Anthony Koutras' "Pylon", 2010, Courtesy: Stephen Bulger Gallery

Q.: What is wrong with a “passive encounter with the everyday”?  After all, can we not assume that sometimes a garbage can is just a garbage can?
A.: I don’t feel that there’s anything necessarily wrong with a passive encounter with the everyday.  I find that people become familiar with things and that creates our personal definition of everyday objects.  That’s why travel to other cities and countries are of interest to a lot of people.  Traveling to other places exposes you to an unfamiliarity of the everyday.  Your usual recognition is thrown for a loop.  It’s this recognition that’s interesting to me, and what I’m exploring through this new work.
As an artist I try to look past the recognition that creates our perception of the everyday.  I find myself really looking at my surroundings and curating my own surrounding elements.  As I walk through the public space I constantly find fleeting compositions and objects that are visually interesting to me.  In choosing a garbage can to photograph it has to hold certain characteristics that are personally interesting.

Q.: Does an object have to be disconnected from its original context in order to be viewed differently?
A.: No, I suppose objects can be viewed differently without their being disconnected from the original context.  I suppose it would require the viewer to take it upon him or herself to consciously think about viewing it differently, while the original form, location and function of the object remains in front of them as they do so.

Anthony Koutras' "Cardboard Box", 2010, Courtesy: Stephen Bulger Gallery

Q.: Removed from its context, can’t the meaning of anything be altered?  Why not simply take the pylon and place it in an art gallery?  Why use photography?
A.: It’s true, and Duchamp addressed this issue with his readymades.  I think I continue to use photography because I’m drawn to photography’s inherent ability as a medium to record exact depictions of what the lens of the camera captures.  I’ve found through working with photography over the years, I began to look at the medium itself and the qualities it holds.  Essentially it’s an encapsulation of space, scaled and flattened into a two-dimensional depiction. The question I ask myself is, “what can I do with those qualities?” Through that investigation, over the last 8 years I developed an interest in creating art with an association to the public space. My work expanded into a somewhat interdisciplinary practice, incorporating aspects of photography, sculpture and installation, and was predominantly sourced from the public arena.
In my current series Explication, I take the approach of using photography to speak to the medium of photography itself.  I’m assigning the work the task of opening a dialogue about the mediation of the photographic image.  I incorporate elements of my practice from the public through the use of streetscape objects as a vehicle to speak to this topic.

Q.: What attracts you to certain objects?  For example, why this garbage can instead of that fence?
A.: I found that in this current body of work, the original streetscape object tended to be freestanding and somewhat close to a human scale, mainly because the objects were designed to be functional.  I began to see a physical correlation between the objects and us, each object holding it’s own unique individual character traits much like a personality.  The Hot Dog Garbage was one example of an object that I felt was funny, unique, and somewhat reflected our society through remnants and traces left on the object.

Q.: There is a sculptural element in the way the objects are presented.  All of a sudden, the everyday becomes akin to installation and sculpture and, as such, becomes “art”.  Does this not risk that the object, viewed as art, will lose all of its “reference of origin”?  In other words, garbage can as commodity (it could be argued this is what it becomes the moment it enters the gallery) is no longer a garbage can.  It is art.  Therefore all reference to its history is moot.
A.: Oh, for sure there’s a sculptural element. The large-scale photographs are actually photographs of an 8-inch tall folded photographic composite I made.  The print is refolded, curled and glued back into a sculptural depiction of the object.  The original objects on the street are directed through a series of forward moving embodiments, away from the actual source object.  It’s completely true; the work is an art object that’s shown in a gallery.  It’s absolutely severed from the source. It’s a hollow representation of the perceived object, an example of an object stripped of the original function.  The photographs in the gallery have lost the direct reference of the origin and I would like the loss of origin and the pure recognition of that object to create a playful duality and tension in the photographs presented.
I don’t actually feel that the process I put the objects through renders the history of the object moot.  The history is still there and we tend to want to know where it was located and possibly a story as to how I came upon it.  It simply comes down to it becoming a more complicated history than first assumed.  I’m interested in the history seen through the veil of multiple translations of visual information.

