Good morning Small Green Leafs and good morning, too, readers of BB’s Personal Magazine. Because we have two new members of our curatorial collective (Jin Jing and Nico) it seems right to make this a week all about strategy, general methodologies to curate the Small Green Leaf feeling. So every day I’ll write about a different strategy. Today will be artbands, tomorrow will be institutional performance, wednesday will be ambient figuration, thursday will be postsecularity, and friday is an ontology of loving peace.
In music, collaboration is the default, in art, it’s an exception, something special. Musicheroes are architects of collaborations: Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is a architecture for the highly structured collaboration of fifty plus artists. The arthero is a singular person that made something singular. Even if Michelangelo did not actually paint all of the Last Judgement we see the Last Judgement and think, Michelangelo was such a genius.
But where are the artheroes now? Aphex Twin is a musichero, a living spirit who appears, sampled, in nightclubs weekly, everywhere. Even those who don’t know they are hearing Apex Twin are hearing Apex Twin. Is there such a figure for art? Should there be?
To put the question in a different way: why does it seem like music and food are living arts but actual art is a dead art? Might this have something to do with the more collaborative nature of food and music compared with art art? In Art Art, as mentioned above, collaboration is still special: the individual is normal. Could this fake individuality be causing the deadness of the contemporary scene? If so how could it be overcome? My answer is the artband.
The artband is not a music band made of artists, like rem or talking heads but a artband that makes art like music bands make music. Right now, I belong to three of these: DBBS, TMT and Chomps Cangue. Each of these is (right now) structured around a central collaboration: DBBS with Drew Beattie, TMT with Job Zheng, and Chomps Cangue with Nico Arauner I’ve been doing DBBS since 2013, TMT since 2016, and Chomps since last month.
The situation with all of these is roughly the same, formally: intense aesthetic success combined with artworld indifference. Why is this? I have a hunch it’s because the bands are not large enough - if there were a third, fourth, or fifth member of one of these bands they would have enough energy to do what successful bands do, “tour.”
So this is an invitation for someone to pressure themselves into either TMT or Chomps Cangue, or alternatively, to start an artband with or without me. I have such a proposal for an artband with me, and it is the first artband dedicated to transcuisine. Transcuisine is a cuisine that is becoming or has become something else (as opposed to a cis-cuisine that is already what it is naturally.) This artband can perform in Rostock in the week of the 15th with a performative banquet.
Let me end with three tactical suggestions for artbands: the cultivation of different, playing with analogies, and tastes good is good.
An important part of the artband strategy is the cultivation of difference. Drummers have a different function than singers and a different characteristic personality. What is the artart equivalent of a bass player? The saxophone? Differences in aesthetic can doom a group or they can bless the group with a multilayered aesthetic.
Playing out analogies between music, kitchens, and art studios will help develop new approaches. The concept of mis en place, for instance, from gastronomy has a definite artistic equivalent. When you’re making a painting, you have to set up ingredients in the same way that you’re making a souffle.
Tastegood is good means that artart needs a sensual hit; something that strikes beneath the mind and satisfies the eye or the ear or the tastebud. Without this sensual hit, artart becomes an academic position paper with a lame formal twist inside of a provincial museum unwitnessed and unloved by anyone.