Art. The dictionary definition of erotica invariably tells us to go find it in works of "literature or art"... Pre-Columbian craftsmen oblige, as does today’s Kara Walker. So if erotica isn’t really taboo anymore, being neither prohibited nor restricted, then where’s the excitement in it? And how does X-rated art generate excitement? Getting it to work The key, I think, is still in separation -- in whatever is done to create distance between the desiring (you) and the desired. In language, distance is the difference between what is said and what is referred to. The thing you read or hear – the utterance-- stands for something else – an idea -- and you think you know what that other thing is. In pictures, standing for something else is again the trick. The item in hand is an index (pointer), an icon (likeness), or a symbol (code) for the other thing. In visual art's form, that distance is going to be created through the difference that is evident between the fogging or sweating allure of immediately present “real” flesh -- and the artwork’s tangible material; visual appearance, or message. Oxford Art online describes Kara Walker's work in a way that addresses this distance: "“Walker initially seduces viewers with a polite, delicate, and feminine veneer; she compared the technique of silhouettes to the nature of stereotypes themselves, in which the complexities of an individual or situation are reduced and simplified into easily identifiable forms. As all figures are depicted in black or in shadows, racial identity can only be approximated by their profile or actions. As a result, viewers create their own narrative, thus implicating themselves in the creation and perpetuation of these stereotypes.” The Artnet article, Keith Haring’s Art Has a Secret Language, identifies the way he plays with likeness and code: "In Haring’s work, his fundamental message was one of devout humanism and love. Take his recurring embrace, which is often between two genderless and race-less figures, who are glowing as they hold each other." I compare Walker and Haring here to show that works by both are iconic, but are nonetheless interpreted as experiences beyond what they are similar to. Pursuing the viewer's interest, Walker's icons also give us indices, while Haring's icons also give us symbols. The abstraction that creates icons separates their appearance from their literal references but it still involves the viewer. Taboo for You? Iconography brings up the subject, but meaning relies on more. As eroticism, the work is going to have the intent to invoke desire. What seems unavoidable, with eroticism, is that as audiences we want desire and bring that with us to the works. When we arrive, the works remind us of that, but there is still separation, distancing. The erotic artist knows this, but the table stakes to play have been raised. In our now very leaky world of things slipping across the line of permitted or not permitted, maintaining the "naughty" requires more than a line; it requires a container. The container can be physical or psychological, and in fact a physical container can represent a psychological one. There is “space” within the container, and that space can of course be literal but is an analog of the room for imagination, aspiration, or other emotional uppers. And what goes in it? Explicit imagery, after all, is of course known for not leaving much to the imagination. But one of the juiciest ways to enjoy a taboo is to watch someone making the taboo thing. The making is itself seductive. Seduction still features heavily on the forbidden side of the line between tabooed and not tabooed. That leads us to an up-to-date formula – to recover taboo's thrill we need the seduction to be in a container. But what will the container be? A theater? A tableau? A sculpture? An outline? Space is the Place We're pretty familiar already with "containers" that enhance experience, even if the reason why that works has receded almost entirely into our subconscious. The influence of the container is so strong that even in commercial arenas we find that we're given the choice to have them or not. Whatever is in the container is interacting with it, and that interaction may or may not be wanted as part of our desired experience. The Saks 5th Avenue Ballerina is made more precious by the protection it has in the bell jar. The clustered figures of the Kama Sutra 10 DXF File sexual positions from CNC Industrial's Laser Cut Plasma let us decide, with framing, whether we appreciate the positions more as daring or as willing... One perspective that I have on the images made by Diane Komater is technical -- it involves the idea that a sculpture generates the sense of space around itself that is imaginatively activated, so its “container” is virtual, not necessarily seen. We think of it as a “sphere of influence” making us sensitive to how the work makes us feel about being in the space. But with her example below, outlined multiple forms are all about the space between them, and the intensity of that little space. Meanwhile, the outlining,– namely drawing – pulls us as viewers into following along the process of rendering the forms, just as we follow along a musical melody to get to a full grasp of its shape. We’re seduced; we experience the making of the thing that is taboo and yet within reach. Komater's handling of wire is her way of sculpting by drawing. In Komater's pieces, following her drawing already animates the sculptural form. But in some pieces, the container is drawn as well, as a stage, curtains fully open, the iconic gestures in the stage space exposed to us and animating it. We aren’t in it, except that even outside of it we share the space imaginatively, and we feel the process of creating it too. Her piece represents an event, and that representation has only one purpose, to have us at least imagine being part of what’s going on. So we get to say, with a lot of conviction, that the presentation is essentially "recreational" – but included in it as meaning is experiencing joy. It's an imaginary experience – the icons outlining forms of coupling, and those forms flashing what we dare to hope for. The Chapel of Love Komater's show, X-Rated, starts out with the advantage of being in UMA Gallery, a building whose biggest offering is a chapel. It advertises its offerings as “odd art in an old mortuary.” As the host for the work, UMA flaunts the unexpected; and adds important distancing to our encounter with the work. But UMA's calling card is its attitude – a grand sort of permissiveness, at least in the interest of just seeing what will happen. In a conversation I had with Komater, the thing that stood out most to me is the breadth of her view on how we relate to sexuality. Both her critique of that and her indulgence in it makes her work generous and multi-purpose – but like looking in mirrors, holding pictures of ourselves. She finds humor in our condition, but in being explicit keeps us from hiding, or hiding from, whatever is really in our minds. Comically, she also established that in some works of erotica, size does matter. As you can see in the above pictures with no measurements given, the scalability of her technique is very large. That makes her decisions about size – including smaller sizes – strategic, a strong determinant of whether we get the feeling of being "invited in" by the work. The best way to see if she is right is to go to UMA Gallery and get in front of the pieces yourself.