Anthony Koutras' "Hot Dog Garbage", 2010, Courtesy: Stephen Bulger Gallery

Q.: How do you, as an artist, maintain the object’s “history”?  What role, if any, does the “history” of the object play?
A.: To me the history is important, but specifically in relationship to the history of the photograph used as an archive tool. The selection of the object within the photographic frame is inherently tied to a preservation and archive of something: a moment in time or an object in danger of disappearing. I feel images have been adopted to act as a surrogate for memory and retain details that would otherwise be forgotten or altered. By way of photography, we attempt to hold on to the passing moments. By photographing these commonplace objects—a memorializing action—I give them importance. The geometric form of each object becomes a sponge, taking in a multitude of written communication, weather, damage and decay: each object indexing time.

Q.: How would you describe Canadian Contemporary art?
A.: I think Canadian Contemporary art is full of amazing artists and Canadian work is being shown in more places than ever before.  I feel Canadian Contemporary art is where it is today because of the talent and creativity of so many, combined with the development of support systems to foster individual artists and collectives. Those who worked so hard early on to establish artist run centres, commercial galleries, publication opportunities, and grant systems are all owed a huge thank you.  They helped create a setting to ensure Canadian Contemporary art keeps moving forward in a the positive way it has been in recent years.

This is something I got from Jeffrey Spalding who is one of Canada’s leading artists, educators and art museum professionals.  As usual, his observations and insightful and informative.  Thank you Jeffrey.

David Bolduc's "Pilgrim", 2010 Oil on canvas (Courtesy: Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto)

David Bolduc (1945-2010) was our leading maker of poetic, lyrical colour abstract paintings and the inheritor of the mantle of modernism within the legacy of Jack Bush and Gershon Iskowitz. Bolduc, well-read and widely traveled, accumulated the lessons learned from a lifetime spent exploring the pleasures of the rich visual history of civilization. His works paid homage to his admiration for an inclusive array of places and traditions. His peripatetic wanderings took him to Paris, Spain, North Africa, Mexico, Turkey and the Middle East, China as well as clear across Canada. His art draws upon and celebrates our vibrant collective world artistic heritage: Persian miniatures, Oriental rugs African art, Asian calligraphy and the splendours of the inventive progressive art of the modern age.

David Bolduc's "Spring Stream", 2010 Oil on canvas (Courtesy: Christopher Cutts Gallery)

He came to attention in the early seventies through his exhibitions at the prestigious Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto. These works were taut, refined all-over monochrome compositions operating within the tradition of reductive, geometric abstraction utilizing homogenous treatments or a single mark-gesture repeated consistently across the entire surface. They were shown in the company of a band of minimalist-inclined painters: Brice Marden, David Diao, Les Levine and Paterson Ewen. By mid 1970s, he and fellow Lamanna exhibition mate, Ewen were breaking free of this mould. Both had spent time studying at the school of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and their new work sprang forth with vivid colour and accentuated linear mark-making. Their works shown in the 1975 exhibition The Canadian Canvas signaled the dawning of a new art. While Ewen gravitated towards New Image figuration and landscape, Bolduc evolved a unique signature approach to central imagery abstraction.

Bolduc’s art re-asserted a strong figure-ground relationship of a hovering main motif articulated in bold impasto colours squeezed and drawn directly from the tube atop a stained background. Bolduc extended the modernist dialogue championed by Jack Bush, Robert Motherwell and Jules Olitski triumphantly showcased first by the David Mirvish Gallery and subsequently Klonaridis Gallery.  In so doing, Bolduc became the locus of the evolution of a tendency strongly associated with a generation of Toronto painters referred to variously under the rubric: exotic or eccentric modernism. Marcus Garvey, (collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario), is reflective of a career-long obsession with colour, pattern and collage references. For all its modernity, its compositional form harkens to antiquarian appearances gleaned from time spent among libraries of rare, hand-stamped leather book covers and decorated bookplates. His sensitivity to this history prepared him to be the contributor of exquisite illustrations to a number of hand-made books and accompaniments to finely-crafted literary publications.

