Mack McFarland Alleviating Aesthetic Static

Before I tell you anything else about Mack McFarland’s lecture, I have to tell you that sometimes there is a work of art that is not only good, but is perfectly calibrated to one’s own aesthetic concerns and appreciations. One of the pieces he showed us, “watch to alleviate aesthetic static” (2007) is such a piece for me. The simplicity of the act belies the complexity and range of the visual and sonic (!) effects created by a thumb and a pad of graph paper. And that it offers a kind of meditative clearing while pointing to many art works and movements that influence my thinking while being a fine example of a straightforward action that appears to have been allowed to unfold with its little hiccups along the way…it just made my night, and made me regret that it’s taken me three years to see it. Exclamation point.

Artist and curator Mack McFarland (he is director of PNCA’s Feldman Gallery and Project Room) gave a great talk yesterday evening for the South Waterfront/UO Artist in Residence Program Professional Practices Lecture Series. It was titled: A Brief History of Artists Organizing for a Larger Hunk of The Multi Million Dollar Industry that is The Art World. Followed by Examples of My Forays into Said Art World and the Pay or Lack There of I Received.

McFarland spent the first half tracing the history of artists as activists beginning with Stuart Davis and the Artists’ Union (1934), through the Art Workers Coalition (founded 1969) and its spin-offs, through to the contemporary W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy). He didn’t mention it, but it brought to mind Portland’s artists’ activist group Artists’ Equity, formed in the early 50s with Michele Russo in an active role. (Read more about it in this interview.) It’s rare and so good to hear an artist talking about things like this. He pointed us to the Art Work project by Temporary Services, a “national conversation on art, labor, and economics. ”

He then moved on to talk about work that had influenced his own (Picabia, Rauschenberg, Manzoni) and about his own projects, noting for each the amount of money he earned for the exhibition, project, or grant. (He’s shown at the Tacoma Art Museum, at PICA’s TBA festival, and at NAAU). And it’s that degree of candidness and detail (e.g. splitting a $300 stipend between three artists) that made the talk refreshing. For 88 days, McFarland made short (16-60 second) videos he called Kinetocasts, interested in the idea of the video iPod and the return to single viewership it respresented. The video work above is one of those Kinetocasts. Thank Mack.