Because you’re reading this, I’m going to give myself the liberty of presuming that you have seen AND read the Forbes article, “AI-Created Images Aren’t Protected By Copyright Law According To U.S. Copyright Office” and perhaps noticed the following. “But the drawings, which were all created by Midjourney…” “the images in the Work […] are not the product of human authorship” “animals have taken photos…” “A person who provides text prompts to Midjourney does not ‘actually form’ the generated images […] The information in the prompt may ‘influence’ generated image, but prompt text does not dictate a specific result And in a much more extensive quote, which by the way appears in the copyrighted Forbes article verbatim, “there are going to be a lot of lawsuits in the coming months and years as creators figure out who owns the intellectual property created by a machine. As far as the U.S. Copyright Office is considered, no one does.” [Image generated by Malcolm Ryder with Dall-E] Let’s sprint through this quickly. I. A “machine”, being by definition non-human, might just as well be an “animal” despite any mechanism by which they can generate something. The trendy new label “Creators” always refers to people, not to non-human “generators” of anything. Ownership is not granted to non-humans. The #1 issue here is “ownership” NOT authorship. “Rights” in copyright are about ownership, not about copy. And ownership is a nonsense term without the concept of “Property”. So it is ultra-clear that copyright is about property rights. It isn’t about creation, nor even about originality. It is about the only force in the universe that cares about property: people. II. Now, regardless of legal ideas, I have written all of the above using things that were formed by someone else before me — alphabets, words, and grammar. I have used those things to compose “expressions that I did not borrow or copy from someone else. It is extremely possible, regardless of probability, that many of the composed expressions above could be generated by some other OPERATOR than myself. Grammar is the principle “programming” of the generator that I operate for expressing my compositions. The fact that I use programming to generate my expressions is irrelevant to the significance of them. And the possibility that my text has been renovated by a spell-checker or grammar-checker, or a human Editor, does not at all disqualify me as the originating producer and communicator. Meanwhile, if my expressions are understood, no one cares how I materially generated them. They instead might care about the ideas I had that directed my decisions. At this point, only by arguing against my assertion that I have composed something can you not agree with the following: Composition is the single most discriminating fact of the generative exercize, that separates the “original” expression from any re-iteration of it. Composition is, literally, structure. An unprecedented structure is an “original” structure. The designer of any unpredecented specific structure is the “author”. Design is a function and practice that, within its scope, generates structural definition both Prescriptively and Restrictively. By deciding what is to be included, excluded, associated, related, and HOW for all of that, design FORMS the generation regardless of the means that are utilized. To push this further, most movies today could not be copyrighted if the requirement was that every frame in the movie must be successfully copyrighted. An A.I. generated image in a film is there only because someone decided to make it (by either putting it there or leaving it there) a part of the design. If someone else then copies that image and uses it in a different design, the argument about who “owns” the image is absurd artistically, while it is not absurd in the context of asset management. III. So, let’s not be stupid about A.I. and copyright. Owners get rewarded by markets. Authors get rewarded by recognition. A.I. is NOT about “creativity”. And copyright is NOT about “authenticity”. If your goal is to directly reward authorship, that is NOT necessarily the same as rewarding ownership. And ownership does not necessarily coincide with authorship. Finally, it is necessary to avoid being delusional about how images have valuable meaning. Value is contextual. And meaning occurs across the entire spectrum of cognitive capability from the most elemental and literal to the most complex and abstract. Images do not have to cross some imaginary threshhold along that spectrum to suddenly qualify enough to be especially appreciated for authorship, nor for ownership. Humans are not the exclusive source of meaningful value in imaging. Context is by far the decisive factor. This doesn’t diminish the thrill of witnessing exceptional human capability. It simply acknowledges that there are many ways to attribute value to original expressions that are generated though images.

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it. -- Yogi Berra May 18 - Reading through today's news about the Supreme Court ruling on Andy Warhol v. Lynn Goldsmith is both dramatic (as in theatrically) and a big old dose of Wait... What? News readings will generally not suffice to explain what happened, because the accounts mostly mirror the confusion of the high court's effect. The effect: the Supreme Court may have made the right decision for the wrong reasons; but it may have not made the right decision, either. Truth & consequences To be more clear than what has been published so far, slow your role as a reader, and note this: the 7-2 vote in favor of Goldsmith's claim of copyright infringement reveals that Vanity Fair did not appropriately compensate Goldsmith for using Warhol's imagery based on Goldsmith's work, in a purpose apparently indistinguishable from what Goldsmith's own purpose would have been in using Goldsmith's imagery based on Goldsmith's work. Right away we have to ask, why didn't Vanity Fair compensate Goldsmith appropriately? The first of three "correct" answers is that the Warhol Foundation provided the Warhol work to Vanity Fair without a licensing agreement that would have included Goldsmith as a beneficiary. On the surface, this might seem like either an oversight or a theft, but both of those ideas miss the real point. The real point is that if the work provided by the Warhol Foundation did not get used by the recipient (Vanity Fair) to make money, then the copyright infringement case likely would never have occurred. It's important to say this out loud, because it is the closest thing to a rational underpinning of the Court's decision to take its majority stand based on "purpose". The purpose in question was to make money commercially. And while that particular purpose was not disputing that the Warhol work was objectively derivative of Goldsmith's, it stood on pretty firm ground that there was a commercial right abused. The right was to have the first chance to offer a solicited property for gain. In the case at hand, the presumption of this right is unambiguously granted to Goldsmith unless there are criteria that qualified the property in demand as not being Goldsmith's. The Warhol Foundation "copied" (mimicked) Goldsmith's right to make the first offer. The second correct answer, then, is that Vanity Fair was not legally compelled to compensate Goldsmith. This is because Goldsmith was not the provider, and because Vanity Fair's qualifications for its own purpose were not met by Goldsmith's product. Vanity Fair specifically wanted a product that had the "character" found in the Warhol work -- elements that artistically commented through a "flat, impersonal, disembodied, mask-like" portrayal of the subject, on iconic mythology, and on the culture's appetite for it. And the third correct answer is that at the very least, any party using Warhol's work commercially has always known that it is a calculated legal risk. Both the Warhol Foundation and Vanity Fair knew it and had already factored that into their respective business models. So, whether right or wrong, that is in fact why they didn't compensate Goldsmith in the transaction: they didn't need to, even if they should have. They decided to take the risk. Understanding the above means that we can focus on the events more clearly. The Supreme Court ruled on the basis of business ethics, not on the basis of artistic authorship. It did not need to base its decision on whether the Warhol work was sufficiently transformative of the Goldsmith work to qualify as having "a new meaning". Meaning what? The test here -- the Supreme Court's own test -- says that to be transformative the work must "add something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning or message.” Yet at the very same time, Justice Sotomayor exclaimed that "such perceptions are inherently subjective". Let's take a beat here to realize that if this is the case, it does not mean that party X's subjectivity overrules party Y's subjectivity. That is, the Court itself (party X) was not in a position to decide whether the Warhol work was transformative any moreso than was the "client" of the transaction, Vanity Fair. That spectacular self-contradiction is our cue that the 7-2 decision is probably not a landmark decision nor one that is a tectonic shift. The Court did not rule on whether Warhol's work was "transformative". It actually ruled only on the business ethics of a given circumstance, and on the implications of allowing that to be a tolerated precedent in the market. It only thought that it based its ruling on transformation criteria. Well, what do they call these high court rulings? Opinions. Appearance versus Reality But is Warhol's work transformative or not? Subjectivity notwithstanding, we might argue that there are certainly large populations that are insensitive, and therefore indifferent, to the alterations that Warhol performed on the Goldsmith-created image. As a philosophical reflection, we won't get confused by saying that if a measurable difference of characteristics has no impact of significance experiencing the one work versus the other, then who cares? Transformed is not an applicable term for something that has no effective difference from its predecessor. But yes, we still want to understand when it does apply, and there are only two ways to get there. One is by market research. The other is to switch to the producer side of the matter and compare the intention of the makers when it comes to meanings. It is pretty safe to say, in pseudo-legalese, that Lynn Goldsmith's intention that formed the Goldsmith photograph used by Warhol was not the intention Warhol had that formed the artwork made by Warhol using Goldsmith's photograph. In a hypothetical examination looking to verify that, we would naturally separate the protagonists from each other, take direct independent statements from each of them, and compare the statements. This is a completely different perspective than one that is primarily concerned with what the market may or may not decide to use. The market does not define the product; the market defines acceptance. If the key issue is whether the product is a "copy" or not, the test is for a validated difference in meaning that is explicitly attributable to the intentional influence on form exerted by the maker. Normally, this is just the sort of thing that we expect art critics to do for us, whether the artist is agreeable to it or not. But as Adam Liptak reported in the New York Times (May 18, 2023): "The majority does not see it,' Justice Kagan wrote. 'And I mean that literally. There is precious little evidence in today’s opinion that the majority has actually looked at these images, much less that it has engaged with expert views of their aesthetics and meaning.' " The Supreme Court usually has the option to refuse to take a case. In this round, it refused to actually debate the issue of whether Warhol's work was transformative. Had it really debated, there would be evidence in the opinions. What we saw, instead, is that the Court, knowing it did not need to actually settle the transformation issue, let non-critical observers think that it did (one prong of the fork) while actually ruling on the commercial issue (the other prong) as if the transformation issue was not contested. It took the calculated risk and did what it wanted to do.