David Bolduc's "Paris Room Terra Neuva", 2010 Oil on canvas (Courtesy: Christopher Cutts Gallery)

Bolduc openly embraced the joyous fauvistic colour of Matisse, Derain and Dufy. Like his kindred spirit, David Hockney, he relished the primacy and graphic play of free-hand drawing and acknowledged the benefits to be derived from constant daily work upon advancing his art: Nulla Dies Sine Linea. For four decades Bolduc nuanced every opportunity to evolve his characteristic style and formats. The temperament and tone of the works differed widely from stately, restrained and under-spoken neutrals to riotous exuberant gregarious colour symphonies sporting metallic and iridescent pigments. Quietly, behind the scenes, Bolduc, synonymous with abstraction, had begun again to sketch from nature: floral motifs, still-life, trees and stars. He and painter Alex Cameron commenced annual sketching trips across the country, notably recurring visits to the rocky coastlines and forests of Newfoundland. Organically, Bolduc’s studio canvases embraced this admixture; his invented spaces would be refreshed by direct observation of revered places. David Milne, John Meredith, Paterson Ewen and John Clark come into play, so too the watercolours of Greg Curnoe. In an act of re-unification with glories of art’s past, Bolduc created a number of moving, transcendent nocturnes redolent of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.(with Lawren Harris’s late abstractions not too far from sight).

In the seventies and eighties Bolduc was celebrated as a bright star in the constellation of Canadian art. He was a heralded exhibitor in Andrew Hudson’s 14 Canadians that introduced progressive Canadian Art at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington. He held annual solo exhibitions dating from the early seventies; his works are in the collections of public collections from coast to coast. Of late, many have turned their gaze away from the visual pleasures of formalism. Recently, Bolduc completed and mounted a final show for Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto. Confident mastery of his craft combines with a humble acceptance of his personal place within art’s cosmos; the final show is a triumph of the personality as well as of the hand.

- Jeffrey Spalding

Museums are preparing to place works by Bolduc on display in tribute among them:

Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Appleton Museum of Art (Florida), Musee D’art de Jolliette, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Canadian Centre for Contemporary Art, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kelowna Art Gallery

Studio shot, Carmel, Saskatchewan, January 2010 (Courtesy: The Artist)

Some thoughts on my studio practice…

In the early 1980s, when I was a young art student, I got to know Saskatoon artist Robert Christie whom I owe a large debt of gratitude for his insights and ongoing support. Through him I met and saw the work of other senior Saskatoon artists including William Perehuddoff and Eli Bornstein as well as a host of others. The Saskatoon art community in the 1980s was very supportive and paint-friendly and was a great place to “grow-up” artistically. This place and its history taught me some great lessons and one of the most important was to use the materials to express yourself – how to put a painting together and give it presence, weight, and impact. Sounds simple enough but I think this is quite rare and I am lucky to have had that education

Forrest's "Hop, Skip and a Jump", 2010, Acrylic on Canvas, 24" x 32" (Courtesy: The Artist)

Part of my personality is that I have an innate kid-like desire to muck around with paint – to make things, try it out, and see where it will go. I like to personalize every part of the picture, touching it all, putting my handprint, so to speak, on the painting’s surface. While I often will draw the layout of the painting, it’s the painterly incidents that give the piece character.  This happens on the canvas as I am engaged in the process. The best painting times are when I can take off the censor brakes and go where the work leads me, enjoying the journey and delighting in the results.

I have noticed how your particular situation, circumstance or environment can influence your work and that this can be cultivated as a means of change. An example is the Emma Lake workshops held every two years in Northern Saskatchewan, which I have attended intermittently since the mid 1980s. The workshop somehow gets recorded in the work I do up there. The paintings are directly related to what happens around me, the people there, what they are painting, what they are talking about, the feedback and the off-cuff comments. Somehow, this all gets filtered into my work and it becomes a distinct group of paintings capturing the two week “zeitgeist”. An example of this is my recent show at The Gallery / Art Placement called “More Pieces of the Puzzle” where most of the small scale works were painted at Emma Lake in the summer of 2009.

