You have been involved in a lot of ground-up projects and have an expressed focus in DIY models.  If I was looking to start an arts project in Philadelphia (a gallery, a zine, a crit group, etc.) what are three points of advice you might give me?

1. Make friends. Philadelphia is small. None of these endeavors can exist very well in a vacuum. It's important to have a support structure in place with other projects before launch — blogs who will write about your gallery, galleries who will sell your zine, salty artists who will bring friends to your crit group.

I think that art writers in Philadelphia bite their nails around questions of audience and their own efficacy; similarly, Philadelphia DIY artists wax dramatically over the necessity of more criticism, and more discussion, and more thought around their pieces. This is a very symbiotic and gratifying relationship of hand-wringing and complaining. Of course, there's a massive audience for art journalism in Philadelphia. Tens of thousands of us read certain blogs and hundreds of thousands read established newspaper art columns and magazines. The anxiety stems from the fact that Edith Newhall isn't writing about warehouses (though Randy Kennedy did!), or the majority of people reading about art in this city are reading Edith Newhall. So the DIY scene sets up its own cottage industry of art criticism, employing its own to write about its own. A funny thing happens, though, in that attempt to create an affirming alternative. The writing becomes both more futile and more important. There are a lot of essays and reviews I wrote of shows, articles that took days or weeks to make, where the art pieces referenced in the essay no longer exist. Not because it was an ephemeral time-sensitive piece, but because it got stored in a moldy basement and disintegrated, or was chucked out when it was time to move apartments again. And in those instances, art journalism does stand alone — in part, because it is no longer art journalism. It is art. The written archive around a work moves from being this pathetic leech and becomes closer to actual artwork itself. The writing embodies an artistic practice; it no longer replicates experience, it is the experience.

Take, for the sake of example, Robert Mapplethorpe’s X images.  The oeuvre wasn’t transgressive for the sake of transgression.  It sought to change the game, to rip the world out of the closet.  The portfolio embodies the semiotic axiom that the meaning of a sign is the response to it.  The outrage the followed in the wake of its exhibition was part of the photos (as some have argued it was the only thing that mattered).  The images were effective because of their power to insist upon an antagonistic response.

. . . .

I have been going back and forth for a while on whether I should write a response to Kara Crombie’s video installation at Vox Populi.  To discuss something, even the very worst of things, gives it cultural capital.  Passing along absurdly misguided clips from Fox News in horror only gives Fox News more traffic and, subsequently, more money from advertisers.  So I will not link to her video, or website, or the gallery’s page — if you want to watch it, I’m sure you can find it yourself.

The video that was on view is part of a larger series of works which chronicle the feisty and libidinous inclinations of a plantation and slave-owning family.  Weaving in appropriated footage and grungy music, the animations feature wealthy characters in neon colors who flaunt their despicable power by having sex with slaves and abusing them.  But it’s funny, because they have problems too!  We can laugh at the things the white people do – oh, it’s irreverently awful!  The family is an MTV kind of broken, filled with teenage pregnancy, charming alcoholism, and a relaxed acceptance of sadism and chauvinism. 

Our galleries, like our minds, are meant to be open, liberated, inviting. But neither art nor galleries are inherently progressive. It's a very modernist notion to believe that each piece of art, each exhibition, each new artist moves the trajectory forward. Art is political, yes, but to assume what those politics are based on the presumed radicalism of its host institution is lazy and dangerous. The exhibition at Vox Populi is nothing but regressive, sedating the audience into jovially acceptable crypto-racism.

I spent a long time thinking about this show, a long time writing a reaction, and an even longer time soliciting the opinions of friends over whether or not I should publish it. I hemmed and hawed because I kept engaging myself in circuitous thought — any criticism I wrote over how mindless and distasteful the work was might be countered with the idea that I simply didn't understand it. Or worse, that my opinion was automatically homogenized, as valid as any other. Maybe the video was only "pretend dumb" and "pretend racist" in order to make a sardonic comment about the inanity and dull pain of pop culture. But this is an impenetrable logic, one that deflects critiques of offensiveness with an alleged higher level of enlightenment. I realized that this nonsense was the ultimate failure of the piece. Art is not here to cloak itself in ironic logic. Work that is intended to point out a social injustice doesn't commit the social injustice itself. It doesn't cloyingly ingratiate itself to an audience of the past — it dedicates itself to one of the future.