Composing spans all media and genres in which a whole is built by arranging selected parts. So, naturally, it can produce things from great simplicity to great complexity. In all cases, the goal is for the arrangement to generate what makes the whole significant; and changing the arrangement means that the meaning of the whole might change too. If we decompose a composition, navigating through what looks like the elements, the choices, and the logic of combining things, one possible discovery is of alternatives that we can imagine, which brings the combinatory decisions into higher relief as purposeful choices. Another discovery might be the similarity of purposes in composing, across different mediums such as writing and photography. The two documents below analytically explore composition and decomposition, one with an emphasis on pointing out various options typical of composing a photograph, and the other how they relate to literary composition. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X9t0lrCiDNvEeJQzItdXVlqQ0djIo77V/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fqh5R_xJofDEVVL-KO-RtpLnbry_r-ZF/view?usp=sharing

Oakland, CA April 1 through May 6, 2023 The word “portrait” can apply to many different things, such as a place, a time, a culture, or a person; the current show at Gray Loft Gallery is dedicated to people. Portraits always seem like declarative statements. But the portrait always stages a dialogue, featuring the question “What am I like, and what is like me?” Portraiture insists that the viewer considers how he, she, or they compare to the subject. As direct exploration of a “Self”, a portrait distills an identity and projects it into the mind of the viewer or reader. The recipient then experiences an awareness of the self in relation to that self in the image. The image may provoke recognition, aspiration, validation, insult, deference, or otherness... Whether by surprise or as increased certainty, the viewer may know something after the encounter that answers the portrait’s question. For most of us, the natural starting point in viewing a portrait is to seek recognition; the picture is a window on ourselves, and on humanity. At times the offered image appears to intentionally make this challenging, but always with the presumption that there is a worthy payoff. A portrait can have the attitude of re-presenting or of reflecting, and one of the key differences between one viewer’s response and another will be which of those two attitudes is felt as the portrait’s side of the dialogue. At the Gray Loft show, this duality is just one of many that fuels the exploration curator Jan Watten engages in with her selection of artists. What follows are four observations about that, with some images from the show interspersed. [NOTE: The images are not positioned here to be demonstrating their nearest particular adjacent observation; I have sprinkled them throughout, simply to mimic having made my own comparisons as a viewer seeing the show. Browse any picture below at any point along your way; indulge their suggestiveness.] 1. Among the works making up the show, some pictures have the kind of literal visual precision that implies the subject is an actual person highly familiar to the artist. In other cases, the pictures are more abstract, yet strongly gestural, in bringing feelings to the viewer. These are not mutually exclusive appearances, but we see it in the organization of the works on the walls. There is also a mix of another kind among the images. Sometimes the feeling in the picture has been created mainly by the artist’s way of rendering the subject; the portrait itself might be considered an invention of the subject’s apparent identity. Elsewhere an artist has “found” in the subject a feeling that is painstakingly distilled and transmitted from the subject through the artist; something we can consider to be an interpretation expressing a character. Again, there is not a strict separation of the two, rather an evident difference that also allows blends. But either one can be the route to the way we see others or the way we see ourselves. If we “see ourselves in” the subject, that quickly leads to asking what the portrait appears to be saying about us. Is it creating a particular version of us? Is it critiquing us, or at least who we think we are? What do we see in that mirror? But if we see someone else in the picture, what is the message? Is the subject a version of someone who we could be, or shouldn’t be? Or is it the picture’s intent to amplify a characteristic that heightens our awareness of what people, humans, can be like or can feel? 2. In general, the artists use the subject displayed in the picture as a way of conveying a message above or beyond the ordinary reality of the subject’s presence. They achieve this in more than one mode. At Gray Loft, several established conventions of portraiture run strongly through the show’s variety of pictorial styles. Said differently, viewers are invited to dwell on the relationship between a style and the purpose given it by the artist. Interesting tensions can arise from why we ourselves think some combination was used versus why the artist decided to use it, but that’s what makes us look at the works several times instead of making just one pass through them While we readily observe that the range of work spans from the realistic to the abstract, the more important distinction turns out to be between the virtual and the actual – the representation of what appears to be imagined persons or real ones. Among the eleven artists in the show, some use more abstraction in representing either the virtual or actual, while others use more realism. Among those “realists”: we can easily consider that the subject agreed to “sit for” the picture as a willing accomplice. Here the strain of visual “realism” is in the service of transmitting ideas, not just presenting facts “drawn from life”. Sometimes, there is the notion that the subject is a “muse”. But with others, perhaps being mainly a “life model” was the job. In these modes, the subject projects all the details needed by the artist, who captures them for composing the display. A few works offer the more abstract “icon”, having an intentional reference beyond detailed fidelity to any actual person observed, but now moving the notion of an actual person much more towards a symbolic one. The examples here include ones that seem to critique our appetite for celebrities, or even just for what celebrities look like. And, finally, there is the invented character. The invention of characters is clearly significant as a way to answer portraiture’s key questions in the viewer’s mind. A strong characterization is not fundamentally different from fantasizing. And not at all unusual, being the stock in trade of illustrators. 3. Across the spectrum of styles and intents, we as viewers may not actually be certain when the subject was an actual or virtual person. It can make a difference of course, because we think about the artist largely in terms of how the artist treats people, and that forms a key element of what relationship we think we may have with the artist. Are we alike, different, or undecided? And do we care about it? If yes, why? This is exactly what “appreciation” is, and Watten’s attention to mixing things up makes appreciation a stronger takeaway from the show while not diminishing our usual pleasure of finding a few favorites among the works. 4. A final duality on offer comes from a sense of how these visual artists share ways of influencing us that are in common with other kinds of artists. As viewers, we also bring our thoughts and feelings from our broader experience of artwork to our encounter with these pictures. In the case of portraiture, we have a persistent requirement for veracity. But that expectation can offer two paths to satisfaction. One is truthfulness to the identity of the subject. The other is truthfulness to the experience that the subject represents. We could argue that this distinction takes us close to that between non-fiction and fiction. It’s an atypical way of categorizing portraiture, but having said it, I find that the fit is comfortable. Either way, we expect that a portraitist has a deep familiarity with the experiences of being human – of how people appear to us, and when, and why. Exposing the mental image of that psychology through the features of the artwork is the artist’s challenge. Featured Artists in DEPICTIONS: Jayne Biehn, Gene Dominique, Christine Ferrouge, Lin Fischer, Drew Klausner, Sue Matthews, Lynn McGeever, Glenna Mills, Jude Pittman, Bill Prochnow, Ron Moultrie Saunders. - Malcolm Ryder, with Constance Hale April 17, 2023