A more specific example of influence is my out of town studio. I drive out there through all seasons and notice the changing landscape, colours and things like weathered buildings, curves and dips in the highway, traffic signs, grid roads crossing, stop signs blacked out by a setting sun, dusk. These things all seep into my paintings and were reflected in a couple of shows (“Off the grid” and “Cross Section” both in 2008). It would be crazy if this didn’t affect my work. Sounds obvious, but in a sense every conversation you have affects you in that way, every show you see, anything that grabs your mind and sinks in. And often it’s not overtly grabbing your mind – it’s more “out the corner of your eye”, intuition, what seems right – rather than what is justifiably theoretically provable as being right!

Forrest's "Trumpet", 2010, Acrylic on Canvas, 48" x 66" (Courtesy: The Artist)

Forrest's "Tippy Toe", 2009, Acrylic on Canvas, 48" x 66" (Courtesy: The Artist)

Then there are the visual ideas that morph into new possibilities, which has to do with having a creative visual mind. A vertical pillar becomes a curving road, which becomes a figure. Or a painting triggers an idea about folding over the corner of paper, and once I’m lost in the work it triggers childhood memories of folding newspapers and floating them on a pond. A small painting like “Paper Hat” from an exhibition “Power Play” at Michael Gibson Gallery is a formal abstraction, a technical curiosity, a whimsical image, an acknowledgment of painterly ancestors, a reference to childhood memories, and a nod to family disappointments and unfulfilled hopes. A happy but poignant painting to me.

But geometry is supposed to be cold and anonymous – right? How can it be personal? An example I have used is my son and his obsession with juggling a soccer ball. When he was 8 or 9 he started playing soccer. He stuck with it and he started doing this juggling (kicking a ball up and down and doing “moves” as the ball is in the air). He kept doing it and over the years he got very good at it. I started looking at the very simple act of kicking a ball – how it somehow acted as a benchmark or consistent reference point as he went through a number of life changes in his teenage years. Years of doing that one act, so now when he juggles there’s an explicit and implicit act – on the one hand, he’s just kicking the ball – on the other hand, that ball has somehow has been personalized and has become meaningful, containing his life experience, the highs and the lows, the successes and the failures. That’s abstraction!

Sometimes very simple observations can be used as starting points. On a recent trip out east I visited a colleague’s studio. Walking to a close by gallery we started talking about visual cues for paintings – the repetitive break in the side walk concrete, the length of a stride, some kids artwork on a playground wall across the street. It was all there and completely valid and real.

Trouble is all of these things don’t guarantee a painting that visually moves you. They give a back-story but this has to be meshed with the act of making a painting – a visual object that somehow captures an aesthetic moment, and that can re-communicate that aesthetic moment back to the viewer. Hopefully my work does contain the emotional force of that back-story, if not its literal depiction.

Forrest's "Setting the Stage", 2009, Acrylic on Canvas, 48" x 66" (Courtesy: The Artist)

The work in my current exhibition “Splinter Group”, at Newzones Gallery in Calgary, focuses on larger scale work painted over the last six months. A number of the works come out of ideas started in the summer of 2009 up at Emma Lake. Taking those ideas back to the studio has allowed me time to explore a rich and varied paint application as well as a colour range with more nuance than I have recently used. There is a light-hearted, humorous play between chaos and order, attention grabbing image versus subtle painterly incident and hopefully, a personal take on contemporary abstraction and its future potential.

Jonathan Forrest, March 2010

To see more of Jonathan’s work, please visit his website: www.jonathanforrest.com

The following is from Sylvain Levy, the founder of the dsl collection.  In one of my commentaries on Chinese Contemporary art, he sent me a particularly well thought out commentary that is worthy of publication.

