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Statement – A Measure of Art
In A Measure of Art I make conceptual artworks in the visual language of modern and contemporary artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Richard Misrach, and Damien Hirst. Using auction sales results from the late 1980's through the present obtained from artprice.com, I graph art market data directly into my canvases. The data is legibly presented in line with Edward Tufte’s theories on the graphical display of information. The art, career, and relative worth of the artist in question is the subject matter of these artworks.
There is not one particular way that I approach the work and data of each artist. In Agnes Martin Painting 1989-2004 the data is displayed in a grid, with each square that is not black representing the sale of a painting. Time moves from left to right, while prices rise vertically. While this work clearly references Martin in it’s scale, simplicity of means and the use of the grid, it does not look like any specific painting she made. Richard Misrach Photography 1989 – 2004 at first glance closely resembles some of the prints from Misrach’s Sky Series, yet a closer look shows many elements that are not part of his work such as the numbers surrounding my image and my use of a stretched canvas in place of his laminated photographic paper mounted to a substrate. Takashi Murakami Painting and Sculpture 1998 – 2005 could not be confused with one of Murakami’s works. I have borrowed his color and use of the circle, and the writing in the work “???? ??????????????? ?????” is a direct quote from an interview with Murakami in a Japanese art magazine. [Translation: “Obsessively I do art marketing in order to survive.”]
Influences on this project include all the artists in the series, the ideas and practices of conceptual art, the stock market from the 1970’s through the present, and the use of statistics in decision making.
Few artists integrate financial or statistical models into their artistic process, or make work that relates to business and markets. Some of the precedents are Jeff Koons, Hans Haacke, Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser, who arranged a paid sexual encounter with a collector through her gallery, and Danica Phelps, who documented her sales and expenses in her drawings. Loren Madsen uses data from souces such as the US Census Bureau and the Department of Labor Statistics in making sculpture; Komar and Melamid’s series Painting by Numbers was based on statistics compiled from their interviews with people on their preferences in art.
I am one of a number of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area with an awareness of art history using the computer as a vehicle for artistic production. While the computer is simply a tool like a camera or a chisel, its use shapes the character of my artwork and my artistic process. I employ sales databases and graphing tools, and am able to make endless revisions as well as multiples of my works. I push an image forward to completion through as many as ten to twelve iterations, which are much like studies or drawings that move toward a final painting. While this series could be made with a brush and paint, it would not be, or rather, it would have a very different character if it were.
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