What is antARTica?

UPDATE February 2010:

Every article presented at blog.selfportrait.net, even a copied press release for an art opening, should be considered an open-ended draft, seeking peer review.  Nothing we write, even statements that are clearly in the affirmative, intends to be closural.  As the theorist Avital Ronell puts it:

“understanding as such — thinking one has understood — is a disaster. It places closural moves on a problem. Right now I’m not on the side of understanding in that simple sense of “Yes, I understand,” and that’s it. To make things “perfectly clear” is reactionary, stupifying. The real is not perfectly clear.”

- Avital Ronell being interviewed in Mondo 2000, #4

We aren’t claiming open-endedness to cover our intellectual asses, as has been done, but to convey an earnest feeling of overwhelmedness and unsureness about the state of meaning in art, and in the present more broadly experienced.  Also, we are optimistic though similarly unsure about the effects and future legacy of blogging — that is to say the characteristic blog format — as a development in art writing.

antARTica is an art blog, which features — among other more dubious things — art writing.  Art writing is a nice term that we think speaks to a loose set of mostly written “practices”, through which art and artists are reviewed, interpreted, critiqued, adored, promoted — everything except dimly consumed and obeyed.  Because contrary to art’s privileged status in society, just looking at a strange and alienating object in a gallery space (or on the side of a building for that matter) and acquiescing to its aura of intention and substance, can be as or more complicitous than avoiding art altogether.

An exception to that notion is if you’re Tehching Hsieh — by all means Tehching, stay home and relax … for the rest of your life.

Here is a good summary of art writing from a book called Art, Money, Parties:

‘Art-writing’ is intended to suggest an amorphously diverse field of activities no longer reducible to the practice of ‘criticism’ in its traditional sense, the narrative of which goes: critic visits gallery, looks at paintings, decides if they are any good and writes a review trying to say why. Evaluation in that sense, as Fried observed in the mid-1960s, was on the way out – though, of course, it continues to be practised by some. But the leading critics of so-called Late Modernism (and 1980s ‘classic’ postmodernism, for that matter), though a few remain active, belong to a generation now several decades older than the great majority of artists they might be asked, or decide themselves, to write about. This is a profound schism. Arguably, something unpalatably called ‘art theory’ has replaced criticism in quantitative terms, illustrating, among other things, the academic transformation and occupation of a domain once dominated by amateur or ‘jobbing’ males like Greenberg and Fried – the latter himself giving up on contemporary art and emigrating into the academia at the end of the 1960s.

-Jonathan Harris Art, Money, Parties, p 24

We think online art writing exists roughly in two forms: art news & commentary blogs (artfagcity, artobserved, Ed Winkleman, inaba, artnewsdaily, artinfo, bloggy, c-monster, artworldsalon, etc.); and online art journals, which may exist in print but which offer a great deal of their content free online (e-flux, frieze, afterall, bidoun, triple canopy, mute magazine, artforum, medien kunst netz, texte zur kunst, etc.) .  For the moment, our content falls in the middle, and we hope to continually examine the merits and limitations of both forms.

How can I get involved?

If you have strong opinions about art and like writing about it, we invite you to submit work for possible inclusion on the blog.  Please send a few words about yourself and your artistic predilections, and a .doc or .odt, along with any relevant links or .jpgs to

info@selfportrait.net

We also welcome art submissions, as well as information about upcoming exhibitions/parties/interventions/symposia/night schools/Halo 3 tournaments or meteor showers.

Who are we?

antARTica is a standalone project (it will have it’s own domain name soon), but it also serves as the blog for selfportrait.net.  Selfportrait.net is a social networking site for artists, galleries, collectors, and art enthusiasts.  Selfportrait.net has some academic and experimental underpinnings and is a work in progress, technically still in beta.  We organize art shows to exhibit young, emerging artists drawn from the selfportrait.net community.  We also organize experimental thematic group shows.  We have problems with our own curatorial methodologies.

Both sites are run by selfportrait, a sometimes-for-profit sometimes-not art and media company started by four Bard College students in late 2006:

Here is some press that has featured selfportrait.net in the last year or so.

Any other questions, comments, or suggestions can be submitted through the contact form below.