Zeng Fanzhi's "We", Oil on canvas, Courtesy DSL Collection

The dsl Collection was created in 2005 and focuses on contemporary Chinese art since 2004. It is a private collection representing 90 of the leading Chinese avant-garde artists, artists having a major influence on the development of contemporary art in China today. Even though focusing on the contemporary production of a specific culture, the collection is nevertheless not guided by the search for otherness. It admits basic cultural similarities and dispositions, however, it goes beyond a simplistic approach that only looks for typical cultural signs and symbols.

The collection is limited to a specific number of art works – about 150 pieces – that as an entity is open to constant redefinition itself. Openness, movement and communication are basic qualities we want to promote

The collection is not only significant on a personal level, but also at a larger scale.  We start from a museum approach, which means that we are collecting a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, installation, video, and photography.

But the dsl collection is more than a collection, it is a project.

The major tools to achieve these goals are new technologies, such as the internet and interactive programs and supports, like, for example, electronic books.

Why we collect?

1) Art is  the mirror of a Society

Even if art is more and more global, art is also a product of language, geography and history. Chinese contemporary art reflects Chinese modern life from every aspect including politics, economics and culture.

When we first came to Shanghai in 2005, I felt that there was another logic here; something that speaks of a very schizophrenic attitude towards economic development, the city embodies a ceaseless pursuit of the “superhuman” that redefines traditional definitions of humanity, sustainability, scale, speed.  Somehow these feelings were very inspiring and we wanted to find art and artists that express the relationships between contemporary art production and society.

2) China has a long cultural history

Culture has existed in China for more than 5000 years.

3) Collecting is the best way to connect to people

Through this collection, we were able to meet a lot of people in China and to better understand Chinese culture

JIN Jiangbo's "God chatting", Courtesy dsl Collection

What type of artists we are interested in ?

I am always keen to find individuals who are interested to see where the prevailing boundaries lie, either in terms of content, of materials, of disciplines and how they can push them open. That doesn’t just mean young artists.

I learned that contemporary Chinese art is as varied as its Western counterpart and, like that more familiar model, has its highly-visible personalities, auction house favorites and celebrities. But also, like the Euro/American scene, there are many Chinese, Taiwanese and other Asian artists who are laboring quietly in the vineyards, producing credible and beautiful work. Below I will mention some of the categories of artists that we are interested in and the most outstanding ones.

First, artists who remains individuals, autonomous persons and who are nevertheless decisive factors within this general movement. For example, Gu dexin.

Beijing-based Gu Dexin, this most enigmatic and evasive figure within the contemporary Chinese art scene. His distrust in all systems and his objection to live his life according to conventions set by any social milieu made him choose retreat as a strategy, a retreat from obligations and mainstream that actually advances him in a position of relative freedom and autonomy.  He is one of the most respected artist by curators of all of the world

Second, artists who can implant and advance Chinese traditional painting, traditional Chinese aesthetics and thought into a contemporary context and thus reaching an ideal model of “cultural and individual autonomy”.  For example, Yang Jiechang whose large inks are based on the traditional Chinese principle of the sublimation of the self to put forth the spiritual qualities inherent in the work and the material, which, on the conceptual level, means advancing through retreat and non-doing.

Third, artists who approach contemporary discourse by promoting local and vernacular culture. For example Zheng Guogu with Yangjiang Group.

Zheng Guogu who is one of the most famous artist from the young generation who has decided to live at Yangjiang and not in Beijing.  By retreating to Yangjiang, he, on one hand, creates a space for non-mainstream, locally-imbedded artistic imagination and creation. On the other hand, by including those local outcomes in his projects he advances the local onto a global platform.

“Chinese contemporary art reflects Chinese modern life from every aspect including politics, economics and culture, which is quite valuable in recording the past 30 years since the reform and opening up policy,” Wang has said.