Project overview Critiquing a specific legacy archetype of maleness, the Not Male Show extends beyond feminism to a more inclusive representation of self-determining identities that are alternative to that archetype. It will simultaneously exhibit an overall group contrast to that legacy and argue against the ambiguous generalization of catch-all categorizations (such as "LGBTQ"), through art works concretely expressing interpretations and experiences that distinguish these respective newer cultural identities. Why this show? The increasing emergence and acceptance of self-identities beyond the POV of maleness is an evolutionary tipping point for future society – a change in the psycho-social climate we call culture. Based on works by Princeton alumni artists, the show will investigate how the realities of this accelerating change are experienced and expressed. What the show is about: With emerging social self-identifications, people often attempt to disassociate themselves from what is viewed as “male cultural identity”. This features increasingly specific alternative identities. Ironically, dominant male culture continues, through the POV of its language, to generically bundle and confuse these identities as “not male,” blurring the distinctions which they count on having recognized for gaining their respective social progress. Society’s broad acceptance of that language use has inhibited the reshaping of dominant cultural norms by individual new identities. The visual arts, in comparison, are uniquely able to expressively embody the distinguishing realities of having “Identified As”— offering an audience direct experiences beyond naming and explanations. For example, over the past fifty years women artists, in an early self-identifying declaration of "not male", have provided a pictorial vocabulary, methods and tools that define “womanhood”. See the research "male" stereotype versus which works in this show are presenting our emerged cultural diversity, here. This exhibition will showcase art works about a very wide range of such contrasting alternative identities. By gathering the works together, it will sharpen the distinction of their respective realities. Development process: The Not Male show is an experimental and collective effort, produced by the 185v76 artists collaborative. During January through April, it will set out with a provisional working definition of “Male”, and acknowledge a current panorama of autonomous “not male” self-identities. The project then will seek, include, and exhibit works submitted by artists representing their respective interpretations and experiences of “Not Male.” The project will build a curatorial team, an editorial team, and two exhibition rosters: Princeton alumni artists, and community artists selected by those alumni artists. The exhibition will be both online and offline and will evolve over time. To participate in this project, as a curator, exhibitor, writer, or media coordinator, please fill out the contact form here.

February 2023, Oakland Curator: Jan Watten Diaspora is a vivid word. We sense it in two ways. Saying it feels like saying “disperse.” At the same time, our ordinary response to hearing it is in the mind’s eye; we see it – the scattering of one thing into many. Then, there’s the matter of where things scattered to, and what we see when we find them. We’ll find meanings in that, but we also imaginatively make meaning of it. It’s like looking at constellations, taking a snapshot of the diaspora of stars, stars that like all stars presumably came from the same place, but not at the same time. We see them together in the same single moment and try to connect the dots. America’s Black History Month itself creates a constellation of the African Diaspora, but to put it that way queries mostly the “American” part. While many different places subjected people of African descent to the same kinds of degradation, the descendants nonetheless crafted lives in their journeys apart that were as diverse, as different from each other, as the many different places that they reached – here being among those places. In Oakland’s award-winning Gray Loft Gallery, we get a view of that difference through one of several “satellite” exhibits of works in the Richmond Art Center’s annual Art of the African Diaspora event, which opened February 11th for a month long run showcasing eight Bay Area resident artists of African descent. Given the diaspora theme, we go to the show expecting it to connect the dots, the works, with some view-in-common of the diaspora itself. But also, we might arrive with a range of questions about how it will do that. Will that theme explicitly feature in most works as subject matter? Or does this collection of art by African Americans have a special sensibility, traceable to the experience of a shared ancestral homeland? Or instead, will the works mostly express something about African American artists in their home today, the Bay Area? --0-- The show at the gallery starts before you even get in the door. A work* by Raymond Haywood stops me in the hallway, almost arrogantly unrestrained in how it transforms a canvas into visual space that triggers an imagined environment. All of the painting’s color has a physicality revealed as if by abrasions or splatters. The shapes of the colors are captive to the energy that marked the canvas. It makes me hyperaware that the image and its illusory effect was hand-built from material, not illustrated. [* excerpt of a Haywood piece ] That work signals to me what I should most intently focus on across the show’s works: personalized technique. And, hearing several artists talk at the opening, I realize further that for them technique in these works is not just a fait accompli on display but a running current, with each artist still finding out and sharing where it can go, what works, and why. The group of works shows us that ongoing activity in three ways. In some of the works, moving from one piece to another by the same artist, I feel the pieces commenting on each other as if they are in the process of deciding what to agree on. In doing that, a group of works is in effect more forceful than its individual pieces. Some of the artists, seeking very different imaging, have recently taken on some technique new to them, amounting to a big change of style from earlier accomplished work. With these works, while a single piece is already a “finished” work, it feels like it is previewing possibilities, other future work, as much as it commands attention to itself now. And in some cases, various types of imaging– drawing, colors, lettering, cutouts, more – are mixed together in an individual work; the work’s visual composition is the container for a complex narrative, blending a set of multiple experiences but in a non-linear way.* Those three differing aspects are not mutually exclusive. And whether separately or together, they originate much of the variety experienced in the show. [* excerpt of a Tomye: Living Artist piece ] Also in that variety: autobiography, explorations of identity, and personal experiences are found in many of the works whether conveyed in abstraction, figuration, or collage. Meanwhile, in other works, despite dissimilarity to each other on the surface, there is commonality in a kind of expressionism that seems to combine memory with an offer of more philosophical idealism. The work does not merely intend to show us these things but to engage us. In that engagement, we bring our own sensibilities – our feelings and ideas – to the encounter with each piece. So, the influence runs both ways. It’s a dialogue. Sometimes, a given work’s way of handling ideas, feelings, or memories gets us to look, in its way, at what we had brought in our own minds to that artwork. In fact, several times I overheard one artist talking to another about how the other’s quite different work was making the first artist think about “trying out what you did.” But as viewers we also affect what a given work might appear to do. Here I’m thinking about my response to Jimi Evins, whose work at Gray Loft exudes what I keep thinking of as a “profound faith in paint”. His work relative to the other artists’ is immediately bolder graphically while also moodier, and the paint is aggressively gestural. It takes up the space of the canvas in a way that is architectural but also seems done fast, mainly because much gets done economically without a lot of things being manipulated. [Excerpt of an Evins piece at left.] In one Evins piece, the technique resonated with the musician in me – my memory, as a band member, of a certain big horn player’s confidence improvising in solo while knowing in advance there was limited room in which to work. Evins’s abstract graphical treatment here pushes paint into the space of the canvas like big sounds pushed into the building of a solo in real-time. Other viewers may not experience the work that way, but as we say, to each his own. Evins, by the way, has plenty of dramatically different and detail-laden figurative work, in a series called “The Village” on display elsewhere within the group of satellite galleries under the Richmond project. The display of his abstractions at Gray Loft is testimony to more than “versatility”; rather, it is to artistic diversity. --0-- So here’s a good point at which to make this observation: the artistic diversity of the show reflects a truly important political dimension of the diaspora: freedom, found and demonstrated by African descendants’ individual discoveries, expressions, and achievements; and certainly there is an argument that an “American” ideal aspires to manifest in that way. In a more conceptual vein, I’ll also bring up my well-used idea that most art is celebratory, analytical, or philosophical but can certainly blend those aspects in differing proportions. That is, we can see celebratory art amplifying, even advocating, certain cherished values or preferred qualities; see analytic art questioning the origins of given beliefs, or their validity; and see philosophical artwork proposing a worldview, whether imaginary or real, colloquial or lofty. None of these aspects are denied to the African-descendant artist of the diaspora. Nonetheless, in their respective individual freedom of expression, the eight artists address subject matter that to this viewer does appear as shared territories. For example: emotional landscaping by Raymond Haywood, Stephen Bruce, and Jimi Evins, featuring intensive use of color iconographic portraitures and identities presented by Yolanda Holley, Cynthia Brannvall and Tomye: Living Artist, combining multiple perspectives into wholes greater than the sum of their parts retro abstract modernism by Kelvin Curry and Arthur Norcome, highlighting how design aesthetics can influence feelings, and possibly renovate nostalgic art icons into contemporary expressive language. Seeing similarity