Social practice can probably be defined as the meeting between ethics, aesthetics and exchange. Think: murals with QR codes or turning the Chicago skyline into a musical score. The role (and responsibility) of the artist to the environment and the society within which he exists is probably at the center of the field. My ego is probably too big to take it up, but social practice should be comprised of public works, engagement with the community, performance, and documentation. It should involve art that speaks to the ways in which we interact, undermining (or re-enforcing) our process of exchange–of information, emotion, money, time, culture. I’m instantly worried, though, that it could become mired in its own capacity for documentation–like a behavioral psychologist doing endless field research. What form does it take?

It will be interesting to see what Kristaps Gulbis and the students in The University of New Mexico’s burgeoning International Social Practices program develop during his residency in Albuquerque. The program–a partnership between UNM and UC Santa Cruz–is bound to deepen the relevance of the art department at UNM, if only by bringing it in step with what might be the fastest-growing field in arts education. The most popular (if I can use that word) social practice program surely is the one developed by Harrell Fletcher at Portland State University–you only need look at the upcoming Open Engagement: Art and Social Practice conference to see how large it has become.

My main thing, though, is I want to see how social practice performs; what it looks like beyond a pedagogical structure.

Early in the companion book to the 2008 symposium on the writings of Donald Judd, Richard Ford brings up the subject of forensic stylistics, defined by the author as “used to evaluate or authenticate the authorship of certain documents”. In an art context, I don’t know if that’s one facet of the gem or the whole thing.

Which also leads me to say: I don’t know what’s good or bad anymore. There are so many constructs employed in both the development and the contextualization of art that when I’m in front of it I feel like a fashion critic picking on a model’s elbows. So maybe the illusion of quality is an art in and of itself. Which isn’t to say I didn’t appreciate a show like Reasons, Excuses, Alibis & Non Sequiturs (the 2012 juried graduate exhibition currently on view at Jonson Gallery). This is the show that got me wondering about my own ability to evaluate what has magic and what doesn’t. I was grossed out by Stephanie Brunia’s photo, stood in admiration at Ryan Henel’s “whale tree”, blinked through Molly Bradbury’s video installation and refrained from touching Tamara Wilson’s felt bicycle. Most of the work in the exhibition–curated by David Pagel–is solid. What happened, in those wistful moments bouncing like an electron through the field of bodies that make up an art opening, what happened is that something got in the way. I couldn’t see the work. I’m speaking figuratively, of course, but the work sat in front of me, gave me every indication it was ready to be looked at, I gave all the signs I was there to see it, but in the end we didn’t have a spark. It was like when a date is over and you’re still not sure if you had any fun, but you might have.

Speaking of looks, don’t miss Leslie Ayers’ Your Gold tomorrow night at SCA & Artlab. The opening is from 5-8 and the show runs through May 18. It’s paintings and prints mostly. Ayers joins Mike Pare, George Pierre Evans, the Seven Weeks’ crew and Reasons, Excuses, Alibis & Non Sequiturs to fill out an already busy spring showing of undergraduate and graduate work.

In the 90s, there were multiple times I found myself on top of the  trains parked adjacent to Tempe’s flour mill. Why I was acting like we were in some sort of Treasure of the Sierra Madre fan film, I don’t know. We didn’t start the night at the flour mill, nor was it on anyone’s mind earlier in the evening. You just combine a hefty helping of milk stout and some goading and ‘voila’, you’re on top of a train, running from one end to the other at two o’clock in the morning, doing your best Humphrey Bogart.

Most of that difficulty in saying something meaningful lies on the receiving end of what’s being said. Standing in front of Philip Guston’s Couple in Bed from 1977–this is the painting that shows husband and wife hiding under the covers of their bed, only painting tools left exposed to protect them. It’s a great painting. I first saw it in person at the Guston retrospective which began in Fort Worth around 2003. A watch and the soles of the artist’s shoes are looking out at the viewer. Of course it’s easy to make a connection between ‘sole’ and ‘soul’ and of course the watch was one of Guston’s go-tos when he wanted to show you how fearful he was of the ticking clock. Creativity and human relationships can be fragile things. A small note here: it’s strange how many biographies of Guston don’t make any reference to his marriage to the poet Musa McKim.

There is a real difference in the effect this painting had on me when I saw it in Texas and when I saw it two weeks ago at the Museum of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Eight years ago, I was more interested in the aura of Guston, in the lingering effect that he had over contemporary painting. I wanted to see the thing work in person, and perhaps I approached it a bit coldly. And of course the change in the painting came on my end. What is important to me in images (and life) is much different from what was important to me as a student.

