Below is the text of the original assignment for The Review Hive project. It sets out the parameters of The Review Hive project, and discusses the ideas it is intended to explore.
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Ongoing project for the iTouch, VCS blog, and Web 2.0
This assignment continues our exploration of art writing by artists, but it will also consider two additional issues. First, we will pursue the idea of art writing as a communal, participatory activity, rather than a specialized field to be controlled by professional critics and passively consumed by a silent audience. Second, we will investigate the implications that new communications technologies and networking systems such a Web 2.0 have for how people will view, evaluate, and talk about art in the future. In our case, we will use the following tools: the iTouch, Twitter, the VCS blog, and perhaps also digital photography.
Several times throughout the rest of the semester, I will assign something in a specific place for us to view and write about. The subject for consideration might be a gallery exhibition, a specific work of art in a museum or elsewhere in the city, or some public non-art object that seems to be begging for critique (one or more of our subjects may be virtual/online objects). For the first assignment, we will take a field trip as a group to view our topic; future assignments will be done outside of class, with students going to see the subject on their own, either individually or in groups.
Students will write comments about the chosen object on a special Twitter stream that I will set up for class use. Initial posts should be done on the spot (or as close as possible) using the iTouch, in order to record each person’s initial impressions. Later follow-ups or reconsiderations can be posted from home. Although there is no limit to the number of posts that each of you can add, Twitter’s limit of 140 characters per post will have implications for how you are able to write about a chosen topic. The basic idea is for the class as a whole to write a group review on the fly, while adapting to the limitations and distortions imposed by Twitter’s structure. As part of this, each participant should feel free to build on comments and notes left by others on the Twitter stream. One thing to think abut during this process is what benefits such an approach offers, and how these benefits compensate for a lack of ability to write a traditional, structured review in a longer format and a single voice. We may also end up discovering that traditional art writing presents its own special problems and limitations.
There will be a special blog that houses a description of our project. I will also post a notice about it on the VCS blog, so that other people around SVA and elsewhere can follow along. My hope is that some of our work will encourage others to go and see the art we’re reviewing for themselves, and perhaps comment about it on the project’s blog. From time to time, we may also decide to communally draft and post a more traditional review based upon the raw material of the Twitter feeds.
Obviously, we are not going for standard criticism in this project. For one thing, you are artists, with your own concerns, and ways of looking at art that differ from those of traditional critics. Your writing will reflect those concerns, and will reflect a number of different voices rather than a single controlling viewpoint. Part of the purpose in writing about a given artwork in short snippets and from multiple perspectives is to examine whether a composite view of art crafted from different impressions can create a richer picture of what that object is, how it feels to engage it, and what its value is than could be provided by an individual report. Finally, by working both on the spot and after the fact, we can create a synchronic view of our chosen topics that develops them as phenomena in time as well as space. We may learn something interesting about the way that art can change for us as time passes, especially as it fades out of physical view and enters the world of memories and mental associations.
In order to help us prepare for this exercise, we will read and discuss some of the shorter gallery reviews written by Donald Judd in the 1950s and 60s. Though sometimes constrained to a length of 60 to 100 words, Judd was often able to deliver a very vivid image of what a given body of work looked like and how he felt about it. Although he sometimes failed to get the point of the art he was looking at, he was still able to convey a lot of information about it in a very small space. We will consider the tactics he used and the features of his writing style that allowed him to work so effectively on such a small scale.
