artist Joshua Rizer on Conceptual art and the degradation of visual language
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October 25, 2009, Kansas City, MO – Thirty-six stories above eye level on the penthouse terrace at 909 Walnut, Joshua Rizer was graciously hosting a celebration for all of the Featured Artists in the 2009 Paint The District public art exhibition in the Power & Light District, which had featured his work “Feat Of Ignorance.”
The backdrop of shimmering lights hints at the type of environment in which you may stumble upon Mr. Rizer in the real world: in a dimly-lit corner of a room filled with people, a deliberate vantage point to consolidate his thoughts about the world around him without obscuring his visibility of it.
A goal of this talk was to present Rizer’s articulate opinions on Conceptual art. Rizer’s personality shines through, and I might describe his as a keenly observant, critical character full of thoughtful opinions but not lacking a sense of humor.
During my undergraduate years at Boston College, I had the opportunity to study a most fascinating topic: gender role socialization in Western culture.
What we know:
The modern male is prone to stress stemming from pressure to conform to the traditional societal expectations of what being male signifies and entails. Psychology coined the struggle as gender role strain, or gender role conflict. In the wake of the post-feminist era that spanned the last century, a vacuum of research on masculine issues developed. The notion of femininity underwent a major overhaul, in that the barriers and ideologies of women’s role in society shifted to provide for more rights, freedoms, and privileges to them – and rightly so. Gender scholars focused their attention on the facets and effects of “femininity nouveaux,” holding masculinity as the control. The problem with this approach is that it does not recognize the interrelation of the duality of gender relations. All things are relative, and in a quid pro quo world, if femininity shifted to a new societal position, then so has masculinity.
Rizer explores the implications and results of such gender role shifts, highlighting how the new generations of men and their ability to adapt to gender role flux, has been outpaced by progress realized by the female gender at large.
I wrote the text below following a conversation with Joshua Rizer. We discussed ways to improve his video feature in the Itzu Sketchbook Series. The thoughts are germane as concerns about dumb luck and deliberate choice saturate my subconscious at this time in my life. As a result, I feel compelled to perform arduous re-edits on the Sean Kelley, Hannah Hurrle and Ryan Haralson artist interview videos. I choose to publish these thoughts because in many ways, they reflect the core mission of this project. It hints at the immense potential for the video series to be a springboard for future talks about things that, in my opinion, really matter.
This isn’t a matter of bashing individuals with malicious intent. But by exposing some individual artists who are the sources of Rizer’s disagreements, the Kansas City arts community should be affected by the production in a way such that we can reasonably expect whole-hearted responses from them. The point is not to make others feel bad. My understanding of it all is that if an artist has stayed in the business long enough to be considered as a topic for discourse on the type of art they purport to create, then they likely have stood on the firing line before, defending their manifestations, and have developed thick skins in so doing. It is also my assumption that, in the art world, criticism is expected as it is welcomed. It is important too that these video documentaries communicate serious critical statements about the state of things in the art community today, and what’s on people’s minds. It is unclear whether such critical statements can be achieved without identifying definitive points of reference on a local scale to which our audience can relate. There are potential political ramifications and we could get ourselves into irreversible trouble.