And it’s a simple conclusion to draw: the change in the life of the viewer dictates the life of the work of art. That’s why buildings are leveled or modified. That’s why I can only listen to one or two Morrissey tracks before I have to switch to something else. Which is why I’m not sure what will happen to work by artists like Damien Hirst or Sarah Morris or Marcel Dzama. When things are meant for  a certain point in history, they are often relegated to lessons in technique or art history or economics later. I do drive-bys of paintings by Jacques Louis David, and that’s not a problem, but it’s clear that work by someone like Mike Kelley means more to a contemporary artist then paintings about the politics of the monarchy (duh!). Hell, Twitter is more important than David’s paintings. Because the meaning is the use, and besides the exaltation you might get in front of David’s transcendent technique, you can’t really do shit with them. (Hello, propagandists!)

So thank you Id and Ego and Superego (and economics) for the shift from art commissioned to do good amongst people to an art that originates in the self. Guston’s late work is too often a catch-all for an art brute approach to image making. The real meat of his work is in his successful transmogrification of human experience into his paintings. Stories. Characters. Painful interactions. All done with grotesquely humorous exaggeration. The effect was the creation of mysterious images that aren’t easily recognized, that are still growing with the viewer, a viewer that knows that those images (like all images) are being slowly pushed toward the back of the shelf. Because we keep things we can use. We keep things we give meaning to.

Walking over Blue Island surrounded by the murals of Mexican singers, the sandpits filled in the distance, the mud slowly drying, the wind pulling clouds over the city. Windy City coined in the 19th century and not about the weather. But here it is, about the weather. The depth of the architecture, the sons of Chicago trailing through the streets: Burnham, Sullivan, Wright, and thinking about Frederick Olmsted and Central Park and Jackson Park and the World’s Fair and its transformation into a parallel city, a city to which to aspire, the southern buildings now burned away.

I often surround myself with too many books. I read some of them, but usually I find myself flipping through most of them, sucking out whatever ideas I can. These are some of the books in stacks around my house:

• Container Architecture by Jure Kotnik
• Between Sense and De Kooning by Richard Shiff
• The BLDG BLOG Book by Geoff Manaugh
• The De Kooning Retrospective catalogue
• The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
• Triumph Twin Restoration by Roy Bacon
• Prefab: adaptable, modular, dismountable, light, mobile architecture
• Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
• The Genius of Rome 1592-1623
• Talking Art: Interviews with artists since 1975 by Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson
• Los Murales del Palacio de Bellas Artes
• Papertoy Monsters

It’s interesting to visit super-legit art schools. I spent last week working at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute and was blown away by the sheer infrastructure of greatness laid at the feet of each student. 60 painting faculty members, studios for everyone, an amazing foundry and open space for sculpture, performance spaces, a strong lecture series, a killer museum, computer and tech access, and on and on. I started to believe that every great artist of the future would be coming out of that school. But I honestly don’t know if they will.

It might be speculative to say that there’s a structural lockout at high-end institutions like SAIC; in the sense that the architecture is impervious to exploration. Look at a school like Northern Arizona University. When I was a student there in the 1990s, we found a way to insert ourselves into the underground maze of pipes, cabling and ducts that led between all of the buildings on the north end of campus. (That catacomb-lite system is probably shut down by now.) I don’t know why we went underground, but it certainly tapped into a kid-like feeling of adventure. I remember it was winter. We would wait until it was clear, lift the grate and drop into the tunnel below. Instantly, we would need to shed our jackets, gloves, hats and sometimes sweaters. These tunnels usually led us to boiler rooms and always tempted us to enter the buildings that housed them, though we never did. I wonder now, in 2012, what those tunnels have morphed into. Is there still electrical cabling within them? Do they have fiber-optic wires running through them now? Do students still have access to them? With the ubiquitous nature of surveillance, especially on a college campus, it’s doubtful any curious student could go unnoticed. For further reading, the second part of the BLDG BLOG book is all about the underground.

Before leaving Albuquerque, I saw Mike Pare’s show Devotional Goods at UNM’s John Sommers Gallery. It was made up mostly of tie-dyed, folded paper, often pieced together to make large wall pieces. I was struck by the small touches–the holes that revealed the reflective mylar sheets, the delicate drawing. It seems strange that every graduate show has to be in the Sommers Gallery or at AC2.

While in Chicago, I saw a sprawling, skull-infested installation at the Cultural Center called Morbid Curiosity, the vast collection of the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, the art at The National Museum of Mexican Art and group show about heroes at Yollocali. Morbid Curiosity was awesome for its James Ensor etchings, Chapman Brothers’ Disaster of War prints and its display of post cards where people are doing things but then you realize its all super-composed to make an image of skull (see example).

On a side note, its cool that on about every corner in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood you get to look at an Aztec calendar and/or a tamale. The area is home to The National Museum of Mexican Art and Yollocali (part of NMMA). NMMA has an amazing collection and the neighborhood is full of historic and beautiful murals rich in Mexican imagery.