helps to push us back to this review’s opening question. In a show focusing on the diaspora as the common reference, is the mission of the artwork to put some singular common legacy or consequence in high relief? Across the eight respective artists at Gray Loft, no two sets of works look alike. As travelers in time’s cultural and personal histories, the artists have individually decided what to make of the places they have adopted, as of now. In general, this show openly invites us to dwell on why they decided to show what they care about, the way that they show it. The viewer senses that invitation as the artists’ intent. The work that seems most explicitly concerned with that is Cynthia Brannvall’s dialectics of multiculturalism. It features her compositional use of contrasting materials, of “material as (information-carrying) media”. Here, some of it invokes meanings as do souvenirs, evidence, talismans, and similar signifiers of history living in the present, juxtaposed with other factually objective elements. With that, her pictorial composition first attracts us and then results in our real engagement. The work argues that one’s journey from geographic origin to now is about a difficult and uncertain opportunity for self-recognition, and Brannvall wants us to join in the challenge. Each artist, in a distinct way, invites us to join in. My take: little more than that is required of the show’s reach into the diaspora. It results in great richness, not just variety, in the work by the artists. Metaphorically at least, any ground that is shared among all of these artists is one that “let a hundred flowers bloom”. But literally, in this show, curator Jan Watten’s emphasis on the community’s powerful creative diversity is the most obvious shared ground.

Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., rages on in the world of visual art, it’s current ability to automatically compose being the new apex of its functionality. While A.I. continues to make progress at cognition, its most exciting influence on image making has now moved to showing what it “knows” about methods used to combine parts into arrangements that make a whole, that is, composition. It presents a challenge to human image-makers who have placed high value on their own use of methods because of either the difficulty of mastering them or the uniqueness of applying them. Getting past that challenge is comparable to the permanent effect of industrialization in creating the default expectations of a modern life. A.I. makes both difficulty and uniqueness nothing more than legacy conditions that henceforth will be merely choices. Meanwhile, mastery of a method has always required two things: understanding why to do something a certain way and rehearsing the action to refine its consistency on demand. Because A.I. is a function of computers, it makes the rehearsal part trivial – the computer can practice the same thing millions of times a minute, record its own variances, systematically avoid the variances, and reach virtually perfect consistency in exactly the same way that factory automation became viable and obsoleted the need to build cars by hand. Computing is constrained only by the scope and volume of tasks that is demanded of it. And against challenging workloads, the computing answer can usually be simply to increase its brute force. But methodology, too, can account for higher or lower labor efficiency in working on progress. As part of computing, programming is mainly about defining the way to achieve acceptable efficiency levels against any inclusions of useful variances and/or inconvenient exceptions. Programming supports methods. Function The mystery of an artist’s method has always been attractive based on the appreciation of it being exceptional both as labor and as strategy – as action and as idea. The combination is what underpins our sense of it being important, in effect, of being valuable. But for conventional image-makers in the “fine” (non-utilitarian) arts, one of the most challenging things about A.I. is that A.I. as a production tool does not inherently care why a method is meaningful. A.I. only cares about whether a stated goal correlates well with the choice of method. If that goal is not given to the A.I. factory, A.I. doesn’t even decide what goal to pursue. This can result in dazzling A.I.-generated outputs that are still felt to have very little meaning – like an invention that no one knows how to use. Artists, however, may frequently go into process, without having made a decision beforehand about their goal. Instead, through experimentation, they discover that a technique allows something identifiable when the technique is incorporated into a method. Whatever amount of time and labor is spent doing this is something presumed to be an inalienable right of being an artist. But for A.I., this level of effort (experimentation) is just an action that it executes and can keep track of, “mindlessly” and easily. As it also excavates repeatable patterns from its repeated execution, A.I. builds a collection of known actions that produce known effects – effects which can be intentionally combined and arranged. In short, A.I. can readily generate designs but it doesn’t inherently care what they mean. Meanwhile, the main difference between what an artist considers to be a design and a “composition” is not found in the artifact showing the design. The difference constituting “composition” is found in the artist’s intention to have the arrangement psychologically affect a user (listener, viewer, whatever) to invoke a “meaning”. Similarly, A.I. itself is programming that also pursues a goal; but the difference between “artificial” intelligence and an artist’s “natural” intelligence is found not in the output of A.I. being successful. Instead it is in the artist’s knowledge of how outcome derives from using the A.I. output. The user – an artist – makes a decision about what outcome is a goal. A.I. simply performs some or all of a method to realize that artistic decision. Clearly more than just by analogy, A.I. is an “instrument”. Operating A.I. can generate effects that are already compelling in some ways, but those effects are literally instrumental and contribute to a further intent—the performance (execution) of composing. Form With that understanding, we can place A.I. in proper context going forward; just as composing may be predisposed by using certain instruments, composing can be done specifically for certain instruments. Instruments affect the decisions made in composing through a process called orchestration. A given version of a composition may get modified into another version if the composer decides to render it with instruments different than those previously used. For example, the “same song” can be performed using a piano or a guitar or a clarinet or a voice, and if the instrument is specified beforehand, the arrangement of the composition that is accepted can be clearly different from what would be designed for a different instrument. Orchestration marries the instruments and the desired effects, for the arrangement (design) of the composition. Showing this in practice, visual artists are increasingly using A.I. as their technical tool to find and apply methods to use as their instruments for something further – composition. Value But because of that, there is a popular (casual) perception that A.I. imitates artists. While the recognition of A.I. as an instrument is nearly intuitive for an artist, the inclusion of A.I. in the production of the artwork is still causing confusion among art users (audiences) about why the work produced with A.I. has value. As already mentioned, value is customarily attributed to artwork because of an appreciation of the distinction of how it causes a meaningful experience. If A.I. is perceived to eliminate the distinctiveness – by sheer automated repetition destroying uniqueness, or by production efficiency minimizing the labor – then it faces pressure to generate something else compelling on its own. So far, most of that A.I.-based value is in the drama of surprise – namely, A.I.’s producing the unexpected, or doing it unexpectedly. A.I. can “create” renderings of imaginary states such as bringing a deceased person back as an apparently lively actor in a “real” event. The enormously high degree of detail used to create the illusion– aka the depth of specificity employed – “fakes” the overall appearance of reality, imitating an “actual” condition. The “intelligence” of artificially creating a fake instance of an actual condition is far from being unfamiliar to artists. Counterfeiting is a longstanding reality in the artworld, and the “intelligence” to do it is itself an appreciated achievement and characteristic of the counterfeiter. But A.I. is able to counterfeit – and imitate -- more and more actual conditions that can be imagined beforehand – a so-called virtual reality. And as A.I. production of items becomes increasingly familiar, devaluing the product on the basis of its A.I.-based methodology will be increasingly rare, while humans’ decisions about what to do with it will naturally become the basis of attributing more value to it. We get to raise the question: would A.I., without human involvement, ever reach a point where it generated a new defined form to a degree the equivalent of the invention of cubism, or of jazz, given what it had already worked on? A.I. in art will, in other words, be subjected primarily to the same question that all art faces regarding its production and provision: Why make this thing this way? And the answer will be: the artwork’s target experience ... relies on the characteristics of ... effects that ... were made available ... in a way distinctive to ... what instruments are used ... in the method of composing it.