Ye Yongqing, the artistic director of the institute, explains that the organization will dedicate itself to academic research as well as education on contemporary art. A systematic project to analyze and promote the contemporary art industry will also be established.  “Chinese contemporary art’s success and development to a large extent has depended on independent artists and collectors, but from now on, there is a new platform to do all things related to contemporary art.”   He adds that unlike many art organizations that gather artists together and benefit from works created by them, the institute is more like a think tank, with the hope that experts will contribute their ideas and reflections on Chinese contemporary art’s development.  “Only with a formal institute is there hope that systematic research on contemporary art can be done.”

Famous artist Luo Zhongli, who is also the director of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, has been appointed director of the new institute.

We are used to China’s growing influence on the world economy—but could it also reshape our ideas about culture and specially contemporary art?

Why you should collect Chinese contemporary art ?

The market for Chinese contemporary art pieces shows great potential, but at the same time, it faces many questions that had never arisen before.  It is constantly initiating contemplation and inquiry.
There has been a lot of money flowing around the Chinese art scene over the past few years that has had a dramatic effect on the art scene and the nature of the art being produced.

Ai Weiwei's "Portable Temple", Compressed bamboo, Courtesy dsl Collection

The market has come to occupy such a dominant position in the art world, often deciding “quality” and “importance”, most obviously in terms of Chinese art works and a local scene that does not enjoy the sobering influence of meaningful critical debate. Yet, at the same time, Chinese artists are often criticised for being overly commercial, while their understanding of how the art market functions is informed by their knowledge and experience of Western models.

Chinese artists, especially those in the so-called “millionaire’s club of painters”, have re-invented the art world for themselves and may or may not reap the windfall. They have played dealers and auction houses off against each other. They have dropped their own works into auction with relish and have manipulated their markets with a degree of savvy and bravado that has left many dealers stunned. This art is here to stay and, in my opinion, while European and American markets may plateau or even fall, the Asian markets will continue to climb. Why should not the best Asian artists be priced at the same levels as their western counterparts?

There has been a lot of money flowing around the Chinese art scene over the past few years that has had a dramatic effect on the art scene and the nature of the art being produced. This volume of funds is going to fluctuate in the coming year or so, which is not a bad thing. It might make artists reflect upon the quality of the work they are producing, and encourage some of the new galleries to formulate more productive strategies to deal with a slackening off in the market. So, hopefully, these recent events will have a positive impact.

Many people in China today are only just becoming aware of the contemporary art produced by local artists.  As two years ago, few could name even a single Chinese collector of contemporary art. It was a truism that the Chinese preferred to spend their money acquiring antiquities and classical works. Since then several well-known mainland collectors have emerged on the scene.

Looking at the continued innovations of the older generations of artists, as well as the growing number of young graduates from art academies around the country, I think we can safely say that Chinese contemporary art is far from an imminent demise. It might have been a bit under the weather in recent months given the mood of the international and the domestic art markets (and the media), but it is still young and vibrant.

What are the difficulties in collecting Chinese contemporary art?

The biggest  difficulty comes in how to benchmark a work.  Art is always about quality. The quality should be evaluated by experts, scholars, curators, and critics. The weakness of Chinese art scene is that critics and curators do not have much power. So their influence is very limited within the recent art market.

To conclude, I shall say that the market for Chinese contemporary art pieces shows great potential, but at the same time, it faces many questions that have never arisen before.  It is constantly initiating contemplation and inquiry.  So even as the market stumbles, and even as we hear rumors that almost a third of the galleries in China there are headed for extinction in the coming months as rents rise and sales drop, I can’t help but feel optimistic for the future.

Bettina Pousttchi's "Sculpture Study #3", 2010, Photography, courtesy Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

On this year’s Armory Show Buchmann Galerie will attend at the featured section Focus:Berlin with a solo presentation of the Berlin based German-Iranian artist Bettina Pousttchi (b. 1971).

On show will be three new large photographs which evolve out of the photo installation Echo, currently on view on the façade of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin. The installation, 2000 m2 in size, consists of 970 individual posters attached to the four outside walls of the Kunsthalle. The work echoes the “Palast der Republik”, a famous, now demolished building of the former GDR.

In the work presented at the Armory Show Bettina Pousttchi doubles references and crosses the lines between photography, sculpture and reality.  In earlier photographs she manipulated reality; with Echo she installed a subjective photographic perception of reality into the real world. She now crosses lines again and takes this installation back to the medium of photography.

Bettina Pousttchi's "Sculpture Study #1", 2010, courtesy Buchmann galerie, Berlin

Bettina Pousttchi's "Sculpture Study #2", 2010, courtesy Buchmann galerie, Berlin

Mathieu Beauséjour's Monument at La Place de la Cité Internationale

Imitating a French Revolutionary guillotine, self-taught artist Mathieu Beauséjour’s Monument shouldn’t be missed.

Sylvaine Chassé’s The Thought Collectors at Square-Victoria metro station.

G.R. Iranna's The Birth of Blindness, 2007 (Coutesy Aicon Gallery)

The Role of the Artist
The artist has taken a step into the role of authority on content and social commentary. Earlier postmodernism was described as exhibiting a sort of unabashed, and vicarious exploration of unrelated symbols. “Anything goes, and it doesn’t matter anyway” is an interpretation of postmodern art making that I often hear.

There is more and more evidence to suggest, that the role of the artist is shifting from that of the “replicator of symbols” to a role of social engineer and/or commentator. Artists now develop works that require viewer interaction in order to create the meaning of the work. In fact, I would argue that artworks are designed with the concept of how the viewer/user will interact with the artwork, now more than ever. Artworks take on the incorporation of a wide range of approaches to inviting user interaction. The question then becomes, “How does behavioral interaction by the viewer/user, with creative works, shape how the viewer/user thinks and emotes?” Culture industry and popular media are the most obvious examples. Toy designers study this issue extensively. Video game developers know how this changes the thought process of the user, to such a point that the U.S. military is intimately engaged in the development of combat strategy games (Aaron Ruby, Heather Chaplin, SmartBomb).

Miltos Manetas' "People Against Things", 2001

Population Management
One of the more disturbing trends in contemporary (recent postmodernist) culture, is the comprehensive effort to suppress the intelligence of populations. The torture, brainwashing and interrogation scenarios from the 1940’s through the 80’s have been exposed in the news media. But, all of these techniques have already been extrapolated to the wider population as control devices. Governments have a much easier time managing populations by maintaining a cult mentality among constituents and by waging information warfare on their own citizens. The election protests in Iran of 2009 would be a classic example: the Iranian government was blocking and posting disinformation about protest rallies on social networks. Web searches for “Tienanmen Square” are restricted if you live in China. Political party loyalties in the United States are now inseparable from cult mentalities as there seems to be a rabid push for a pseudo-polarization of what is supposed to look like a two party system. This cult mentality is on display as an accepted matter of critical discourse in the “news” media.

Cowboy George W Bush - Glebe, Sydney (the art has since been painted over)

In the latter stage of postmodernism, governments needed the military to control their own citizens. We currently attempt to use our military to control the citizens of other countries. In the United States, the last real protest (to my recollection) of a worldwide governmental/economic entity occurred in the late 90’s, in Seattle during the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference. The protesters were apparently calling for an end to police brutality, fair wages for workers and other similar issues. These messages seem to have emerged from individuals who possessed some understanding of global economics. You were able to find out about these issues just by reading the paper, or watching the news. More recently, in Pittsburgh, we had the G-20 Summit. Most of the media outcry brought forth headlines such as “What is the G-20″ and “Peaceful Protests at the G-20 Summit”. Coverage by the “local news media” showed protesters wearing masks and strolling down a street, some locals telling the “idiots” to go home. The “news media” didn’t convey that the protesters had any grasp on the socioeconomic issues at hand. As a final slap in the face, the President of the United States, thanked the city (a town with 2 major University Campuses) for a very “tranquil” hosting of the summit.

There is more evidence to suggest that debate and discourse surrounding serious macroeconomic and societal issues exists solely as a fictitious narrative in the media. However, this is an aspect of recent postmodernism. This writing isn’t an attempt to bring forth a complete overview.