Results, Automagically We can be surprised only so much to find out that encyclopedias of everything seem now to be available. Our common experience of using web search engines easily lands us on subjects and facts that we neither already knew about ourselves nor were going to create. Even further, discovering the extent of information already developed about some new-to-us topic is usually somewhere between humbling and intimidating. We may not know any of the people involved but we compare ourselves to them as if we could be one of them and then intuitively sense how much work has already gone into making the topic, plus the fact that we either wouldn’t or couldn’t do it. But the same awe comes with simply observing any creative person who has mastered some technique in an activity we don’t know how to do ourselves. We’re caught watching the magician do their trick without even using the misdirection usually needed to leave us marveling at the impossibility. When computers do the searching or execute techniques, we of course aren't shocked that they can do it. We’ve already seen them doing it for decades, and the main difference that we notice now is how much faster they can get through so much more of it. What really matters to us, instead, is that the computing winds up being able to sort through everything to present us with something we think is either the “right” result or the “preferred” result. It is the range of our own criteria that actually makes us decide if the computing is or is not “smart”. That Ticking Sound Our idea of “smart” usually comes in any one of three flavors. There’s “thinking”, which means editing through choices to find ones that we can then relate to each other. Call it logic. There is “explaining”, which means that we can determine and describe how something that already exists DOES work or IS formed. Call it analysis. And there is “inventing”, which means describing how a new way of organizing a practical object or action WILL work as needed. Call it design. Those three things – logic, analysis, and design -- are usually somehow combined for any of three objectives. One is to Propose. Another is to Prove. And another is to Predict. The vast majority of what we consider “smart” behavior is covered by those three things. And what excites us most about “smart” is that it can get us something that we need or want, on demand. Brains and Beauty Too Among the range of needs and demands is a special case – things that we didn’t already know we needed or wanted. And second in interest level is things that we didn’t already know are possible, and that we experience as being relevant. Artificial intelligence gets its value mainly from how computers can be trained to refer to our examples of logic, analysis and design – and to apply our techniques of logic, analysis and design. By doing that, it possibly generates results (i.e., produces products) that are needed, preferable, and relevant. The most important part of the idea of artificial intelligence is the relationship between (a.) the products and (b.) their origin in being smart -- rather than just their being in the right place at the right time for us to stumble upon or receive that product. The idea that A.I. can have "originality" is entirely reliant on its being smart. But we don't have or use the term "Artificial Originality" even though we can explain it. Artifice, of course, is entirely about fabricating something that isn’t already there. Being smart enough to produce it is what we expect intelligence to enable. Intelligence is the "originality". Intelligent Art Now if we consider what it means to have logic, analysis and design within different practices, one of the most intriguing practices is that of art. Putting this in perspective: we want art because of what it provides. It meets a need or a desire, and we expect it to have relevance. First we identify what it is that artworks provide to us. Once we identify the characteristics of the art product that support or generate preferability and relevance, the means are needed to produce those characteristics. The logic, analysis and design in art are means of producing that experience of preference or relevance. That is, the artifice is driven by the intelligence. Rationally, the notion of “A.I. in art” refers to only two things. One is the notion that "intelligence" itself can be expressed by computing. The proper name for this, however, is “synthetic” intelligence. Can a computer perform logic, analysis, and design? Yes to all three. And the other reference is to the goal of applying intelligence, which is to produce an artifact that has the qualities we require from art. Creativity and the Heart of a New Machine The term "creativity" is loaded with notions of originality, inspiration, uniqueness, and other conditions that distinguish it as being "special" and, really, a manifestation of a certain kind of consciousness that is not shared even by all humans. This makes it somewhere between implausible and insulting to think that a machine would have it. But what A.I. increasingly presents to us is something that we find harder and harder to distinguish from what many people present to us as creativity. Here is the important thing to recognize: entertaining though that idea of creativity may be, it is dis-informative, and unreliable to say that the computer is “creative” as if that creativity was at all possible without its essential task, production. When we specifically say “production” we are not meaning to intend “creation” in any lofty other sense. And frankly, when we say "creative", despite our interest in its special glow, we are often only talking about production that is being executed at a level hidden from us like the secret of the magician's trick. That's just not hard for A.I. to do. What matters, instead, is how we need or want to make use of what it does.

Arriving After turning twice up the narrow stairway, a type exactly halfway between rustic and industrial chic, one enters the Gray Loft gallery on Oakland's Ford Street, a space rewardingly larger than it first appears to be. The first thing that registers is the excellent wall-by-wall grouping of the types of images – so successful in that task that it almost seems the photographs were made-to-order for the show. It is the 10th Anniversary celebration show for the gallery, and it is focused on black and white photography but it has a wide enough view to include some others. The unity theme goes strong. It is assertively pressed by the spare black frames keeping each of the art works set on their space against the white walls. Scanning the rooms from a distance reinforces that after ten years, the group of artists is not just those who "made the cut" but all members of the same community. In the crowd at the opening, there had been just as many of the artists there, talking to each other, as there were visitors, which included family. Having the smiles and shoulders and wide range of comfort clothes for cocktails all together finally post-COVID fear, it was still more like a homecoming. Now, a couple of weeks after that event, there will be far more floor and sightlines visible. And what will be remembered quickly from the opening is that the collection on the walls is dominated not just by ideas about black and white imaging, but about printmaking. Label after label finely articulates the attention to craft, to whether the black or gray was conveyed to the paper in this way or that, digital or analog, one step or two. The price tags, somewhat modest, show a balance between rewarding the labor implied and the artist’s generous willingness to at least share this piece if not make more. The papers, identified by their exotic names of source or substance, suggest scrutiny, exclusivity, and sensitivity. They are not by and large “photographic” papers; they are fine papers holding photographic marks. The Work The legacy of black and white photography originates in constraints on chemistry but also immediately leaned on the precedents of black ink. Many photos celebrate opportunities that the photographers had to lean into calligraphy, or atmospheric washes, or detailed renderings of surfaces. The majority of the photographs did not fight for visual innovations, but instead showed full appreciation of how various “schools” of images have usually provoked feelings the way music can. The physical properties of the print were there to trigger emotion, rather like abstract expressionism regardless of the literal “information” offered in the picture’s detail. But with photography, there is a built-in tension between the picture as an object and the picture as a communication. Some pictures emphasized this tension by the way they used their edges -- to define how much of what in front of the lens was relevant to portray. That decision – to create a “scene” from the “seen” -- could be a more important reason for the picture being made than the aesthetics of the picture’s composition. Some other photos furthermore emphasized an aesthetic effect unusual for a given scene, found mainly through how the print established the scene’s look. But still others went further – using prints mostly to “capture” peculiar characteristics of photographically recording viewing. For decades before now, in most photographers’ lives, there has been a period in which there are unintended effects – mistakes – that are targeted for elimination in printing; but perhaps later these mistakes are effects that get created intentionally, exposing a “vocabulary” of photography that is not from painting These are effects deliberately chosen and used as gestures arranged to illustrate or represent an experience such as memory’s complexity, real-time mystery, or drama. These graphic effects included optical, chemical or digital things like blurs, multiple exposures, flares, distortions, and the outer boundaries of image negatives that were not trimmed or hidden from view by the frames. or drawing. In this show, the importance of it is that it shifts attention from the photographer’s eye to the photographer’s hand, and from sights to visions. Yesterday, as I was typing this, a software program called Grammarly insisted on changing my phrase “make a photograph” into “take a photograph”. That irritating yet charming naivete unintentionally pointed at the default expectations that broad and casual audiences may still bring to photography as an activity. But in the show we are discussing here, nearly all of the work is highly self-conscious regarding the role of the photographer as an imagemaker. With “black and white” being the anchor approach for the show, a side effect of that self-consciousness jumped out at me: there is a near total absence of any work referring to the fact that we are in the age of the digital internet. The entire show is almost kind of a throwback experience. It guards the gates to a kind of classicism that, with only a few exceptions, seems disinterested in any notion of a subsequent avant-garde that we have, in fact, already seen. The Exceptions I think that this is important about the show, because a group show becomes a conversation between the works, not just a gathering. As I noted initially, this aspect of the show – the choices made curatorially to put certain pictures near each other – is fantastically effective in having one work’s features drawn out more persuasively by another work taking a shot at it too. Having said that, I think also that there are two big issues raised about how this work fits into our larger personal experience as viewers and, for some of us, photographers. One is the now overwhelming dominance of the use of “filters” as a starting point in the broad population of camera users who “create” images. Automation has converted exactly the labor of most of the printmaking effects seen in this show into styles. Given this new default, the show throws down a bit of a gauntlet in its self-confidence that younger web-native viewers can – or even want to – really grasp the virtue of what is on the walls. In a celebratory show, that may not be relevant to the show’s intent, but it begs questions about where the work should go from here. My guess is that the answer is Collectors, and if so, then limiting the editions of the work becomes highly important. The second issue is at first more subtle, even odd, but ultimately is the most important thing I took from the show. On the opening night of the exhibit, tucked into a corner spot nearly alone, behind almost all other pictures on display, there were two Polaroid pictures. I’m going to elaborate a bit on them. First of all, almost nothing in the history of photography has been as important as Polaroids to the population’s desire to make pictures. What comes to mind as potential challengers are the Kodak Brownie Process and now of course the Smartphone. What all three have in common is that there is no consumer darkroom necessary, and that the camera can go almost anywhere. When Polaroid prints became obtainable in color, they became, basically, and obviously, the first Instagram of real life. But Polaroid usage always had, and still has, the incredible tangibility of making a photo – very close to the direct, immediate, and emotional feedback of playing a musical instrument. Its result is a print, but the experience is photography as a medium. Second, as if to emphasize that experience in the most explicit way, the Polaroids on view in the show are entirely encased in larger conventional glassfront frames. These frames instantly become archival boxes – completely unnecessary for viewing the images in the prints, but making the prints themselves special, protected from the chaos of being tossed around carelessly among unrelated other small items. The framing and visibility of the Polaroids say, “Remember that time when I made that picture while …” I am reminded that in today’s artworld, small physical images have market value in an entirely different way than the giant works increasingly found in many commercial galleries. They are compelling because they are intimate -- and in the case of a Polaroid, also one of a kind. This makes the photograph quite undeniably a piece of a life. It doesn’t have to convince you that it was; it just is. So third, the Polaroid becomes more than a print; it is an imprint. Its image is almost more like an animal track, or a fingerprint, or a handwritten note. Something that was peeled right off the physical or emotional skin of somebody, carrying clear traces. Or, it is like a captured butterfly, preserved in the same press that caught it. These particular Polaroids also have a visual quality that offers two outstanding features above and beyond the figures noticed in them. One is a kind of lacquered transparency – a visibility through their surface that is reached only by first tuning the “translucence” setting all the way to its maximum limit. It’s not a property of the subjects in the image; it’s a property of the square photo objects presenting the image. The other is the steep lean towards being monochromatic. Compared against the vividness of ordinary life in color, their tone represents distance, and symbolically that distance makes the viewing a recall. Here, recall is an overt intention to navigate the distance from the source moment where the photographer was, to the later moment where we are. Less of the Same Finally, being more monochrome than not in this show means that the graphics of their images go right to the same point that half or more of the other prints in the show labor for. The Polaroids actually set a bar against which all the black and whites can be measured, by pointing out that the photoprints did not actually need to be black and white. So, what does the true black and white of other prints do to communicate the energy of the moment that caused their birth? I keep thinking the same thing: it's inkpress... This comparison with the Polaroids really lets them set a high bar, and the Polaroids, unexpectedly, are nearly the most powerful images in the show. Sporting what can only be called a subdued mood, and being the smallest things on the walls, they still dare nearly half of all the other pictures to emanate as much psychological presence as the Polaroids do. But stepping away from all that... Some other pictures almost uniquely hold their own way of making stillness dynamic. In one work, a diptych compares two nearly identical scenes in a way that tells us time has passed between them but asks us whether the differences are more important than the similarities. If our answer is no, then what does that mean about time? In another work, what is typically rendered as a nature scene is agitated with just enough “camera shake” to remind us that grasping the scene was actually doing something active, not passive, in that place at that time. It is also more interesting as printmaking because it reminds us that the image maker was part of the scene, making decisions about having us see something in a certain way. I think what these pictures emphasize is the idea that the prints are not just terrific two-dimensional compositions; they do this interesting thing of skipping right past the third dimension (space) into the fourth (time). In one more work, maybe the only one in the show that is not in a frame, what we see is a collage, lacquered in what feels like amber, that layers moments of a movement spanning time. Through the Lens Dwelling on some of the exceptions in the show is easy mainly because the full group of pictures is a generous helping. I’ve taken up your time with revisiting how the show’s strong organization by style is instantly helpful in unifying the show yet sets the stage for a healthy variety of experiences. Since I’ve claimed that printmaking dominates the show, it is important to respect how much camerawork is on display and not take it for granted. Several works are most engaging because it is obvious that the image simply couldn’t exist except for the vantage point of the photographer, regardless of printing. In such cases, printing has one job – to not dull the distinction of the vantage point, and if possible, to amplify it. There is something that maybe is called hyper-realism in these pictures, and part of their excitement is that they do not rely on “special effects”. Surprisingly, there are exceptionally few portraits in the show. The ones hanging are simply expert, but they are nameless and so they make us wonder whether the intent was to be iconic or biographical. That curiosity is a good thing, since it makes us want to see more of them and find out. There are, by the way, no selfies. Lastly in this article, I’ll mention that some works attend to enhanced “documentation” – not billed as such, but examples include the capture of a decisive moment; the unusual appearance of an ordinary place; or what can only be called closeup evidence, of something that cannot be tolerated as is and must get changed. In each case, the difference felt is that the shots are not just opportunistic snaps. Rather, they are a refinement of attention and skill that promises more focus on the subject to come rather than being concerned with what I called Collectors of classics. Next Time Throughout this review I intentionally omitted names of artists and titles of works. My reason for that is in my hope to provoke you to visit the show. Then, while there, to use these notes and thoughts as clues to which ones I’m mentioning, by considering how each piece you see works one way or another. Likely there will be several ways to get the show's images in front of you and do this match game at your convenience. But this is, after all, an exhibit of prints, not screens or projections. One should get into the gallery space itself and really feel the way they look. - MR, Dec 12, 2022

Ghost Busters The experience of time’s passage takes place only due to the perception of change, and if the noticeable events don’t happen on their own then cultures have more than compensated by creating commemoration and rituals of marking time. The most important of the commemorations are ritualized to ensure they are distinct from ordinal and ordinary experiences, but moreso that they keep bringing the past back to the present. In the age of being green, mausoleums are an anachronism to everything socially or community-oriented except for the wealthy. Above-ground tombs and crypts don’t recycle the bodies out of existence but rather mimic preserving them in a last act of defiance against disappearance. Taking up space monumentally that way is political. It's an occasion of someone's fierce intent, amplifying privilege earned or taken during their days amongst the living. In addition, they are barely concerned at all with their impact on further history; their intent is to stop time where they want it to be stopped. But further, the Mausoleum organizes its exhibits specifically to call attention to the individuality of its contained guests – each and all of whom, however, have run a gauntlet of specific qualifications to get in. The similarity of a mausoleum and a museum is pretty clear. But of course, the museum is holding not just the idea of its guest; it's holding the actual guest. Still, like the mausoleum, the museum holds its content with the intent to remove it from the ongoing changes of passing time. Instead, it carves up time into segments that have only one purpose – to hold memory, of the importance of the entombed. Here is where we might, by comparison, feel the difference between a museum and a gallery. The gallery promotes awareness of its content specifically by arguing that the existence of its content gives importance to the time that we call Now. It is energetically discovering and showing how the particular importance that needs to be noted comes not from the past but from the present. All that said, it's hard to prevent any one of them from trying to do another's job if somebody wants it to. Ruins are in here too. Ruins convert museums into either mausoleums or galleries – depending on whether we are looking for the living or the dead. In the history of cities and towns, imperialism, colonialism, larceny, and evolution all exploit ruins to some degree that we can point at on a spectrum of appropriation. And on that same spectrum, art makes an appearance. Reincarnation The entrance to Adeline Graffiti Palace is not walled. The walls merely leave openings vulnerable to being entered. The structure has an architecture of ruins. Things that remain standing or structurally stable are just the survivors of invasions, collisions and interventions, still signifying a kind of important role in the past but indifferent to the present, and which have not been undone. In this location, almost entirely ignored by passersby on a major north-south route through Oakland, the spaces left formed by man’s or nature’s demolition offer a set of sightlines from one extraordinary vertical wall to another, and sometimes over them or through them. On display is an enormous collection of mid-to-large scale graffiti – not murals, graffiti. A giant graffti gallery. The emphasis in this space is not that so-and-so was here. It is that so-and-so is here. Street artists have entirely repurposed the ruin of the original building. On encountering it myself, I immediately felt the tremendous pull of its dazzling overall visual array versus the resonance of any single part being given a good hard stare. I've dubbed this a "palace". The first impression of this place is the overt organization of the display space created by the street artists’ wall writing – an expressed sensibility expected from professional exhibition planners or… interior designers. The works on view, by over a dozen different graffitists, gather together on the surfaces to create distinctive room-like areas within the outer confines of the site. One walks through the space in a way that is prepared by the raw ground paths letting the walls have their great felt scale. The writers' and taggers' arrangements unabashedly celebrate the space with their display; they do not advocate, argue, or subvert anything in particular but instead make the entire location a sensory experience featuring size, color, scale and emotional energy. The images are not in the service of any other event; the site is not a host or facility for anything but making an impression on the person within it. Collectively, the works are an enclosed environment completely different from anything else near it, celebrating its own aesthetic force. The Takeover One compelling impulse was to thoroughly document the entire location in exhaustive detail, to protect against its future disappearance. But another impulse, stronger and more personal, was to gain control over the force of its visual heterogeneity, by reorganizing my mental intake of its images within the perspective I chose with my camera. In effect I would be appropriating again what they had already appropriated. Doing that immediately also brought up the ongoing artistic challenge of discerning what my work would be doing that their work was not already doing. To me, that is largely referenced by any conversation that considers how documentary and landscape relate to each other. Some may say that it's about the difference between showing facts and showing a truth: editing will always do that, and using a camera is always editing visually. But not always mentally. On that count here, I’m modeling another new order from what might too casually be presumed to be disorderly (i.e., unauthorized, unformal, and perhaps assertively blighting) - a presumption typical of those who neither made it nor want it. And recognizing it as palatial – not a temple, not industrial, and not a park – is key to recognizing its community function, its social authority, and its legitimacy: it's a demonstrative sanctuary of a cultural aesthetic. The power of its display is significant as an event; it is a statement piece. Despite its off-road visibility, it is an emphatic announcement of the presence of its community. But the entire thing is at extremely high risk of being suddenly non-existent in the foreseeable future. As a result, the photographs could become the ready-made memorial of not merely its prior existence but the importance of it. Post-demolition, what will remain to be seen, actually seen with the photos, is wrapped up in the perspective that proxies my own presence there - documenting but also imagining. To some, that will offer a vicarious experience otherwise out of their reach. To others, perhaps it will invoke suspicions of what other agenda may be attached to my selectivity. I believe that the goal is to have both of those reactions occur together, creating a higher sensitivity and curiosity that will persist and, from then on, become part of the viewer’s own predisposition when observing their environment.